GitHub Copilot

About GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is one of the most widely adopted AI coding assistants in the world, with tens of millions of developers using it across Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, and GitHub.com itself. It leverages OpenAI's models to provide inline code completions, multi-line suggestions, test generation, and a Copilot Chat interface for conversational coding assistance. The free tier (introduced in 2025) allows individual developers to access a monthly allocation of completions and chats at no cost. Pricing spans five tiers: Free, Pro ($10/month), Pro+ ($39/month), Business ($19/user/month), and Enterprise ($39/user/month). The Business and Enterprise tiers are designed for organisations with compliance requirements, offering policy controls over which AI models Copilot can invoke, seat management, and audit capabilities. Copilot Business explicitly guarantees that customer code snippets are not retained or used to train the underlying AI models. From a security and compliance standpoint, GitHub Copilot Business and Enterprise have achieved SOC 2 Type I and ISO 27001 certification (as of mid-2024), representing a meaningful step forward for enterprise adoption. Data is processed on Microsoft Azure infrastructure, which is distributed globally, though specific data residency guarantees depend on the organisation's Azure tenant configuration. No full on-premises deployment option currently exists for Copilot. For software engineering teams in regulated industries, GitHub Copilot Enterprise is the recommended tier, offering content exclusion policies (blocking Copilot from seeing sensitive repositories), organisation-wide policy management, and GitHub.com-native pull request assistance. Buyers in jurisdictions requiring strict data residency should note that Copilot does not offer the same level of geographic data control as some specialised alternatives, making it more suited to organisations comfortable with Azure's multi-region global infrastructure.