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Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data vs. IBM watsonx.ai

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AAstra DB is a vector database for developers. In 2025 Datastax, the developer and supporter of Astra DB, was acquired. Astra DB is now available as a component of the IBM watsonx.data Multicloud offering.N/A

    IBM watsonx.ai

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AWatsonx.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
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataIBM watsonx.ai
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataIBM watsonx.ai
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    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
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataIBM watsonx.ai
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    46 Answers
    98%
    Would buy again
    45 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    45 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    36 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    45 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    46 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    40 Answers
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    30 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    44 Answers
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    33 Answers
    Features
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataIBM watsonx.ai
    Vector Database
    Comparison of Vector Database features of Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data and IBM watsonx.ai
    Feature
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    8.0
    12 Ratings
    1% above category average
    IBM watsonx.ai
    -
    Ratings
    Vector Data Connection8.212 Ratings00 Ratings
    Vector Data Editing8.56 Ratings00 Ratings
    Attribute Management7.710 Ratings00 Ratings
    Geospatial Analysis8.26 Ratings00 Ratings
    Geometric Transformations8.06 Ratings00 Ratings
    Vector Data Visualization8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
    Coordinate Reference System Management:7.96 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Import/Export8.011 Ratings00 Ratings
    Symbolization and Styling8.35 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Sharing and Collaboration7.69 Ratings00 Ratings
    AI Development
    Comparison of AI Development features of Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data and IBM watsonx.ai
    Feature
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    -
    Ratings
    IBM watsonx.ai
    6.6
    2 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Machine learning frameworks00 Ratings6.73 Ratings
    Data management00 Ratings6.43 Ratings
    Data monitoring and version control00 Ratings5.83 Ratings
    Automated model training00 Ratings6.43 Ratings
    Managed scaling00 Ratings7.03 Ratings
    Model deployment00 Ratings6.43 Ratings
    Security and compliance00 Ratings7.63 Ratings
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    User Ratings
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataIBM watsonx.ai
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (46 ratings)
    9.2
    (36 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    7.8
    (4 ratings)
    7.7
    (6 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.9
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (44 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataIBM watsonx.ai
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    We've been super happy with Astra DB. It's been extremely well-suited for our vector search needs as described in previous responses. With Astra DB’s high-performance vector search, Maester’s AI dynamically optimizes responses in real-time, adapting to new user interactions without requiring costly retraining cycles.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
    • Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
    • A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • Need better fine-grained Security options.
    • The support team sometimes requires the escalate button pressed on tickets, to get timely responses. I will say, once the ticket is escalated, action is taken.
    • They require better documentation on the migration of data. The three primary methods for migrating large data volumes are bulk, Cassandra Data Migrator, and ZDM (Zero Downtime Migration Utility). Over time I have become very familiar will all three of these methods; however, through working with the Services team and the support team, it seemed like we were breaking new ground. I feel if the utilities were better documented and included some examples and/or use cases from large data migrations; this process would have been easier. One lesson learned is you likely need to migrate your application servers to the same cloud provider you host Astra on; otherwise, the latency is too large for latency-sensitive applications.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    Graph, search, analytics, administration, developer tooling, and monitoring are all incorporated into a single platform by Astra DB. Mongo Db is a self-managed infrastructure. Astra DB has Wide column store and Mongo DB has Document store. The best thing is that Astra DB operates on Java while Mongo DB operates on C++
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Discontinued Products
    We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.
    Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • Better uptime due to the managed service having no outages
    • Less technical debt because we don't need to worry about upgrading our Cassandra clusters
    • Lower cost on infrastructure as a whole
    • Quick and easy to integrate vector search into our tech stack
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.