Looking for an alternative to Microsoft 365 Copilot? An honest comparison of model-agnostic options for Irish businesses, including osFoundry.

dgm is an independent osFoundry implementation partner — not affiliated with osFoundry’s developer (the company OS LLC), and it has not yet completed any client integrations.

Looking for an alternative to Microsoft 365 Copilot usually comes down to wanting more model choice, a different pricing model or more control over data outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

Why consider an alternative?

  • Model choice — Copilot runs on Microsoft/OpenAI models; a model-agnostic platform lets you choose for each task, including EU open-weight Mistral.
  • Pricing model — Copilot prices per seat; a usage-based platform prices by usage.
  • Data control — outside Microsoft’s ecosystem you may want to pin regions, run locally or self-host in Ireland.

osFoundry is a model-agnostic alternative — it can integrate Microsoft/OpenAI models via BYOK and run others, with agents, apps and self-hosting.

What about data protection and residency?

osFoundry pins the data region to the United States, the EU or Japan, runs models locally on your own hardware, and supports self-hosting (BYO Cloud) on a cloud account you control. An EU region keeps data inside the EEA — and that satisfies GDPR for most businesses, because there is no Irish rule requiring personal data to physically stay in Ireland. There is, however, no dedicated managed hyperscaler region “in osFoundry” for Ireland; to keep data solely in the country the honest path is self-hosting in an Irish cloud region — Amazon Web Services has eu-west-1 (Dublin, generally available since 2007, three availability zones) and Microsoft Azure has North Europe (Dublin, Grange Castle, generally available since 2009), while Google Cloud has no Ireland region (the nearest are Belgium and London) — or running open-weight models locally. One honest nuance on capacity: Ireland lifted the de-facto data-centre connection moratorium under a stringent new regime (the CRU policy effective 12 December 2025), but EirGrid will not connect new data centres in the Greater Dublin Area until around 2028; existing AWS and Azure capacity in Dublin is operational and usable today. In financial services, cloud and ICT third-party risk is governed by DORA, supervised by the Central Bank of Ireland.

How dgm helps

dgm is an independent implementation partner that helps businesses in Ireland adopt osFoundry — from identifying the first practical use case, through building it, to connecting AI to the systems you already use. dgm works independently of osFoundry’s developer (the company OS LLC) and has not yet completed any client integrations; everything above is therefore a description of the service offered, not a delivered result. If you would like to look at a sensible first step, dgm is happy to think it through with you. Arrange a no-obligation conversation with dgm.