A Kwai Chung trading company with ten staff sits down to decide one thing before the new financial year: turn on the AI inside the office software they already pay for, or move the whole team to the other camp because its AI looks better. Two quotes are on the table. Both are per seat. Both are annual. Nobody in the room can say what the real difference works out to.
This page answers that question with 2026 list prices, then tells you which one to pick, and where each one loses.
What are you actually choosing between?
You are not choosing between two chatbots. You are choosing which office suite gets an AI layer attached to it. Microsoft 365 Copilot sits inside Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams. Gemini sits inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet. The winner is usually decided by where your files already live.
That single sentence saves most Hong Kong owners a month of comparison. If your quotations are Word files and your team lives in Outlook, moving ten people to Google to get a better AI costs far more in retraining and broken habits than the licence difference ever saves.
If you want the feature-level explanation of what the Microsoft side actually does inside your documents, that is covered in our plain guide to Microsoft 365 Copilot. This page is only about the money and the decision.
How much does Microsoft 365 Copilot cost in 2026?
Copilot is a paid add-on on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan. For organisations up to 300 users, Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is US$18 per user per month on a promotion running through 31 December 2026, against a standard price of US$21. The separate enterprise add-on is US$30 per user per month on an annual term with no seat cap.
The Microsoft price list, as at August 2026:
--- Copilot Business: US$18 per user per month promotional, US$21 standard. Roughly HK$140 and HK$164 at 7.8 to the US dollar.
--- Seat cap: up to 300 users for Copilot Business.
--- Promotion expiry: 31 December 2026.
--- Enterprise add-on: US$30 per user per month, annual term, no seat cap, wider set of qualifying base plans.
--- Base plan required: yes. Copilot is an add-on, not a standalone product.
--- Pre-bundled SKUs: Business Standard with Copilot at US$23.50 per user per month, Business Premium with Copilot at US$32.00.
Here is the line that saves real money, and almost nobody checks it. The pre-bundled SKUs price out cheaper than buying the base plan and stacking the add-on separately. Business Standard on its own plus Copilot Business as an add-on lands above US$30 per user. The pre-bundled Business Standard with Copilot is US$23.50. Same software, roughly US$7 per user per month apart. On ten seats that is around HK$650 a month, or close to HK$7,800 a year, for choosing the correct line item on the same order form.
How much does Gemini in Google Workspace cost in 2026?
Gemini has no separate AI fee. Google discontinued its standalone Gemini add-ons and folded Gemini into every Workspace plan, raising base prices by roughly US$2 to US$4 per user in exchange. Business Standard is around US$14 per user per month with Gemini included across the apps.
The Google price list, as at August 2026:
--- Business Starter: around US$7 per user per month, limited Gemini access. Roughly HK$55.
--- Business Standard: around US$14 per user per month, Gemini in all apps, electronic signatures, 150-participant meetings, 2TB pooled storage per user. Roughly HK$109.
--- Business Plus: around US$22 per user per month with Gemini included. Roughly HK$172.
--- Separate AI fee: none. The add-ons that previously cost US$20 to US$30 per user were discontinued.
--- Heavy-usage add-on: AI Expanded Access at around US$20 per user per month with an annual commitment.
The catch inside the good news. Because Gemini is bundled, it is no longer optional. You cannot decline the AI and keep the old price, because the old price no longer exists. For a business that genuinely will not use it, that is a small permanent increase rather than a choice.
What does each one cost a ten-person Hong Kong company?
Run the arithmetic on the Kwai Chung trading firm, ten desk staff, monthly billing converted at HK$7.8 to the US dollar. These are list prices, not reseller quotes.
Path A, Microsoft. Business Standard with Copilot pre-bundled at US$23.50 per user comes to US$235 a month, roughly HK$1,833 a month or about HK$22,000 a year.
Path B, Google. Business Standard at US$14 per user comes to US$140 a month, roughly HK$1,092 a month or about HK$13,100 a year.
The gap is around HK$8,900 a year on ten seats. That is real money, and it is also less than one month of a junior clerk's salary in Hong Kong. Which means the licence difference should not be the deciding factor unless the two options are otherwise equal, and they rarely are.
At larger scale the gap stops being cosmetic. At enterprise level, Copilot requires a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 base plan at US$36 to US$57 per user per month plus US$30 for Copilot, totalling US$66 to US$87. Gemini Enterprise with Google Workspace runs US$48 to US$60. Across 1,000 users the annual difference reaches US$216,000 to US$324,000. Very few Hong Kong SMEs are at that scale, but it explains why the two vendors price the way they do.
One practical warning on all of the above. These are published list prices in US dollars. Hong Kong reseller pricing, annual versus monthly commitment, non-profit rates and mid-term promotions all move the final invoice. Confirm your own numbers before you sign anything, and ask specifically whether the pre-bundled SKU is available to you.
Where does each one genuinely win?
Neither product wins every row, and any comparison that says otherwise is an advertisement. Here is where each one is the better answer.
Copilot wins when your work is already Microsoft-shaped. If the day runs on Outlook, Word, Excel and Teams, Copilot is the path of least resistance, and recent updates extend it to multi-step edits on locally stored Excel files across Windows and Mac. Excel-heavy operations work, which describes a large share of Hong Kong trading, logistics and accounting firms, is the strongest single case for it.
