Databricks vs IBM Watson Studio comparison

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Databricks Logo
28,975 views|18,474 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
IBM Logo
3,410 views|2,249 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Databricks and IBM Watson Studio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Data Science Platforms solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Databricks vs. IBM Watson Studio Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"I haven't heard about any major stability issues. At this time I feel like it's stable.""It is a cost-effective solution.""This solution offers a lake house data concept that we have found exciting. We are able to have a large amount of data in a data lake and can manage all relational activities.""The Delta Lake data type has been the most useful part of this solution. Delta Lake is an opensource data type and it was implemented and invented by Databricks.""The solution is very easy to use.""The setup is quite easy.""It's easy to increase performance as required.""Its lightweight and fast processing are valuable."

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"IBM Watson Studio consistently automates across channels.""It has a lot of data connectors, which is extremely helpful.""It is a stable, reliable product.""The main benefit is the ease of use. We see a lot of engineers in our site and customers that really like the way the tools are able to work with the people.""For me, the valuable feature of the solution is the one that I used, which was Jupyter notebooks.""Watson Studio is very stable.""Stability-wise, it is a great tool.""It is a very stable and reliable solution."

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Cons
"Support for Microsoft technology and the compatibility with the .NET framework is somewhat missing.""I'm not the guy that I'm working with Databricks on a daily basis. I'm on the management team. However, my team tells me there are limitations with streaming events. The connectors work with a small set of platforms. For example, we can work with Kafka, but if we want to move to an event-driven solution from AWS, we cannot do it. We cannot connect to all the streaming analytics platforms, so we are limited in choosing the best one.""Costs can quickly add up if you don't plan for it.""Would be helpful to have additional licensing options.""If I want to create a Databricks account, I need to have a prior cloud account such as an AWS account or an Azure account. Only then can I create a Databricks account on the cloud. However, if they can make it so that I can still try Databricks even if I don't have a cloud account on AWS and Azure, it would be great. That is, it would be nice if it were possible to create a pseudo account and be provided with a free trial. It is very essential to creating a workforce on Databricks. For example, students or corporate staff can then explore and learn Databricks.""Generative AI is catching up in areas like data governance and enterprise flavor. Hence, these are places where Databricks has to be faster.""The solution could be improved by integrating it with data packets. Right now, the load tables provide a function, like team collaboration. Still, it's unclear as to if there's a function to create different branches and/or more branches. Our team had used data packets before, however, I feel it's difficult to integrate the current with the previous data packets.""The product cannot be integrated with a popular coding IDE."

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"We would like to see it less as one big, massive product, but more based on smaller services that we can then roll out to consumers.""Initially, it was quite complex. For us, it was not only a matter of getting it installed, that was just a start. It was also trying to come up with a standard way of implementing it across the entire organization, which had been a challenge.""The main challenge lies in visibility and ease of use.""The decision making in their decision making feature is less good than other options.""Watson Studio would be improved with a clearer path for the deployment of docker images.""I want IBM's technical support team to provide more specific answers to queries.""It's sometimes easy to get lost given the number of images the solution opens up when you click on the mouse and the amount of different tabs.""Some of the solutions are really good solutions but they can be a little too costly for many."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Whenever we want to find the actual costing, we have to send an email to Databricks, so having the information available on the internet would be helpful."
  • "I do not exactly know the costs, but one of our clients pays between $100 USD and $200 USD monthly."
  • "Licensing on site I would counsel against, as on-site hardware issues tend to really delay and slow down delivery."
  • "We find Databricks to be very expensive, although this improved when we found out how to shut it down at night."
  • "The pricing depends on the usage itself."
  • "I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
  • "The price is okay. It's competitive."
  • "Databricks uses a price-per-use model, where you can use as much compute as you need."
  • More Databricks Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Watson Studio's pricing is reasonable for what you get."
  • "IBM Watson Studio is a reasonably priced product"
  • "IBM Watson Studio is an expensive solution."
  • "The pricing is generally reasonable and straightforward but can vary significantly depending on the specific workloads in use."
  • More IBM Watson Studio Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with… more »
    Top Answer:We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It… more »
    Top Answer:Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their… more »
    Top Answer:From an improvement perspective, I would say that if the deployment environment and IBM Watson Studio's environment are separated, then it would be good. I would like them to be one and offer users a… more »
    Ranking
    1st
    Views
    28,975
    Comparisons
    18,474
    Reviews
    47
    Average Words per Review
    441
    Rating
    8.3
    11th
    Views
    3,410
    Comparisons
    2,249
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    426
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
    Watson Studio, IBM Data Science Experience, Data Science Experience, DSx
    Learn More
    IBM
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    Overview

