Cloud agent platforms
Bonito vs Microsoft Copilot Studio + Microsoft Foundry Agent Service
Microsoft's agent stack vs. a control plane across every provider
Azure AI Foundry is now Microsoft Foundry; the APIM AI Gateway tier is in public preview
Copilot Studio is Microsoft's low-code agent builder for Microsoft 365 and Power Platform users, and Foundry Agent Service is the developer platform for agents over the Foundry model catalog, with Azure API Management as the gateway. It is the default choice in Microsoft shops. Bonito runs agents and routing across Azure, Bedrock, Vertex and the direct providers on your own accounts, with failover between them built in.
Microsoft pricing
Copilot Studio: $200 per month for a 25,000 Copilot Credit pack, or pay-as-you-go. Foundry Agent Service: no service fee; you pay models, tools and hosted-agent compute.
Model costs
Azure resells models (Claude via Azure Marketplace); Copilot Studio abstracts model use into credits. Models behind your own gateway are billed by that provider.
What Microsoft does well
- Distribution: agents publish into Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot and the Entra Agent Registry, and every agent gets an Entra identity
- Broad first-party catalog, with both GPT and Claude models available inside Foundry
- Copilot Studio covers no-code building, autonomous triggers, reviewer approvals, computer use, A2A and evaluations
- Mature gateway primitives in API Management: token limits, semantic caching, backend load balancing and circuit breakers
- Hosted agents run your own framework code (Agent Framework, LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK) as containers
Where Bonito goes further
- Automatic failover to an equivalent model on another provider, out of the box; in Azure it is API Management policy you build and maintain
- Eight providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure, Groq, OpenRouter, DeepInfra) on your own accounts with 0% markup, instead of credits or Azure resale
- Cost routing across providers; Foundry's model router only picks among models deployed in Foundry
- Dollar cost per request, agent, team and provider in one trace tree, not credit consumption
- Agents, gateway, knowledge bases and policies declared in one bonito.yaml and deployed with the CLI
Where Microsoft is ahead of Bonito
- Distribution into Teams and Microsoft 365, which Bonito does not have
- Compliance portfolio and Entra identity for every agent
- Semantic caching in API Management; Bonito has none
- Connector breadth through Power Platform
Capability by capability
| Capability | Bonito | Microsoft |
|---|---|---|
| Agents | ||
| Build and run agents | Yes | Yes |
| Approval queue and scheduled runs | Yes | Yes |
| Dollar budgets per agent | Yes | Yesmonthly credit limits per agent in Copilot Studio |
| MCP support | Yes | Yes |
| Routing | ||
| OpenAI-compatible gateway | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic failover across providers | Yes | PartialAPIM backend pools and circuit breaker, policy config you build |
| Cheaper models for simple work (cost routing) | Yes | PartialFoundry model router, within Foundry deployments only |
| Bedrock, Vertex, Azure and direct providers in one place | Yes | PartialAPIM AI Gateway tier (preview) fronts Bedrock and Vertex |
| Semantic caching | No | YesAPI Management policies |
| Governance | ||
| SSO, RBAC and audit log | Yes | Yes |
| Data residency pinning | Yes | YesData Zones; Anthropic-hosted Claude runs outside Azure |
| Observability and knowledge | ||
| Agent traces with cost per request and agent | Yes | Partialtoken and budget use on the Control Plane dashboard |
| Knowledge bases (RAG) | Yes | Yes |
| How you run it | ||
| Whole stack from one config file | Yes | PartialSDK, Bicep and az CLI; no single agent plus gateway manifest found |
| Self-hosted or open source | Partial | PartialAgent Framework is open source; the services are Azure and M365 only |
| No markup on inference | Yes | PartialAzure resale and Copilot Credits; BYO models via a gateway |
Checked against Microsoft's own documentation on 2026-09-27. Products change quickly; if something here is out of date, tell us at hello@trybonito.com and we will fix it.
Sources
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