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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
6.5
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Watson Machine Learning
Ranking in AI Development Platforms
15th
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 October 2025, in the AI Development Platforms category, the mindshare of Azure OpenAI is 9.4%, down from 18.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson Machine Learning is 2.1%, 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 OpenAI9.4%
IBM Watson Machine Learning2.1%
Other88.5%
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

"The most valuable feature is the ALM."
"The AI search functionality is particularly effective, as it creates summaries from data."
"Azure OpenAI has significantly reduced costs and increased efficiency in tasks such as aggressive testing of systems to avoid anomalies and trust issues."
"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 most valuable features include analyzing comments and preparing requests for customers, making emails easier and faster."
"My goal was to create an experience where project managers don't have to read through entire documents. Instead, they can ask a question and receive relevant point analysis. This analysis identifies the document and specific section where the information resides. Previously, users had to rely on these document references. Now, Azure OpenAI enhances the experience by providing the answer directly in the user's own language, relevant to their context."
"Its ability to understand and respond well to queries, including language translation for clients, is beneficial."
"It's very powerful. It allows users to query our documents using natural language and receive answers in the same way. This makes our product information much more accessible than traditional keyword-based search."
"The solution is very valuable to our organization due to the fact that we can work on it as a workflow."
"It is has a lot of good features and we find the image classification very useful."
"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."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution's the cost and human labor savings."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution ten out of ten."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in their support services."
"I would like to see in the future that Azure OpenAI brings non-OpenAI models into their service because they currently do not have independent models and follow the OpenAI roadmap."
"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."
"We are awaiting the new updates like multi-model capabilities."
"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 solution's response is a bit slow sometimes."
"Azure OpenAI is not an optimized tool yet, making it one of its shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The product must improve its dashboards."
"They should add more GPU processing power to improve performance, especially when dealing with large amounts of data."
"Scaling is limited in some use cases. They need to make it easier to expand in all aspects."
"The supporting language is limited."
"Sometimes training the model is difficult."
"In future releases, I would like to see a more flexible environment."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is interaction-based, meaning transactional. It's reasonably priced for now."
"We started with monthly payments, but we plan to switch to yearly billing once we've stabilized our solution."
"I rate the product pricing six out of ten."
"The cost is pretty high. Even by US standards, you would find it high."
"It's a token-based system, so you pay per token used by the model."
"The cost is quite high and fixed."
"The pricing is acceptable, and it's delivering good value for the results and outcomes we need."
"The platform offers a flexible pricing model which depends on the features and capabilities we utilize."
"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
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
5%
University
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Educational Organization
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise19
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: September 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.