AI has moved from futuristic concept to everyday business tool. The harder question now isn’t “Should we use AI?” It’s:
“Which AI platform actually makes sense for our business?”
Between OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Perplexity, it can feel like you’re comparing apples, oranges and a few alien fruits. For most organisations, the decision comes down to three things:
Which ecosystem you already live in (Google, Microsoft or mixed).
How much you care about safety, control and compliance.
The types of work you actually need AI to do.
At vCloud Group AI, our role is to sit across all of these platforms, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and then design solutions that fit your specific environment—whether you’re a law firm, accounting practice, MSP, or any other professional services business.
OpenAI: The General-Purpose Workhorse
OpenAI’s models (ChatGPT), have become the default reference point for modern AI. They are designed to be flexible, capable and broadly applicable. That means they can help draft documents, analyse information, write and debug code, turn rough notes into structured content, or even generate images and handle multimodal inputs.
OpenAI offers a free tier for basic use and a range of paid plans for individuals, teams and enterprises. For many professionals, a per-user subscription in roughly the US$20–30 per month band unlocks faster models, better tools and higher limits, while organisations can move to business or enterprise plans with administrative control and governance.
For businesses that don’t want to be tied too tightly to Google or
Microsoft, OpenAI often becomes the “central brain” that can plug into many different tools and workflows.
Anthropic Claude: When Safety and Compliance Come First
Anthropic’s Claude family has built its reputation around safety, reliability and strong reasoning. That makes it particularly attractive in environments where compliance, audit trails and reputational risk matter. Law firms, accounting practices, financial services and regulated industries are often drawn to Claude because the model is engineered to be more conservative, to provide clearer refusals when a task is inappropriate, and to handle longer documents in a single pass.
Anthropic has also been very aggressive in optimising pricing at the API level, especially with the Claude 3.5 and later family, making it more affordable for large-scale deployments while still focusing on safety and control. Individual users can access Claude via a free tier and a paid subscription, while teams can adopt enterprise plans that add governance and security features.
If the question inside your organisation sounds like “We want high performance, but we’re nervous about risk,” Claude is always worth a serious look.
Google Gemini: AI Inside Google Workspace
For organisations that live in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive, Google’s Gemini is the natural extension of how they already work. Instead of introducing a completely separate tool, Gemini appears inside the existing Google Workspace environment. Staff can ask Gemini to draft emails, rewrite documents, summarise long reports, generate slide content or help analyse spreadsheets—without leaving the tools they use every day.
Google also positions Gemini as part of its broader search and cloud story, with AI-enhanced search experiences and powerful multimodal models. Pricing for individuals typically starts with a paid tier (for example, Gemini Advanced or similar branding) around the same range as other premium AI tools, while business features are sold as add-ons to Workspace plans or consumed via API.
If your team already spends most of its day in Google Workspace, Gemini’s biggest strength is convenience: AI simply becomes another capability inside your existing environment, rather than yet another separate app to manage.
Microsoft Copilot: AI Woven Through Microsoft 365
On the Microsoft side, Copilot is the AI layer that runs through Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Windows and more. Instead of being a standalone chatbot, Copilot is designed to sit right where you work. In Word, it can draft or rewrite documents; in Excel, it can help analyse data and build formulas; in PowerPoint, it can turn a few bullets into a full slide deck; in Outlook and Teams, it can summarise long email or chat threads and pull out the key actions.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is generally sold as a per-user add-on on top of existing Microsoft 365 licences (such as Business Standard, Business Premium, E3 or E5). Under the hood, Microsoft orchestrates several models—including OpenAI models, its own Phi series, and even third-party models in some cases—behind its existing security and compliance framework.
For organisations that are already heavily invested in Microsoft 365, Copilot is often the most seamless route to AI adoption, because it doesn’t ask users to change their habits: it simply makes the tools they already use more intelligent.
DeepSeek: Open Models for Maximum Control
DeepSeek is the emerging disruptor that gets a lot of attention from technically mature teams. Instead of offering only closed, SaaS-style models, DeepSeek provides high-performing open-weight models that organisations can run on their own infrastructure. That gives engineering teams and MSPs much more control over cost, deployment and data residency.
