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Azure Machine Learning vs. Elasticsearch vs. IBM Watson Discovery

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Azure Machine Learning

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft's Azure Machine Learning is and end-to-end data science and analytics solution that helps professional data scientists to prepare data, develop experiments, and deploy models in the cloud. It replaces the Azure Machine Learning Workbench.

    $0

    per month

    Elasticsearch

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AElasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.

    $16

    per month

    IBM Watson Discovery

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AIBM offers Watson Discovery, a natural language processing (NLP) application with options to measure sentiment, detect entities, semantic roles, and other concepts.N/A
    Pricing
    Azure Machine LearningElasticsearchIBM Watson Discovery
    Editions & Modules
    Studio Pricing - Free
    $0.00
    per month
    Production Web API - Dev/Test
    $0.00
    per month
    Studio Pricing - Standard
    $9.99
    per ML studio workspace/per month
    Production Web API - Standard S1
    $100.13
    per month
    Production Web API - Standard S2
    $1000.06
    per month
    Production Web API - Standard S3
    $9999.98
    per month
    Standard
    $16.00
    per month
    Gold
    $19.00
    per month
    Platinum
    $22.00
    per month
    Enterprise
    Contact Sales
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Azure Machine LearningElasticsearchIBM Watson Discovery
    Free Trial
    NoNoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details———
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Azure Machine LearningElasticsearchIBM Watson Discovery
    Considered Multiple Products
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Elastic
    No answer on this topic
    IBM
    Chose IBM Watson Discovery
    To be entirely honest, in my review, I have used Elasticsearch in the past, but not in a way similar to that I am using Discovery, and I cannot honestly say that I can compare the two because I used Elasticsearch in infrastructure management and monitoring setup while using the …
    Incentivized
    Chose IBM Watson Discovery
    IBM Watson Discovery resulted more robust and performant, also the insights were much more interesting than just an AI search from Microsoft or a prompt for ChatGPT.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    82%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    81%
    Would buy again
    21 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    16 Answers
    74%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    17 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    26 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    13 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    18 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    23 Answers
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    Medium-sized Companies
    Google Cloud AI
    Score8.7 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    Azure Machine LearningElasticsearchIBM Watson Discovery
    Likelihood to Recommend
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    9.0
    (48 ratings)
    8.3
    (26 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    4.8
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.9
    (2 ratings)
    7.8
    (9 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Azure Machine LearningElasticsearchIBM Watson Discovery
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    I would highly recommend Azure machine learning design for those with less access to high-end computing infrastructure, as using Azure saves a lot of time, money, and effort by providing a hustle-free platform that is easy to use and train your employees on. On the other hand, if you are looking for complete control of the machine learning model you create and would like to add detailed functionalities and try different algorithms, then Azure is less suitable here as it’s very high level.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Elastic
    Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Overall, IBM Watson Discovery is an amazing technology that we use with our clients to address various business problems, but the biggest challenge has always been about ingesting, analyzing, enriching, and searching huge collections of documents and allowing our end users and SMEs to be able to search for what they need to reduce the time and efforts spent daily on a manual search through various collections of documents. We have successfully managed to reduce manual work by over 80%, and now our SMEs are being used for the skills they have to gather insights rather than do manual work.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Microsoft
    • Easy to create the experiment.
    • Easy to adopt the best algorithm.
    • Efficient way to deploy the model as a web service.
    • Centralized platform for the life cycle of machine learning goal.
    Read full review
    Elastic
    • As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
    • Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
    • Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • It is an excellently fast platform with documents and the answers to queries.
    • With automation learning beneficial as it saves time.
    • When searching for a document, everything stays located and easy to find.
    • Acceptance of various documents.
    • It has a quite comfortable Technical support, always available when required.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Microsoft
    • Few models: Even though it has a lot of Machine Learning models, it is quite limited when compared to R. Most Data Scientists still use and prefer R, so the newest models tend to release as R libraries. With Azure ML, we need to wait for Microsoft to evaluate and decide if including a new model is a good idea or not
    • Tableau interface: last time I checked there was no easy way to connect with Tableau.
    • Cloud based: You always need a good internet connection to use it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Elastic
    • Joining data requires duplicate de-normalized documents that make parent child relationships. It is hard and requires a lot of synchronizations
    • Tracking errors in the data in the logs can be hard, and sometimes recurring errors blow up the error logs
    • Schema changes require complete reindexing of an index
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • I believe AI should be more flexible about providing data. However, it's understandable that you need to provide the details you need in a more specific and detailed way.
    • The interface could use more tweaking. Being new to the program, it was kind of hard to navigate.
    • Luckily, there was a customized feature of the dashboard that I could set up, and having something that you know where you are placed always feels familiar and comfortable.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Elastic
    We're pretty heavily invested in ElasticSearch at this point, and there aren't any obvious negatives that would make us reconsider this decision.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Microsoft
    Good UX/UI and overall good usability, but it takes a while to get used to the product & platform. The whole design seems fragmented with little in terms of integration with project management tools such as JIRA, or wireframing. Overall it feels like an unfinished product that's meant for teaching more than for production.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Elastic
    To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    IBM Watson Discovery has the best user capabilities and easily transform business decision-making portfolio. The automation system saves time used in data analysis as opposed to manual research that consumes a lot of time. The visualization across the dashboard enables my team to interpret complex data and use it to make reliable marketing decisions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    I'm satisfied with the Azure Machine Learning Studio- it fulfilled my goal in a single channel. Even haven't worr[ied] about the maintenance or any fault tolerance. This provide[s] the user interactive UI to grab the features easily. [Their] support teams also very help[ful], they stand with us at any time.
    Read full review
    Elastic
    We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Similar to all IBM Watson and Salesforce product solutions, the overall support would be a 10/10. Their provided FAQ's help with frequently experienced issues and if still unable to figure something out, their customer service representatives are always super responsive. With instant chat functions available, it is easy to ask a quick question rather than sitting on hold.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Microsoft
    Not sure
    Read full review
    Elastic
    Do not mix data and master roles. Dedicate at least 3 nodes just for Master
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    It is easier to learn, it has a very cost effective license for use, it has native build and created for Azure cloud services, and that makes it perfect when compared against the alternatives. As a Microsoft tool, it has been built to contain many visual features and improved usability even for non-specialist users.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Elastic
    As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Discovery differs from its competitors due to the better ease of implementation and the high level of natural language recognition, it is equal in integration resources such as API and workflow or process pipeline, but it loses in the price for a high volume of documents and/or research. If you own or plan to use other services from the IBM Watson family, there is no doubt that Watson discovery is your best option. Another important point is if you plan to use a cloud or on-premise service (local server or private cloud).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • Reduce energy consumption caused by GPUs.
    • Saves on recycling and transporting costs and maintenance caused by buying high-end equipment.
    • Improve productivity as building products using Azure is easier than building everything up from scratch (e.g., machine learning and AI applications).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Elastic
    • We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
    • While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
    • We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • We find its Enterprise plan expensive for a country of LATAM. For US or Europe based businesses, looks great.
    • A Big Data and massive queries based company would find the service expensive. Maybe a flat price plan would be helpful.
    • Have you thought in making a cheaper plan where you take the learning from your customer's data to enrich your AI tool?
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots