What is Copilot?

In this article

Copilot is an AI coding assistant that helps you write code faster and with less effort, allowing you to focus more energy on problem solving and collaboration.

Copilot has been proven to increase developer productivity and accelerate the pace of software development. See Research: quantifying Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness in the blog.

Copilot includes a suite of features. You can use Copilot to:

  • Get code suggestions as you type in your IDE
  • Chat with Copilot to ask for help with your code
  • Ask Copilot for help using the command line
  • Organize and share task-specific context with Copilot Spaces to get more relevant answers
  • Generate a description of the changes in a pull request (Copilot Enterprise only)
  • Create and manage collections of documentation, called knowledge bases, to use as a context for chatting with Copilot (Copilot Enterprise only)
  • Work on code changes and create a pull request for you to review (Copilot Pro+ and Copilot Enterprise only)

Copilot is available:

  • In your IDE
  • In Mobile, as a chat interface
  • In Windows Terminal Canary, through the Terminal Chat interface
  • On the command line, through the CLI
  • On the website

See Copilot features.

There are a few ways you can start using Copilot, depending on your role and needs.

  • Try Copilot for free: Use Copilot Free to explore core Copilot features with no paid plan required.
  • Subscribe to a paid plan: Upgrade to Copilot Pro or Copilot Pro+ for full access to premium features and more generous usage limits. You can try Copilot Pro for free with a one-time 30-day trial.
  • Eligible for free Copilot Pro access? Students, teachers, and open source maintainers may qualify for Copilot Pro at no cost. See Getting free access to Copilot Pro as a student, teacher, or maintainer.
  • Organization members: If your organization or enterprise has a Copilot plan, you can request access to Copilot by going to https://.com/settings/copilot and requesting access under "Get Copilot from an organization."

See Getting started with a Copilot plan for more information.

If you don't need other features, you can request an enterprise account specifically for managing Copilot Business licenses. These accounts don't include repository or organization creation and don’t incur Enterprise seat charges. See About enterprise accounts for Copilot Business.