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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    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

    Microsoft Azure

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

    $29

    per month

    Pricing
    IBM Watson DiscoveryMicrosoft Azure
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Developer
    $29
    per month
    Standard
    $100
    per month
    Professional Direct
    $1000
    per month
    Basic
    Free
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM Watson DiscoveryMicrosoft Azure
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM Watson DiscoveryMicrosoft Azure
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    Chose Microsoft Azure
    Microsoft Azure seems to be the most cost-effective and the ability to buy credits for projects instead of a license makes it attractive.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    81%
    Would buy again
    21 Answers
    92%
    Would buy again
    34 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    74%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    26 Answers
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    35 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    18 Answers
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    24 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    23 Answers
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    34 Answers
    Features
    IBM Watson DiscoveryMicrosoft Azure
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of IBM Watson Discovery and Microsoft Azure
    Feature
    IBM Watson Discovery
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Azure
    8.4
    27 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings8.126 Ratings
    Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.725 Ratings
    Elastic load balancing00 Ratings8.624 Ratings
    Pre-configured templates00 Ratings8.225 Ratings
    Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.326 Ratings
    Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.424 Ratings
    Operating system support00 Ratings8.926 Ratings
    Security controls00 Ratings8.626 Ratings
    Automation00 Ratings8.224 Ratings
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    IBM Watson DiscoveryMicrosoft Azure
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    IBM Cloud Object Storage
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Elasticsearch
    Score8.5 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Amazon CloudSearch
    Score8.5 out of 10
    SAP on IBM Cloud
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM Watson DiscoveryMicrosoft Azure
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.3
    (26 ratings)
    8.7
    (96 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (17 ratings)
    Usability
    4.8
    (3 ratings)
    8.3
    (36 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.8
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM Watson DiscoveryMicrosoft Azure
    Likelihood to Recommend
    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
    Microsoft
    Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
    Read full review
    Pros
    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
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
    • You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
    • The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
    • The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    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
    Microsoft
    • The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
    • The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
    • Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
    Read full review
    Usability
    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
    Microsoft
    As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    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
    Microsoft
    As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
    • DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
    • Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots