Introduction
When you adopt GitHub Copilot in a company, you will sign up to a Copilot plan designed for businesses. These plans allow you to grant access to users and meet security requirements with policies and audit logs.
To identify which plan is right for your company:
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Define the overall goals you are hoping to achieve with your Copilot rollout. Think about downstream goals such as reducing security debt, as opposed to earlier success indicators such as developer satisfaction or feature adoption.
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Understand the benefits of Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise, including included AI credits.
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Choose the Copilot plan with the allowances and features that will help you meet your goals.
Tip
When you subscribe to Copilot at the enterprise level, you can choose a plan individually for each organization in your enterprise. This allows you to evaluate the benefits of Copilot Enterprise with a pilot program or enable it in the organizations where it will have the most impact.
This article explains the available plans and provides examples for how Copilot Enterprise can help you achieve specific business goals.
Plans and AI credits
GitHub offers two Copilot plans for customers on GitHub Enterprise Cloud:
- Copilot Business ($19 USD per user per month): includes 1,900 AI credits per user and most Copilot features in IDEs and on GitHub.
- Copilot Enterprise ($39 USD per user per month): includes 3,900 AI credits per user, and often allows earlier access to new features and models.
For a full comparison, see our plans page.
AI credits are consumed by advanced Copilot features and models, including AI agents. Each plan's included AI credits are pooled across your enterprise, so heavier users can draw from lighter users' unused portions. By giving members access to more AI credits, you can scale your company with AI agents and drive real business outcomes.
By default, usage can continue beyond the included pool, with additional usage charged at $0.01 USD per AI credit. You can control this with budget controls. See Usage-based billing for organizations and enterprises.
How does Copilot Enterprise support business goals?
The following table shows examples of goals your company might set for a Copilot rollout, and how AI credits and other Copilot Enterprise features can help you achieve those goals.
| Goal | Problem to solve | How Copilot Enterprise helps |
|---|---|---|
| Reduce your backlog | Teams may not have capacity to work on backlog issues or non-essential issues that come up during development. This can lead to a gradual degradation in feature quality. | With more included AI credits, users can assign more issues to Copilot cloud agent, which can complete tasks like fixing bugs or adding feature enhancements in the background. |
| Accelerate pull requests | Teams often experience delays in merging pull requests due to lengthy review cycles. This can lead to bottlenecks in the development process and slow down the delivery and improvement of features. | With more included AI credits, users can receive more reviews on pull requests from Copilot code review, often flagging bugs or possible improvements before a human reviewer is available. |
| Reduce technical debt | Inefficient or hard-to-read code can accumulate over time, making it harder for team members to onboard and understand new areas of the code. | With more included AI credits and access to the latest models, users can use agent mode in their IDE to refactor code, choosing models with greater contextual awareness that are more suited to tasks like complex refactoring. |
Is Copilot Enterprise the most cost effective choice?
We recommend considering the included AI credits in the Copilot Business plan as a baseline, not a limit. Developers using agentic workflows including features like agent mode, Copilot cloud agent, and Copilot code review are likely to consume beyond the included amount.
If your company is gaining value from agentic workflows, you will likely want to make more AI credits available to developers. Depending on consumption patterns, the most cost effective approach is either to upgrade users to Copilot Enterprise or to allow additional usage beyond the included pool with appropriate budget controls.
To review your enterprise's consumption, see the AI usage dashboard in your enterprise billing settings. For guidance on managing spend, see Optimizing your budget configuration.