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Azure OpenAI vs IBM Watson Machine Learning comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure OpenAI
Ranking in AI Development Platforms
1st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Watson Machine Learning
Ranking in AI Development Platforms
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the AI Development Platforms category, the mindshare of Azure OpenAI is 9.9%, down from 18.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson Machine Learning is 2.0%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
AI Development Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Azure OpenAI9.9%
IBM Watson Machine Learning2.0%
Other88.1%
AI Development Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Rafael Keller - PeerSpot reviewer
Creates effective scheduling agents with responsive AI capabilities
I am using it to create agents to schedule appointments for clinics and professionals in general. It serves both small and major companies. The primary use case involves creating agents Its ability to understand and respond well to queries, including language translation for clients, is…
Anurag Mayank - PeerSpot reviewer
A highly efficient solution that delivers the desired results to its users
I had not considered how the solution could be improved because I was focused on how it was helping me to solve my issues. If I consider how we want to use it in our organization, certain areas of improvement can be addressed. For instance, we want to use it with Generative AI, not like ChatGPT, but in a way intended for industrial use. It would be beneficial to incorporate more AI into the solution.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Azure's integration with OpenAI's GPT is beneficial as well, especially for text generation tasks."
"The AI search functionality is particularly effective, as it creates summaries from data."
"OpenAI integrates seamlessly with the broader Microsoft Azure ecosystem, and that provides synergies with the other solutions. This integration makes it much easier to build solutions."
"The document intelligence feature has significantly aided in our operations, facilitating the creation of descriptive content."
"Its ability to understand and respond well to queries, including language translation for clients, is beneficial."
"Azure OpenAI is easy to use because the endpoints are created, and we just need to pass our parameters and info."
"Two aspects I appreciate are the turnaround time and ease of use. As it's a managed service, the quick turnaround is beneficial, and the simple interface makes it easy to work with. Performance and scalability are also strong points since you can scale as needed."
"The product saves a lot of time."
"It is has a lot of good features and we find the image classification very useful."
"The solution is very valuable to our organization due to the fact that we can work on it as a workflow."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution ten out of ten."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution's the cost and human labor savings."
"It has improved self-service and customer satisfaction."
"We can enable and change developer productivity with artificial intelligence-recommended code based on natural language input or exciting source code."
"I was particularly interested in trying the AutoML feature to see how it handles data and proposes new models. The variety of models it provides is impressive."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in their support services."
"I faced one issue with Azure OpenAI: My customer wanted more clarity on the pricing. They were not able to get proper answers from the documentation or the pricing calculator. I suggest that Microsoft maintain standardization in the pricing details published in the documentation and the pricing calculator."
"The UI could be a little easier."
"Sometimes, it gives answers in English, even when the request is in Polish."
"We encountered challenges related to question understanding."
"Azure needs to work on its own model development and improve the integration of voice-to-text services, particularly for right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Urdu. The accuracy in these languages requires improvement."
"The product features themselves are fine. However, with Microsoft scaling the service so much, the support structure needs to keep pace. When solving complex issues, the process of interacting with Microsoft can be quite time-consuming."
"There are certain shortcomings with the product's scalability and support team where improvements are required."
"Honestly, I haven't seen any comparative report that has run the same data through two different artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities to get something out of it. I would love to see that."
"The supporting language is limited."
"If I consider how we want to use it in our organization, certain areas of improvement can be addressed. For instance, we want to use it with Generative AI, not like ChatGPT, but in a way intended for industrial use."
"Scaling is limited in some use cases. They need to make it easier to expand in all aspects."
"They should add more GPU processing power to improve performance, especially when dealing with large amounts of data."
"In future releases, I would like to see a more flexible environment."
"Sometimes training the model is difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While the product meets our business requirements well, I consider it relatively expensive, especially for individual users like myself."
"Regarding pricing and licensing, it's a bit complex due to the minimum purchase requirement for PTO units. We're evaluating the best approach between PTE and pay-as-you-go models. Our organization is cautious about committing to PTE due to the fixed bandwidth reservation, while pay-as-you-go doesn't offer enough flexibility. We're discussing these matters with legal teams to ensure compliance and data security."
"The cost is pretty high. Even by US standards, you would find it high."
"I rate the product pricing six out of ten."
"The pricing is acceptable, and it's delivering good value for the results and outcomes we need."
"The tool costs around 20 dollars a month."
"If you consider the long-term aspect of any project, Azure OpenAI is a costly solution."
"It's a token-based system, so you pay per token used by the model."
"I've only been using the free tier, but it's quite competitive on a service basis."
"The pricing model is good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
University
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise18
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Azure OpenAI?
The product is easy to integrate with our IT workflow.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure OpenAI?
In terms of pricing for Azure OpenAI, I would rate it as average compared to Gemini. Currently, Gemini is becoming increasingly popular, which prompts leadership to consider a switch primarily due ...
What needs improvement with Azure OpenAI?
While it is good, we sometimes encounter hallucination issues, which is a significant concern. We are changing the prompt and fine-tuning it, but we still face some inconsistent behavior. We have s...
What do you like most about IBM Watson Machine Learning?
I was particularly interested in trying the AutoML feature to see how it handles data and proposes new models. The variety of models it provides is impressive.
What needs improvement with IBM Watson Machine Learning?
Sometimes training the model is difficult. We need to have at least a few different components to evaluate and understand the behavior of different users to have a very, very high accuracy in the m...
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Azure OpenAI vs. IBM Watson Machine Learning and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.