A team lead asks the question in a planning meeting and the room splits three ways: do we build this agent in Copilot Studio, write the orchestration ourselves and host it, or hand our container to Foundry and let it run our code? All three are official Microsoft build paths in 2026, all three end up in the same tenant-wide agent inventory, and the wrong pick costs you a rebuild once the project outgrows it.

The answer is not "the most powerful one." It is the one whose service model matches who is building the agent, who owns the runtime, and how much pro-code control over orchestration and protocols you actually need. This article is the decision framework for that choice, grounded in Microsoft Learn and current as of mid-2026.

Two of these three paths are public preview, so this is a guide to architectural fit and direction, not a production-reliability scorecard.

TL;DR

Three build paths, picked by service model, not power.