GitHub Copilot Business is cheaper than GitLab Duo on every axis that can be measured in dollars, and the gap is wider than the seat prices suggest. Copilot Business is $19 per seat and includes 1,900 GitHub AI Credits per user per month. GitLab Premium is $29 per seat and includes 12 GitLab Credits. Those two numbers look incomparable because they are: a GitHub AI Credit is worth $0.01 and a GitLab Credit is worth $1.00, so the same word means two units that differ by a factor of a hundred. Converted to money, Copilot Business includes $19.00 of metered AI per user and GitLab Premium includes $12.00. Copilot also does not meter code completions at all, while GitLab does, which is the difference that actually decides the bill.
If you are pricing these two against each other for a team, almost every comparison you will read still quotes GitLab Duo at $19 per seat. That was the old model. GitLab has replaced Duo seat add-ons with a usage meter, and it now prices its agent capabilities "based on actual usage rather than seat assignments". So the comparison is no longer seat against seat. It is one meter against another meter, with two different platform subscriptions underneath them. Here is how the arithmetic actually works out, and the one number in each model that decides whether your bill stays where you put it.
Which is cheaper, GitLab Duo or GitHub Copilot?
Copilot, on the published numbers, and it is not close once you convert the credits into money. The table below puts both on the same units. Seat prices and credit allowances are from GitHub's Copilot plans documentation and GitLab's pricing page, both read in September 2026. The dollar conversions are arithmetic: GitHub documents that 1 AI credit equals $0.01, and GitLab lists on-demand credits at $1.00.
| Per user, per month | GitHub Copilot Business | GitHub Copilot Enterprise | GitLab Premium with Duo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seat price | $19 | $39 | $29, billed annually |
| Included AI allowance | 1,900 AI credits | 3,900 AI credits | 12 GitLab credits |
| What one credit is worth | $0.01 | $0.01 | $1.00 |
| Included allowance in dollars | $19.00 | $39.00 | $12.00 |
| Are code completions metered? | No, unlimited and not billed in credits | No, unlimited and not billed in credits | Yes, 50 per credit |
| Overage | Per token, converted at $0.01 per credit | Per token, converted at $0.01 per credit | $1.00 per credit |
| Repositories | GitHub | GitHub | GitLab |
There is a detail in that table worth pausing on, because it looks like a coincidence and is not. GitHub's included allowance is exactly equal in dollars to the seat price: a $19 seat carries $19.00 of AI credits, and a $39 seat carries $39.00. GitHub is effectively doubling the value of the seat and letting you spend half of it on whichever models you prefer. GitLab's $29 seat carries $12.00.
Does GitHub Copilot charge for code completions?
No, and this is the single largest practical difference between the two. GitHub documents that code completions and next edit suggestions are not billed in AI credits and remain unlimited on paid plans. The credit meter only funds chat and agent work. So a developer who leans on autocomplete all day long consumes nothing from the allowance, and the allowance is reserved for the expensive things.
GitLab meters completions. It documents Code Suggestions at 50 executions per credit, drawn from the same balance as everything else. Premium's 12 credits therefore cover 600 completions per user per month if you spend the pool on nothing else. Six hundred completions is a light fortnight for one working developer, not a month. The moment your team also turns on agentic code review, which GitLab bills at 4 executions per credit, the two features start eating each other: 48 reviews would consume the entire monthly allowance on their own.
That is the mechanism behind the whole comparison. GitLab has one shared pool funding both the cheap high-frequency feature and the expensive low-frequency one, with no partition between them. GitHub takes the high-frequency feature off the meter entirely.
Is GitLab Duo included in Premium?
Partly, and on terms worth reading before you budget against them. Premium includes 12 GitLab Credits per user per month and Ultimate includes 24, but GitLab describes these as promotional: they are available "for a limited time after GA, and subject to change at GitLab's discretion". Unused credits do not roll over to the next month, so a quiet month banks nothing toward a busy one.
On the Free plan there is no included AI at all. GitLab states that Free users can access AI features only by purchasing the GitLab Credits add-on, which means paying the meter on a plan capped at five users per top-level group. If you are on GitLab Free and want AI, Duo is the wrong shape for you before price even enters it.
How much does GitLab Duo cost per user for a team?
It depends on burn rate, which is the honest and unhelpful answer, so here is the arithmetic made concrete. Take a twenty-five developer team on GitLab Premium at $29 per seat, which is $725 a month before any AI usage. Give each developer 800 code completions and 40 agentic code reviews a month, a fairly ordinary pattern. That is 16 credits of completions plus 10 credits of review, so 26 credits against an allowance of 12. Fourteen credits per developer bill on demand at $1 each, adding $350. The bill is $1,075.
Push the same team to 2,000 completions and 100 reviews each and the overage becomes 53 credits per developer, or $1,325 a month, which is more than the seats cost. The same twenty-five people on the same software land anywhere between $725 and $2,050 depending on how much they use the thing you bought for them to use. The full tier breakdown, the per-feature credit rates and a team cost table are on our GitLab Duo pricing page, and Copilot Business against Copilot Enterprise does the same job on the GitHub side.
Teams that run into this usually discover it a quarter late, when a variable line item that was supposed to be $725 shows up at four figures. If AI tooling spend is now a moving number in your budget, it belongs next to the rest of your variable infrastructure cost rather than in a spreadsheet of its own, which is the point at which most finance leads start watching cloud and SaaS spend in one place instead of reconciling invoices after the fact.
Which one should your team actually buy?
In practice this is decided before price, by where your code lives. Copilot only works on GitHub repositories and Duo only works on GitLab ones, so for most teams there is exactly one option on the shortlist and the comparison is academic. It matters in two real situations: you are choosing a platform for a new organization, or you are already paying for one platform and wondering whether the other's AI is worth migrating for.
If you are choosing fresh and the AI is a significant part of the decision, Copilot Business is the better-priced product. Cheaper seat, more included AI value, unmetered completions, and a credit unit small enough that overage arrives gradually rather than in jumps. If you are already on GitLab Ultimate, turn Duo on and measure for a month before buying anything, because your 24 credits cost nothing extra and the credit dashboard will tell you your real burn rate faster than any estimate.
What neither answer gives you is a fixed number. Both are meters. Between promotional allowances that can be withdrawn, a GitLab Ultimate tier that no longer publishes a price at all, and per-token overage on the GitHub side, there is no honest way to write next year's cost on one line for either of them. If predictability is what you are actually buying, that is a different product category, and every AI coding tool priced side by side is the fastest way to see which tools are flat and which are metered.
The part the credit tables do not tell you
Both of these are assistants attached to a platform. They are priced as a feature of source control, which is why the AI cost is entangled with seats, tiers and compliance features you may not want. If what you need is narrower, a task turned into a reviewable merge request without adopting a whole platform tier, that is a separable purchase.
Agentcode connects to a GitHub or GitLab repository on any hosting and any tier, takes a described task, plans it, edits the code, runs your existing test suite and opens a merge request for a human to review. It never merges on its own and never trains on your code. It costs $29 a month flat, not per user and not plus a meter, so the number your finance lead approves in January is the number they pay in November. That is a narrower product than either Duo or Copilot and we would rather say so than pretend it replaces GitLab.
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