Databricks Data Intelligence Platform vs. IBM watsonx.ai

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Databricks offers the Databricks Lakehouse Platform (formerly the Unified Analytics Platform), a data science platform and Apache Spark cluster manager. The Databricks Unified Data Service provides a platform for data pipelines, data lakes, and data platforms.
$0.07
Per DBU
IBM watsonx.ai
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Watsonx.ai is part of the IBM watsonx platform that brings together new generative AI capabilities, powered by foundation models, and traditional machine learning into a studio spanning the AI lifecycle. Watsonx.ai can be used to train, validate, tune, and deploy generative AI, foundation models, and machine learning capabilities, and build AI applications with less time and data.
$0
Pricing
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM watsonx.ai
Editions & Modules
Standard
$0.07
Per DBU
Premium
$0.10
Per DBU
Enterprise
$0.13
Per DBU
Free Trial
$0
ML functionality (20 CUH limit /month); Inferencing (50,000 tokens / month)
Standard
$1,050
Monthly tier fee; additional usage based fees
Essentials
Contact Sales
Usage based fees
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM watsonx.ai
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPricing for watsonx.ai includes: model inference per 1000 tokens and ML tools and ML runtimes based on capacity unit hours.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM watsonx.ai
Features
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM watsonx.ai
AI Development
Comparison of AI Development features of Product A and Product B
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
-
Ratings
IBM watsonx.ai
5.5
1 Ratings
1% above category average
Machine learning frameworks00 Ratings5.51 Ratings
Data management00 Ratings4.51 Ratings
Data monitoring and version control00 Ratings4.51 Ratings
Automated model training00 Ratings4.51 Ratings
Managed scaling00 Ratings6.41 Ratings
Model deployment00 Ratings6.41 Ratings
Security and compliance00 Ratings6.41 Ratings
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Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM watsonx.ai
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User Ratings
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM watsonx.ai
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(18 ratings)
9.1
(33 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(1 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(4 ratings)
7.8
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM watsonx.ai
Likelihood to Recommend
Databricks
Medium to Large data throughput shops will benefit the most from Databricks Spark processing. Smaller use cases may find the barrier to entry a bit too high for casual use cases. Some of the overhead to kicking off a Spark compute job can actually lead to your workloads taking longer, but past a certain point the performance returns cannot be beat.
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IBM
I have built a code accelerator tool for one of the IBM product implementation. Although there was a heavy lifting at the start to train the model on specifics of the packaged solution library and ways of working; the efficacy of the model is astounding. Having said that, watsonx.ai is very well suited for customer service automation, healthcare data analytics, financial fraud detection, and sentiment analysis kind of projects. The Watsonx.ai look and feel is little confusing but I understand over a period of time , it will improve dramatically as well. I do feel that Watsonx.ai has certain limitations from cross-platform deployment flexibility. If an organization is deeply invested in a multi-cloud environment, Watson's integration on other cloud platforms may not be seamless comported to other AI platforms.
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Pros
Databricks
  • Process raw data in One Lake (S3) env to relational tables and views
  • Share notebooks with our business analysts so that they can use the queries and generate value out of the data
  • Try out PySpark and Spark SQL queries on raw data before using them in our Spark jobs
  • Modern day ETL operations made easy using Databricks. Provide access mechanism for different set of customers
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IBM
  • It allows specialists to apply several base models for specific subtasks in the field of NLP.
  • Gives the availability of many models developed for AI enhancement for different solutions.
  • Has incorporated functionality for data governance and security to support access to AI tools by multiple users.
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Cons
Databricks
  • Connect my local code in Visual code to my Databricks Lakehouse Platform cluster so I can run the code on the cluster. The old databricks-connect approach has many bugs and is hard to set up. The new Databricks Lakehouse Platform extension on Visual Code, doesn't allow the developers to debug their code line by line (only we can run the code).
  • Maybe have a specific Databricks Lakehouse Platform IDE that can be used by Databricks Lakehouse Platform users to develop locally.
  • Visualization in MLFLOW experiment can be enhanced
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IBM
  • IBM watsonx.ai is expensive than other platforms.
  • Limited integraions though it has many but still some tools integrations not there for medical usecase
  • Its little difficult to learn as right now not many open reseouces
  • Community is not that strong to get any answer
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Likelihood to Renew
Databricks
No answers on this topic
IBM
I still don't have enough experience, but i have seen a lot of demos and i have made some real world scenarios and so far so long every thing looks fine. I was at IBM Think 2025 and IBM TechXchange 2025 and the labs were really usefull and simple to understand.
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Usability
Databricks
Because it is an amazing platform for designing experiments and delivering a deep dive analysis that requires execution of highly complex queries, as well as it allows to share the information and insights across the company with their shared workspaces, while keeping it secured.

