Azure AI Search vs. Vertex AI

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure AI Search
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Vertex AI
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Vertex AI on Google Cloud is an MLOps solution, used to build, deploy, and scale machine learning (ML) models with fully managed ML tools for any use case.
$0
Starting at
Pricing
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0.101
Per Hour
Standard S1
$0.336
Per Hour
Standard S2
$1.344
Per Hour
Standard S3
$2.688
Per Hour
Imagen model for image generation
$0.0001
Starting at
Text, chat, and code generation
$0.0001
per 1,000 characters
Text data upload, training, deployment, prediction
$0.05
per hour
Video data training and prediction
$0.462
per node hour
Image data training, deployment, and prediction
$1.375
per node hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsPricing is based on the Vertex AI tools and services, storage, compute, and Google Cloud resources used.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Best Alternatives
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Small Businesses
Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 7.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.6 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 7.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.6 out of 10
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 8.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(3 ratings)
7.8
(13 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(10 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.2
(10 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
It's very useful when used with large file systems, once the models index the files good enough, the suggestions are very impressive and produce grounded answers. Since it can natively work with blob storage the requirement for pre-processing the data is eliminated i.e. the data can be searched in its raw form, this makes Azure AI Search a very powerful tool when used with Azure Stack.
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Google
Vertex AI seems to be a lot more accurate with image editing versus other competitors (including free one). We do a lot of image creation, especially of dogs in very certain scenarios. We use Adobe Stock to get us started, but many times we need some very specific edits done to the image. We've found Vertex can produce those with a lot more precision than other AI image generators.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Incredibly robust back-end infrastructure.
  • Streamlined integration into Microsoft's Azure Cloud.
  • From a user standpoint, it lets the customer easily access their data and provide useful search tips.
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Google
  • Vertex AI comes with support for LOTs of LLMs out of the box
  • MLOps tools are available that help to standardize operational aspects
  • Document AI is an out of the box feature that works just perfectly for our use cases of automating lots to tedious data extraction tasks from images as well as papers
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Cons
Microsoft
  • Like virtually all Azure services, it has first-class treatment for .Net as the developer platform of choice, but largely ignores other options. While there is a first-party Python SDK, there are only community packages for other languages like Ruby and Node. Might be a game of roulette for those to be kept up-to-date. This might make it a non-starter for some teams that don't want to do the work to integrate with the REST API directly.
  • In my opinion, partitions inside of Azure Search don't count as data segregation for customers in a multi-tenant app, so any application where you have many customers with high-security concerns, Azure Search is probably a non-starter.
  • To elaborate on the multi-tenant issue: Azure Search's approach to pricing is pretty steep. While there is a free tier for small applications (50MB of content or less) the first paid tier is about 14x more expensive than the first SQL Database tier that supports full-text search. For many applications, it makes a lot more economic sense to just run some LIKE or CONTAINS queries on columns in a table rather than going with Azure Search.
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Google
  • Customization of AutoML models - A must needed capability to be able to tweak hyperparameters and also working with different models
  • Model Explainability -Providing more comprehensive explanations about how models are utilizing features could be very beneficial
  • Model versioning and experiments tracking - Enhancing the versioning capability could be good for end users
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Usability
Microsoft
I give 10 rating because by using this endpoint and api key only we able to build that chatbot product in a timeline given by our client and also creating the endpoint and keys from the portal is also very easy for Azure AI Search and it doesn't take much time and also scalability is good.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Performance
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Google
It's not always instant, but understandable when it's under heavy load. It's not impressive nor disappointing, just what is expected. But when calling this platform through API's for it to do the actions requested there is minimal delay and wait time. It feels very responsive and quick when integrating it with a call center chat platform for example.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
It is good for me, and I want to rate this product 9/10. I hope they continue to improve and also offer a free plan with more benefits to learn Azure AI Search.
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Google
Vertex AI is much more accessible to non-developers than IBM's product. Moreover, Vertex AI integrates well with other Google products, enhancing its capabilities. A big plus is its integration with cloud storage, that allows for better management and access of data. In all honesty, it wasn't much of a difficult choice to choose Vertex AI.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • When integrated with our existing file system the Azure AI Search helped users tremendously by reducing search times and improve efficacy of intended result.
  • Since Azure AI Search is a PaaS solution, we had very short ideation to go-live timespan, which ended up reflecting in our product performance.
  • A rare but not negligible occurrence was correctness of search being questionable when new data was added to the system. The search returns false positive results.
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Google
  • It is pay as you go model so it'll save more cost of your org. In our case previously we used to incurred 1-2L/Month now we are reduced it to 80k-1L.
  • It'll help you save your model training & model selection time as it provides pre-trained models in autoML.
  • It'll help you in terms of Security wherein we can use row level security access to authorized persons.
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ScreenShots

Vertex AI Screenshots

Screenshot of an introduction to generative AI on Vertex AI - Vertex AI Studio offers a Google Cloud console tool for rapidly prototyping and testing generative AI models.Screenshot of gen AI for summarization, classification, and extraction - Text prompts can be created to handle any number of tasks with Vertex AI’s generative AI support. Some of the most common tasks are classification, summarization, and extraction. Vertex AI’s PaLM API for text can be used to design prompts with flexibility in terms of their structure and format.Screenshot of Custom ML training overview and documentation - An overview of the custom training workflow in Vertex AI, the benefits of custom training, and the various training options that are available. This page also details every step involved in the ML training workflow from preparing data to predictions.Screenshot of ML model training and creation -  A guide that shows how Vertex AI’s AutoML is used to create and train custom machine learning models with minimal effort and machine learning expertise.Screenshot of deployment for batch or online predictions - When using a model to solve a real-world problem, the Vertex AI prediction service can be used for batch and online predictions.