A sales rep at a mid-size SaaS company told me last month that she’d spent three weeks lobbying IT to approve Microsoft Copilot, paid the $30/month add-on, and discovered it wouldn’t work on her Zoom calls. Only Teams. She didn’t work in Teams.
That’s the story in miniature. Microsoft Copilot and Craqly are both AI tools that touch meetings, but they’re solving different problems for different people. If you’re deciding between them, the platform question alone might settle it.
Where each tool actually lives
Microsoft Copilot for meetings is baked into Microsoft 365. It records, transcribes, and summarizes your Teams calls. It can answer questions about past meetings (“What did Sarah say about the Q3 budget?”) and draft follow-up emails. It is genuinely good at this. The catch: it runs inside Teams. If your customers use Zoom, your recruiting team runs on Google Meet, or you hop between platforms depending on the client, Copilot just isn’t there.
Craqly runs as a desktop overlay. It doesn’t join the call as a participant. It sits on top of whatever meeting software you’re using and listens locally. Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx, Microsoft Teams, phone calls through your computer, it doesn’t matter. The tool doesn’t care what URL you’re on.
This is not a minor technical footnote. It’s the whole product decision.
What “real-time” means in practice
Copilot’s real-time features are fairly limited during a call itself. It can show live transcription in Teams, and it will generate a summary once the meeting ends. The post-meeting summary is actually excellent, especially for internal team calls where you want action items and a record of decisions.
Craqly is oriented around what happens while you’re still talking. During a sales call, it surfaces objection-handling suggestions. During an interview, it feeds you relevant talking points based on the question it’s hearing. During a client meeting, it can prompt you with context from earlier in the conversation. Whether you’d call that coaching or a crutch probably depends on your job function and how you feel about AI assistance generally. I think it’s genuinely useful for high-stakes, unpredictable conversations where you don’t have a script.
The price math is messier than it looks
Microsoft Copilot costs $30/month per user, but you also need an active Microsoft 365 subscription to use it. That’s another $6 to $22/month depending on your plan tier. So the actual entry cost sits between $36 and $52/month before any volume licensing.
For teams already deep in the Microsoft ecosystem, paying for Copilot might make sense as an extension of tools they’re already using. But if you’re an individual contributor or a small team not on Microsoft 365, that’s a lot of overhead for meeting summaries.
Craqly is standalone. No parent subscription required.
Who Copilot is actually for
Enterprise teams running standardized on Microsoft Teams. Companies where IT has already approved and deployed M365. Managers who want searchable meeting archives and automated action-item tracking across a large organization. Copilot integrates with Outlook, SharePoint, and the broader Microsoft Graph, which is a real advantage if your workflows live there.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot blog describes the product as an “AI system” for knowledge work broadly, not just meetings. That framing tells you something about the target buyer: it’s the enterprise IT department, not the individual contributor.
Who Craqly is actually for
Sales reps doing discovery calls on Zoom. Job seekers preparing for and running through video interviews. Recruiters who switch between platforms depending on the candidate. Freelancers who meet clients across whatever tool the client prefers.
The invisible overlay matters a lot for interviews specifically. Joining a meeting with a visible AI bot participant, as some transcription tools do, is awkward. Craqly doesn’t appear in the participant list at all.
Can you run both?
Yes, actually. If you’re on a Teams-heavy enterprise and you also do a lot of external sales calls on Zoom, running Copilot for internal calls and Craqly for external ones isn’t redundant. They’re doing different things in different contexts. A few people I know in enterprise sales do exactly this.
The question is whether that’s worth two subscription costs. For high-volume external-facing roles, probably yes. For most people, pick the one that fits where you actually spend your time in meetings.
One thing the Microsoft 365 usage data from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index 2024 makes clear: 68% of people say they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time, and meetings are the main culprit. Both tools are trying to fix different parts of that problem. Copilot reduces the aftermath. Craqly tries to improve what happens inside.
Which half of the meeting problem is actually costing you more?