in terms of graph generation and interaction it could improve their UI and UX
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IBM
I needed some time to understand the different parts of the web UI. It was slightly overwhelming in the beginning. However, after some time, it made sense, and I like the UI now. In terms of functionality, there are many useful features that make your life easy, like jumping to a section and giving me a deployment space to deploy my models easily.
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Support Rating
Databricks
One of the best customer and technology support that I have ever experienced in my career. You pay for what you get and you get the Rolls Royce. It reminds me of the customer support of SAS in the 2000s when the tools were reaching some limits and their engineer wanted to know more about what we were doing, long before "data science" was even a name. Databricks truly embraces the partnership with their customer and help them on any given challenge.
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IBM
I still don't have enough experience, but i have seen a lot of demos and i have made some real world scenarios and so far so long every thing looks fine. I was at IBM Think 2025 and IBM TechXchange 2025 and the labs were really usefull and simple to understand.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Databricks
The most important differentiating factor for Databricks Lakehouse Platform from these other platforms is support for ACID transactions and the time travel feature. Also, native integration with managed MLflow is a plus. EMR, Cloudera, and Hortonworks are not as optimized when it comes to Spark Job Execution. Other platforms need to be self-managed, which is another huge hassle.
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IBM
IBM watsonx.ai has been far superior to that of Chat GPT AI. the UI elements prompt responses and overall execution of the AI was much better and more accurate compared to the competition. I can not recommend using this platform enough. Great job IBM. I hope the team behind this project continues to grow and prosper.
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Scalability
Databricks
No answers on this topic
IBM
I still don't have enough experience, but i have seen a lot of demos and i have made some real world scenarios and so far so long every thing looks fine. I was at IBM Think 2025 and IBM TechXchange 2025 and the labs were really usefull and simple to understand.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Databricks
  • The ability to spin up a BIG Data platform with little infrastructure overhead allows us to focus on business value not admin
  • DB has the ability to terminate/time out instances which helps manage cost.
  • The ability to quickly access typical hard to build data scenarios easily is a strength.
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IBM
  • Time saving to set up the infrastructure - without watsonx.ai we would have had to set up everything individually
  • The first point translates directly into cost savings
  • The compliance aspect was a game changer for us and provided us with the confidence to focus all our efforts only on IBM watsonx.ai
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ScreenShots

IBM watsonx.ai Screenshots

Screenshot of the foundation models available in watsonx.ai. Clients have access to IBM selected open source models from Hugging Face, as well as other third-party models, and a family of IBM-developed foundation models of different sizes and architectures.Screenshot of the Prompt Lab in watsonx.ai, where AI builders can work with foundation models and build prompts using prompt engineering techniques in watsonx.ai to support a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) type tasks.Screenshot of the Tuning Studio in watsonx.ai, where AI builders can tune foundation models with labeled data for better performance and accuracy.Screenshot of the data science toolkit in watsonx.ai where AI builders can build machine learning models automatically with model training, development, visual modeling, and synthetic data generation.