I have spent real time inside both Microsoft Copilot Notebooks and Google NotebookLM. One of them I reach for almost every day. The other I keep coming back to, hopeful, trying to find the spot where it earns a permanent place in my workflow. That tells you most of what you need to know, but the detail is where it gets interesting.
Short version up front. If you are only going to use one notebook tool, make it NotebookLM. It is incredible, and it has clearly found its purpose. If your company already pays for Microsoft 365 Copilot, give Copilot Notebooks a try anyway — it is powerful in a narrow way, and you may find a fit I have not. But it has not found its true footing inside Microsoft yet, at least not for me.
At a glance
Copilot Notebooks
NotebookLM
What it is grounded on
Your Microsoft data — documents, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive. Plus links you add.
Whatever you feed it — PDFs, docs, websites, YouTube videos, pasted text.
Best at
Querying and building from a controlled, fixed set of company data you return to often.
Learning, researching, and teaching yourself about almost anything.
Adding sources
Attach cloud files (OneDrive/SharePoint), add a link, or upload — that’s about it, and search is weak.
Fast and clean. Browser extension makes adding YouTube and web sources trivial.
Audio / podcasts
Yes — dialog or narration style, and you can choose the output language. Genuinely cool.
Yes — and still better overall, with more options and higher quality.
Study guides & quizzes
In preview — quizzes, flash cards, topic pages. I haven’t tested them yet.
Excellent. Data sheets, quizzes, study guides all land well.
Extras I don’t lean on
—
Videos, infographics. Good, just not part of my routine.
Best for
Teams locked into M365 with a defined data set to interrogate.
Anyone who researches, learns, and builds plans from messy source piles.
What each one actually is
Copilot Notebooks is Microsoft’s notebook concept built into Microsoft 365 Copilot. The whole pitch is grounding. You point it at your Microsoft data — documents, SharePoint sites, the things your organization already lives in — and it becomes a focused workspace built on that controlled set. You can add links to outside material too, though that is where the cracks show. It is slow, and how well it works depends a lot on what you are linking to.
NotebookLM is Google’s take, and it is source-agnostic. You feed it whatever you have — PDFs, web pages, pasted notes, YouTube videos — and it builds a grounded understanding of that pile. Then it turns that pile into things you can actually use: summaries, study guides, quizzes, audio overviews. It is free to start, with a paid tier if you want more capacity. The mental model is different from the jump: Copilot Notebooks wants your company’s data; NotebookLM wants whatever you throw at it.
Where Copilot Notebooks shines — and where it doesn’t
When it works, it is powerful. If you have a defined subset of controlled data that you want to keep going back to, query, and build from, Copilot Notebooks is built exactly for that. A fixed reference set you interrogate over and over is its sweet spot.
The problem is the setup is awkward, and the boundaries are frustrating. Adding external links is slow and unreliable depending on the source. And honestly, I am not convinced you need a notebook for most of this. You could build an agent that handles attached documents at least as well, probably better. That is the nagging feeling I keep having — that the notebook layer is solving a problem that an agent already solves more flexibly.
The audio overviews are the highlight
The one feature I genuinely use is the audio overviews. You can generate them in a dialog style or a narration style, and — this is the part I really like — you can choose the language they come out in, which is super cool. You also get a customization prompt to steer the result, just like NotebookLM. Turning a controlled set of internal documents into an audio rundown is handy, and I have reached for it more than once.
But it usually does not do as good a job as NotebookLM, and the reason comes back to sources. NotebookLM lets you pull in outside material so much more easily, where Copilot has you fiddling with links or copying and pasting into your own documents first. Better source-gathering means better audio, and NotebookLM wins that chain.
Quizzes, flash cards, and topic pages — new, and untested by me
Microsoft has also added quizzes, flash cards, and topic pages. They look like they are still in preview. I am in the preview program, so I am going to go test them more before I have a real opinion. My honest first reaction, though: doing all of that on company material, I am not sure where it fits beyond maybe training people up faster. It feels like something I could do better in an agent — but we will see. I will report back once I have actually put them through their paces.
Building sources is its biggest weakness
This is the one that holds the whole thing back for me. When it comes to references, your options are to attach cloud files — OneDrive, maybe SharePoint, that sort of thing — add a link, or upload. And that is about it. The search inside it is not great either, so it does not help you build up a good set of sources easily. For a tool whose entire value is being grounded on the right material, weak source-gathering is the biggest weakness there is. Until that gets better, the grounding pitch only half lands.
For a tool whose whole value is grounding, the fact that it doesn’t help you build sources easily is its biggest weakness.
Here is the tell. When I am evaluating solutions and vendors, and they send me materials, I will sometimes drop those into a Copilot Notebook and run comparisons there. But just as often I skip it and use the researcher agents in Copilot instead. When the dedicated tool and the general agent are interchangeable in my hands, the dedicated tool has not earned its slot.
How I actually use NotebookLM
NotebookLM is in my daily rotation, full stop. I use it to learn about almost anything — to research, and to teach myself a subject from the ground up. I have not leaned on it much for open-ended brainstorming yet, but I do use it to compare solutions, and that is genuinely helpful when I am weighing vendors and approaches against each other.
The features I use constantly: the data sheets and study guides, the podcasts, and the quizzes. All three are very good. It has other tricks — video and infographic generation — that I just do not use much. But the core learning loop is excellent.
My favorite workflow is using it as a research front-end for everything else. I run a browser extension in Chrome that lets me add NotebookLM sources easily. I will go to YouTube, drop in a stack of videos I like on a topic, and ask NotebookLM to give me, say, the top ten ways people are actually doing something with a particular tool. Then I take that synthesized list and feed it into whichever LM I am using and say: generate a plan of action to implement these ideas.
I use NotebookLM to do a lot of research very quickly on projects, then hand the results to my execution tools — like Cowork.
That is the pattern: NotebookLM does the fast, grounded research and synthesis, then the output flows into my execution tools. It has become the front of the funnel for how I learn and plan.
Worth it if. Skip it if.
Worth NotebookLM if you research, learn, or teach yourself things regularly. You want to turn a messy pile of PDFs, web pages, and YouTube videos into study guides, quizzes, and audio you can actually absorb. You want a fast, reliable research front-end that feeds your other AI tools. For most people, this is the one to get. It is free to try, and the paid tier is there when you outgrow it.
Skip NotebookLM if your real need is to interrogate locked-down internal company data that lives inside Microsoft — that is not what it is for.
Worth Copilot Notebooks if your company already pays for Microsoft 365 Copilot and you have a defined, controlled set of company data you keep returning to. The grounding on SharePoint, OneDrive, and your documents is the real draw, the language-flexible audio overviews are a genuine bonus, and the new quiz and flash-card features may pay off for fast team training. If it is already included in your subscription, there is no reason not to try it.
Skip Copilot Notebooks if you are an independent operator without M365 Copilot, or if you find — like I often do — that a general researcher agent does the same job with less friction.
The verdict
If you are going to get one notebook, get NotebookLM, not Copilot’s. It is the more complete, more capable, more pleasant tool, and it has clearly found its purpose. Copilot Notebooks is powerful in its narrow lane, and if your company is already subscribed to Copilot, absolutely give it a try — I keep trying myself, and I have new preview features still to test. But I have not yet found a place for it in my normal repertoire, and I do not think it has found its footing inside Microsoft yet.
That is my read. If you have found a workflow where Copilot Notebooks genuinely earns its place, I want to hear it — drop a comment and tell me what clicked for you.
Reviewed, and opinion by Brad Rowland — IT Infrastructure and Operations leader, automation builder, and AI implementer. Tested through June 2026.
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