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Choose the right Copilot Studio experience

Microsoft Copilot Studio is a powerful platform for building secure, scalable, and intelligent agents that work across Microsoft 365 and line-of-business systems. Copilot Studio offers two ways to build AI agents: a lite experience (integrated into the Microsoft 365 Copilot app) and a full experience (a standalone Copilot Studio application). Both experiences enable you to create powerful agents, but they serve different needs. This article describes the differences between the lite and full experiences to help you choose the right Copilot Studio experience for your scenario.

Comparing Copilot Studio experiences

To choose between the lite and full experiences of Copilot Studio to build your agent, consider the following factors:

  • Audience – Who will use the agent?
  • Deployment scope – How widely do you plan to share the agent?
  • Functionality – What tasks will the agent perform?
  • Governance needs – Does your agent require granular application lifecycle management?

The following decision tree helps you map your scenario to the right experience.

A flow chart that shows the decision points for choosing the full and lite experiences of Copilot Studio.

In summary:

  • Choose the lite experience (formerly agent builder) if you want to quickly create an agent for yourself or a small team, using natural language and existing content (for example, a bot that answers questions from your team’s SharePoint files or emails). The lite version is simple, accessible, and integrated with the Microsoft 365 Copilot experience, so you can build agents in context without any code.

  • Choose the full experience if you need an agent for a broader audience (such as your whole department, organization, or external customers) or if the agent requires advanced capabilities like multi-step workflows or custom integrations, or you need more control over deployment and management. The full version of Copilot Studio is a standalone web portal with a rich set of tools for complex or scalable solutions.

Note

Currently, a direct upgrade path from the lite experience of Copilot Studio to the full experience isn't available. We recommend that you review your agent’s intended audience, scope, functionality, and governance needs to select the best starting point for your agent.

The following table provides a more detailed feature comparison.

Feature Lite experience Full experience
Access point Microsoft 365 Copilot app Copilot Studio
User type Information workers Makers and developers
Agent target audience Individuals or small teams. Department, organization, or external customers.
Agent type Lightweight Q&A agents with organizational knowledge. Agents with complex scenarios like multi-step workflows or business system integration, and that require enterprise governance and robust controls.
Key capabilities
  • Natural language authoring
  • Content-focused Q&A scenarios based on organization context from Microsoft Graph
  • Respects user permissions to Microsoft 365 data
  • Uses the Microsoft 365 Copilot orchestrator, foundation models, and services
  • Broad and external publishing
  • Supports multistep logic, approvals, and branching workflows
  • Supports advanced AI models and integration with Azure AI services
  • Provides access to prebuilt and custom connectors to connect with data sources beyond Microsoft 365
  • Autonomous capabilities
  • Lifecycle management tools including versioning; development, test, and production environments; role-based access controls; and telemetry and analytics.
Use cases Use the lite experience to build:
  • Project FAQ bots that answers common questions based on project documentation.
  • Product documentation assistants that help employees find information from internal product manuals or wikis.
  • Onboarding agents that help new team members get answers from internal knowledge bases.
 Use the full experience to build:
  • Customer support agents that create support tickets and escalates issues to a human.
  • IT help desk triage agents that handle employee IT requests and routes them to the right support team.
  • Sales assistants for CRM that retrieve sales data, makes notes, or kicks off an approval workflow.
Management and governance Managed primarily through the Microsoft 365 admin center. Managed through the Power Platform admin center with finer-grained controls for enterprise scenarios.

Licensing requirements

Both Copilot Studio experiences are included with a Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on license for authenticated users. If you don’t have a Copilot license, you can use Copilot Credits or a pay-as-you-go plan to access either experience.

You can also use the lite experience for free to build agents grounded on web knowledge only. For more information, see Using agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

Lite experience governance principles

The lite experience, embedded within Microsoft 365 Copilot allows users to create agents that act as reusable templates. These agents help retrieve insights from Microsoft Graph by packaging repeatable prompts and content connections. They operate within existing enterprise boundaries and respect Microsoft 365 controls.

The lite experience applies the following key governance principles:

  • No new privileges - Agents respect existing Microsoft 365 permissions. If a user does haven't access to a SharePoint site, Teams channel, or Outlook mailbox, the agent doesn't surface content from those sources.
  • Built-in visibility and auditing capabilities - Agents are surfaced within Microsoft 365. Standard audit logs, activity reports, and DLP/retention policies apply.

IT administrators manage agent visibility, sharing, and lifecycle policies in the Microsoft 365 admin center via the Copilot > Agents page. Admins can:

  • View agent inventory and agent metadata.
  • Enable, disable, assign, block, or remove agents to align with organizational policies.
  • Manage agent sharing controls.
  • Configure pay-as-you-go billing and review agent usage and consumption.
  • Enforce compliance using Microsoft Purview (sensitivity labels, audit logs).

Full experience governance principles

The full experience supports the creation of more sophisticated agents, often by makers or developers. These agents can integrate external data sources, call APIs, orchestrate complex workflows, and connect to systems beyond Microsoft 365—ideal for departmental or enterprise-wide solutions.

The full experience applies the following key governance principles:

  • Structured development - Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) enables development across dev, test, and production environments.
  • Connector governance - Admins control which systems agents can connect to, reducing risk of unauthorized access.
  • Environment-level policies - Data loss prevention (DLP), role-based access, and auditing are enforced at the environment level.
  • Flexible deployment - Agents can be published across Teams, websites, and custom endpoints with granular access controls.
  • Secure collaboration - Agents support view/edit rights for cross-functional teamwork with oversight.
  • Development and publishing oversight - Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) supports dev/test/prod environments, and publishing to an organization’s app catalog requires admin approval. This ensures visibility and control over what becomes broadly available.

IT administrators use the Power Platform admin center to manage:

  • Agent environments and connectors.
  • Lifecycle policies and publishing workflows.
  • Compliance via Microsoft Purview (sensitivity labels, audit logs, retention).
  • Telemetry and usage analytics to monitor agent behavior and ensure policy alignment.

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