These models have performed surprisingly well on reasoning, coding and mathematical benchmarks, while remaining relatively efficient. There is no per-seat subscription in the traditional sense; the models themselves are usually free to download and use under permissive licences (with sensible restrictions), and the main cost comes from the compute you choose to run them on—cloud GPUs, on-prem hardware or a hybrid approach.
For MSPs, software companies and larger enterprises that want to treat AI as a core piece of in-house infrastructure rather than a purely external service, DeepSeek is a strong building block—especially when vCloud Group AI helps design, secure and maintain the environment.
Perplexity: AI for Research and Answers With Sources
Perplexity takes a slightly different approach. Rather than trying to be a general all-purpose assistant inside your office suite, it is designed as an AI-native research and answer engine. You ask a question; it searches across the web and other sources; then it returns an answer with citations and links you can inspect.
This makes it especially helpful for roles that spend a lot of time in “find, read, summarise, compare” mode: legal research, consulting, academic work, due diligence and content research. Perplexity has both a free tier and a paid Pro tier aimed at heavier users, with additional enterprise options for teams and API access.
The big advantage here is transparency. When someone inside your organisation needs to know not only what the answer is but where it came from, Perplexity is often the best starting point.
Matching Platforms to Real Businesses
Once you see the landscape clearly, the strategy becomes more straightforward.
A law firm or accounting practice that is extremely sensitive to risk might lean towards Claude for drafting and analysis, supported by Perplexity for research and OpenAI for certain high-productivity tasks. A Google-first organisation that lives in Workspace will often get the best day-to-day gains from Gemini, perhaps supplemented by OpenAI for more advanced workflows.
A Microsoft 365 shop will usually start with Copilot, then look at how OpenAI or Claude can extend that into more custom automations or client-facing solutions.
Meanwhile, MSPs, SaaS vendors and technically capable enterprises may decide that part of their stack should be built on DeepSeek models they control themselves, using OpenAI or Claude as complementary external services.
A Quick Comparison in One Place
To pull this together, here is a simplified comparison that shows how these platforms line up at a high level. Prices are indicative ranges only and will vary by region, plan and usage, but they are useful as a rough guide.
| Platform | Primary Strength | Best Fit Ecosystem | Typical Individual Cost Range* | Typical Business / Team Approach* |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | General-purpose reasoning, content & coding | Neutral / multi-platform | Free tier, then paid from ~US$20/m | Per-user business plans and API usage |
| Claude | Safety-first, long-context, compliance focus | Neutral, compliance-conscious | Free tier plus Pro-style subs | Enterprise contracts and API integration |
| Gemini | Deeply integrated into Google Workspace | Google-centric organisations | Paid Gemini tier around ~US$20/m | Workspace add-ons and Gemini APIs |
| Copilot | Embedded inside Microsoft 365 apps | Microsoft 365 organisations | Some free web features; paid add-ons | Per-user add-on (e.g. ~US$30/user/month) |
| DeepSeek | Open-weight, cost-efficient, self-hosted | Tech-savvy teams & MSPs | Models free; pay for compute | Infra + operations rather than per-seat |
| Perplexity | Research, search and answers with citations | Knowledge-heavy roles | Free tier plus Pro around ~US$20/m | Team and enterprise plans + API |
*Ranges are approximate and for general orientation only. Always confirm current pricing with vendors.
How vCloud Group AI Helps You Decide
The reality is that most organisations will not use just one model forever. The smart approach is to design an AI strategy rather than a single AI purchase. That’s where vCloud Group AI comes in.
We start by understanding your existing stack—Google, Microsoft, on-prem systems, line-of-business applications—and your risk profile. From there, we help you choose a sensible mix of platforms, design the right workflows (from chatbots and voice agents to document automation and analytics), and then train your team so they can use the tools confidently and safely. We also stay across model updates and pricing changes, so you don’t have to constantly re-evaluate the entire market.
If you want to move beyond the hype and put the right AI in place for your business—not just the loudest brand—vCloud Group AI can guide you through every step.