Gemini wins on price and on not having to decide. If your company already runs on Gmail, Docs and Drive, the AI is included in the plan you are paying for this month. There is no purchase order, no seat count to negotiate and no promotional expiry date to diary. For a ten-person firm that has not started, "turn on what you already own" beats "buy something new" almost every time.
Both handle Hong Kong's bilingual reality to a practical standard, though accuracy varies by task. Neither is a clear winner on Traditional Chinese business writing, so test both on your own quotations and client emails rather than trusting a benchmark.
Will your staff actually use it?
This is the number missing from every proposal, and it should change how many seats you buy. A Recon Analytics survey of more than 150,000 US respondents put Microsoft Copilot's workplace conversion rate at 35.8 per cent, meaning roughly 64 per cent of employees with access choose not to use it. The same survey put ChatGPT's conversion at 83.1 per cent.
The pattern holds at the top end. While around 70 per cent of the Fortune 500 hold Microsoft 365 Copilot licences, reported figures suggest only 20 to 30 per cent of paid seats are used weekly.
Read that as a purchasing instruction, not as criticism of the product. Microsoft's own 2026 Work Trend Index found that organisational factors, culture, manager support and a structured rollout accounted for more than twice the impact on AI success as individual factors, at 67 per cent against 32 per cent. In other words, the licence is not the intervention. The rollout is.
So buy three seats, not ten. Pick the three people who already ask AI questions on their phones, run 60 days, and count something specific: hours saved on a named recurring task. Then expand. Ten annual seats bought in month one, with six of them dormant by month three, is the most common way a Hong Kong SME concludes that "AI does not work here".
Is a seat licence even the right purchase?
Sometimes the honest answer is that neither product addresses the problem you actually have. A seat licence makes an existing employee faster at their desk. It does not answer enquiries at 2am, it does not chase quotations, and it does not do a job nobody is currently doing.
Both Copilot and Gemini are the correct purchase when: you have desk staff producing documents, spreadsheets, emails and decks, and you want each of them to finish sooner.
Neither is the correct purchase when: your bottleneck is inbound customer enquiries you cannot answer fast enough, a repetitive back-office workflow nobody wants to own, or a role you cannot afford to hire for. Those are deployment problems, not licence problems, and they are the category UD's AI Staff Solution is built for: an AI worker configured to run a specific job function, rather than an assistant sitting inside somebody's Word.
And here is where our own product is the wrong answer. If what you need is ten people drafting documents faster, a scoped AI deployment is heavier and slower to buy than a US$14 or US$23.50 seat, and we will tell you to buy the seat. A deployed AI worker is scoped and quoted against a defined workflow, not sold at a per-seat list price, which means it only makes sense when the workflow is worth defining. Below roughly a few hundred repetitive tasks a month, it is not.
The trade-off between a subscription assistant and a deployed AI worker is worked through in detail in our comparison of AI chatbots and AI employees, and the customer-service numbers sit in our Hong Kong cost breakdown.
The verdict, by buyer type
Five situations, five different correct answers.
--- Already on Microsoft, under 300 seats, Excel-heavy: buy Copilot, and buy it as the pre-bundled Business Standard with Copilot SKU at US$23.50 rather than stacking the add-on. Start with three seats before the promotion ends on 31 December 2026.
--- Already on Google Workspace: buy nothing. Gemini is included in the plan you pay for. Confirm your plan tier, switch it on, and only look at AI Expanded Access if a specific team hits limits.
--- Mixed environment, or heavily bilingual output: do not commit ten annual seats. Run 60 days on three users each side using your own quotations and client emails, then decide on evidence.
--- Bottleneck is customer enquiries or a repetitive workflow: a seat licence will not fix it. Look at a deployed AI worker instead, and expect a scoped quotation rather than a list price.
--- Fewer than five desk staff, business runs on WhatsApp and a POS terminal: skip both for now. Neither product reaches the place your work actually happens, and you will not miss anything by waiting a quarter.
The bottom line
On list prices in August 2026, Google is cheaper and simpler because Gemini is bundled at around US$14 per user for Business Standard. Microsoft is more expensive at US$23.50 for the pre-bundled Business Standard with Copilot, and is usually still the right answer if your operation runs on Excel and Outlook, because switching suites costs more than the difference.
The bigger risk is not picking the wrong vendor. It is buying ten seats of either one and discovering that two thirds of them go unused, which the adoption data says is the normal outcome without a structured rollout. Three seats, sixty days, one measured task. Then scale the thing that worked.
Whichever way you go, the decision is smaller than it feels, and you should not have to make it alone. UD stands with you, making AI human.
Not sure a seat licence is what you need?
If your real problem is enquiries you cannot answer fast enough or a workflow nobody wants to own, a per-seat assistant is the wrong purchase, and we will say so. Talk to UD about the AI Staff Solution and we will walk you through it step by step, from mapping the workflow to a scoped deployment that does the job.
Reviewed by the UD AI team. Prices in this article are published list prices verified in August 2026 and are stated in US dollars; Hong Kong reseller pricing may differ. UD has supported Hong Kong businesses with enterprise technology for 28 years.
