The comparison most teams are actually making is unfair to both tools: Rovo runs inside Jira and can act on your issues, while Microsoft 365 Copilot never touches Jira at all — it indexes your issues through a connector so you can search and summarize them from Teams and Outlook. One is included with the Jira plan you already pay for and metered by credits. The other is $30 per user per month on top of a Microsoft 365 license, and it’s read-only. Once you see that split, the choice usually makes itself.
What each one actually does with a Jira issue
Start with the verb, not the feature list.
Rovo acts. It’s Atlassian’s AI layer on top of Jira and Confluence — agents you can assign work to, Rovo Chat, cross-product search. On Atlassian’s own AI features in Jira page, the headline capabilities are things like assigning work to agents, a work-readiness checker, and work breakdown that splits a task into subtasks with descriptions. These change or produce something in your instance.
Copilot reads. Microsoft’s Jira Cloud connector crawls your Jira Cloud data and indexes issues so users can find and summarize them inside Microsoft 365. Microsoft’s listed capabilities are exactly that: index issues across projects, enable natural-language queries, support incremental and full crawls, and provide a customizable schema for fields like title, description, status, and assignee. The example prompts are all retrieval — “Summarize CP-1234,” “Show all Jira issues assigned to me that are due this week,” “What are the blockers for the API migration task in Jira?”
There’s no “create a ticket” in that list, because that’s not what a Copilot connector does. It’s a search index with permissions attached.
Rovo vs Copilot for Jira teams, side by side
| Atlassian Rovo | Microsoft 365 Copilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Inside Jira and Confluence | Inside Teams, Outlook, Word, Microsoft Search |
| What it does to Jira | Reads and acts (agents, work breakdown, drafting) | Reads only (indexed issues, summaries, search) |
| How Jira data gets there | Native — it’s the same platform | Jira Cloud or Jira Data Center connector, crawled on a schedule |
| Cost model | Included with paid Jira editions, metered in credits | $30/user/month (Enterprise tier) on top of an M365 license |
| The included allowance | 25 credits/user/mo Standard, 70 Premium, 150 Enterprise | n/a — flat per-seat |
| What burns the allowance | Agents and Quick Answer 10 credits/request; Deep Research 100 | n/a |
| Who it’s for | People working in Jira | People who need Jira context without opening Jira |
Which one for which team?
The table above says what each tool does. Here’s who should actually reach for which one.
Engineering and Jira-native teams — devs, QA, anyone who lives on the board all day: Rovo. You’re already paying for it, agents can act on the issue instead of just describing it, and the Copilot connector can’t write anything back. Buying Copilot for people who already live in Jira is $30/seat/month for a search index over data they can already search natively.
Confluence/docs-heavy teams: Also Rovo. Its cross-product search spans Confluence and Jira together, which is the platform these teams document on anyway. Copilot’s Jira connector doesn’t touch Confluence at all — that’s a separate connector, and it would still be read-only.
PM and reporting-heavy teams: Split by where the PM actually sits. A PM running boards and writing tickets inside Jira gets more out of Rovo’s work breakdown and Quick Answer. A PM — or the exec above them — who lives in Outlook and Teams and just wants status without a Jira login is exactly the connector’s use case; see “When Copilot is the right answer” below.
Support teams that mostly search: Copilot, if the org already has Microsoft 365. “What’s the status of ticket X” and “what bugs are open on the mobile app,” asked from Teams, is the connector’s best case — read-heavy, low-stakes if occasionally stale between crawls, no write access needed. One gap to plan around: attachments aren’t indexed, so a support agent still has to open the ticket for a screenshot or a log file.
That’s team-type. For the specific “can Copilot create epics instead of Rovo” question, see the FAQ below — short answer, no.
The cost question is really two different questions
For Rovo, the question isn’t “should I buy it” — you already have it. It ships with paid Jira editions, so the real constraint is the meter. Per Atlassian’s Rovo usage allowance docs, you get 25 credits per user per month on Standard, 70 on Premium, and 150 on Enterprise, pooled at the org level, reset monthly, no rollover. Rovo Agents and Quick Answer cost 10 credits per request; Deep Research costs 100. Search, summaries, and definitions are free.
Do the arithmetic on Standard: 25 credits is about two and a half agent runs per user per month. That’s fine for occasional work and completely wrong for a task you do all day. Atlassian also says it is not currently billing for usage above the allowance and will give at least 90 days’ notice before overage becomes billable — so no surprise invoice today, but the meter is running and visible. Plug in your own seat count and usage pattern with our Rovo credit cost estimator to see where you’d land.
For Copilot, the question is genuinely “should I buy it,” because it’s a new per-seat line item. Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise is $30 per user per month, and it requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 base license underneath it. If your team already has Copilot for everything else, the Jira connector is a free-ish addition to a decision you already made. If you’d be buying Copilot for Jira, you’re paying $30 a seat for search and summaries over data Jira already lets you search.
When Copilot is the right answer
When the people who need Jira context don’t live in Jira.
That’s a real and common problem: execs, account managers, marketing, support leads — everyone who needs to know the status of a project but shouldn’t need a Jira seat and a saved filter. Indexing Jira into Microsoft Search means they ask in the tool they already have open. It’s the same job as a Jira report for stakeholders who don’t use Jira, solved from the Microsoft side.
Two things to get right if you go this way. First, use the “Only people with access to this data source” permission mode rather than Everyone, unless you’re deliberately making every issue org-searchable; security trimming needs Jira user emails mapped to Entra ID and the Browse projects permission. Second, know the gaps: the Cloud connector doesn’t support Jira Server or Data Center (there’s a separate Data Center connector requiring an on-prem Graph connector agent), and attachments aren’t indexed — so a design doc or a log file attached to a ticket is invisible to Copilot.
When neither is the right answer
When the thing you actually want is one repetitive writing job done well, dozens of times a day.
Rovo is broad by design, and its pricing reflects that: 10 credits per agent run out of a 25-credit monthly allowance is priced for occasional, high-value calls, not for drafting every ticket that comes in. Copilot can’t write to Jira at all. So if your real problem is “our tickets are one-liners and nobody writes acceptance criteria,” you’re picking between a metered generalist and a read-only search box — and neither is built for that.
A focused tool is. AI Copilot for Jira sits on the issue and does the high-frequency drafting work — turning a one-line request into a real ticket, writing acceptance criteria, summarizing a long thread — without drawing down the Rovo credits you’re saving for agents and research. The sane setup for most teams is all three doing what they’re actually shaped for: a dedicated copilot for the writing you do constantly, Rovo for the broad occasional agent work, and Microsoft Copilot only if your organization already runs on it and your non-Jira people need to find things.
For a closer look at how the Rovo meter interacts with Jira’s built-in AI, see Jira AI vs Atlassian Intelligence. And note this page is about Microsoft 365 Copilot — there’s a third Copilot in the mix, GitHub Copilot, which is a complement to Rovo rather than an alternative; that distinction lives in Rovo’s DevOps integration.
If neither tool does the specific thing your team needs, that’s usually a small custom agent — we build those.