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Exalead vs IBM Watson Discovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Exalead
Ranking in Indexing and Search
10th
Average Rating
6.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Watson Discovery
Ranking in Indexing and Search
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Exalead is 3.5%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson Discovery is 4.8%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer916404 - PeerSpot reviewer
The indexing feature is handy but the user interface and support can be better
I am not sure if I will recommend this solution to others. There should definitely be an improvement in the user interface. It should be more friendly and customize until it's perfect. On a scale from 1 to 10, I rate this solution a six, because there is room for improvement.
Geraldo Lima - PeerSpot reviewer
Stable, scalable, and has testing and conversational AI features
The total time it takes to deploy IBM Watson Discovery depends on the documents you'll be working with. For example, I was in a situation where I was working with some painting files and folders for a painting store. The store had PDF documents, but the information was mixed up, so I had to treat the documents on IBM Watson Discovery, and discovering and understanding each PDF file took longer. The process is more straightforward for plain documents, and you have to work with questions that will help IBM Watson Discovery understand the documents. The time to deploy the product depends on the quantity and type of documents you'll be working with.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I find the indexing feature the most valuable."
"Language support and the ability to build a natural language of speech recognition are the most valuable features."
"Being able to have some rules to extract the entities is valuable. The capability to crawl external sites and internal documents, and then draw internal information with external contents is also valuable."
"The most valuable features of IBM Watson Discovery are the integration with the rest of the Watson Suite and the Watson Assistant capability. If you use Watson Assistant, the ability for it to be able to determine the accuracy of your voice models and your voice response systems is a benefit."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Watson Discovery is testing, mainly because the product applies conversational AI, which means I can ask questions to get the information I want from a specific test area."
 

Cons

"The scalability of the solution is a problem."
"The support from IBM Watson Discovery is good but could improve to make it great."
"It needs a lot of memory. Our index is very big. It is around 100 gigabytes. So, we need more than 100 gigabytes of memory to use Watson."
"There are probably other chatbots out there that were built for specific use cases and are easier to deploy than this. Having said that, Watson is way more flexible. While it may require a greater amount of effort, it is not substantially more than some of the other ones that are kind of prebuilt for a specific use case. It would be good to have more prebuilt and specific use cases and specific business models. It can have better phone integration, even though I think that it is actually becoming less of an issue. Most people are online nowadays."
"The pricing is an area for improvement in IBM Watson Discovery because the customer initially used the free version. Still, when he needed more questions and documents, he had to move to a different version, which was paid and cost $500 per month. That change in pricing made my company lose many customers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Cost-wise, it is very reasonable because it is cloud-based."
"IBM Watson Discovery is an expensive product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
36%
Government
16%
University
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Prudential, Bradesco, Woodside
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic, Luigi's Box, OpenText and others in Indexing and Search. Updated: April 2025.
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