    Databricks is an industry-leading data analytics platform which is a one-stop product for all data requirements. Databricks is made by the creators of Apache Spark, Delta Lake, ML Flow, and Koalas. It builds on these technologies to deliver a true lakehouse data architecture, making it a robust platform that is reliable, scalable, and fast. Databricks speeds up innovations by synthesizing storage, engineering, business operations, security, and data science.

    Databricks is integrated with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. This enables users to easily manage a colossal amount of data and to continuously train and deploy machine learning models for AI applications. The platform handles all analytic deployments, ranging from ETL to models training and deployment.

    Databricks deciphers the complexities of processing data to empower data scientists, engineers, and analysts with a simple collaborative environment to run interactive and scheduled data analysis workloads. The program takes advantage of AI’s cost-effectivity, flexibility, and cloud storage.

    Databricks Key Features

    Some of Databricks key features include:

    • Cloud-native: Works well on any prominent cloud provider.
    • Data storage: Stores a broad range of data, including structured, unstructured, and streaming.
    • Self-governance: Built-in governance and security controls.
    • Flexibility: Flexible for small-scale jobs as well as running large-scale jobs like Big Data processing because it’s built from Spark and is specifically optimized for Cloud environments.
    • Data science tools: Production-ready data tooling, from engineering to BI, AI, and ML.
    • Familiar languages: While Databricks is Spark-based, it allows commonly used programming languages like R, SQL, Scala, and Python to be used.
    • Team sharing workspaces: Creates an environment that provides interactive workspaces for collaboration, which allow multiple members to collaborate for data model creation, machine learning, and data extraction.
    • Data source: Performs limitless Big Data analytics by connecting to Cloud providers AWS, Azure, and Google, as well as on-premises SQL servers, JSON and CSV.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Databricks stands out from its competitors for several reasons. Two striking features are its collaborative ability and its ability to streamline multiple programming languages.

    PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features. A Chief Research Officer in consumer goods writes, “We work with multiple people on notebooks and it enables us to work collaboratively in an easy way without having to worry about the infrastructure. I think the solution is very intuitive, very easy to use. And that's what you pay for.”

    A business intelligence coordinator in construction notes, “The capacity of use of the different types of coding is valuable. Databricks also has good performance because it is running in spark extra storage, meaning the performance and the capacity use different kinds of codes.”

    An Associate Manager who works in consultancy mentions, “The technology that allows us to write scripts within the solution is extremely beneficial. If I was, for example, able to script in SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python, I would be able to use my knowledge to make a script in this solution. It is very user-friendly and you can also process the records and validation point of view. The ability to migrate from one environment to another is useful.”

    IBM Watson Studio provides tools for data scientists, application developers and subject matter experts to collaboratively and easily work with data to build and train models at scale. It gives you the flexibility to build models where your data resides and deploy anywhere in a hybrid environment so you can operationalize data science faster.

    Sample Customers
    Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
    GroupM, Accenture, Fifth Third Bank
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Retailer9%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company22%
    Insurance Company11%
    Marketing Services Firm11%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Educational Organization8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise59%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise71%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business71%
    Large Enterprise29%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise66%
    Buyer's Guide
    Databricks vs. IBM Watson Studio
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks vs. IBM Watson Studio and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while IBM Watson Studio is ranked 11th in Data Science Platforms with 13 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while IBM Watson Studio is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Watson Studio writes "A highly robust and well-documented platform that simplifies the complex world of AI". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Dataiku Data Science Studio, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Dremio, whereas IBM Watson Studio is most compared with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI, Amazon Comprehend and IBM SPSS Modeler. See our Databricks vs. IBM Watson Studio report.

    See our list of best Data Science Platforms vendors.

    We monitor all Data Science Platforms reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.