IBM Watson Discovery vs. TensorFlow

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Watson Discovery
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
IBM offers Watson Discovery, a natural language processing (NLP) application with options to measure sentiment, detect entities, semantic roles, and other concepts.N/A
TensorFlow
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. It was originally developed by Google.N/A
Pricing
IBM Watson DiscoveryTensorFlow
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Watson DiscoveryTensorFlow
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Watson DiscoveryTensorFlow
Best Alternatives
IBM Watson DiscoveryTensorFlow
Small Businesses
Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.5 out of 10
Posit
Posit
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.5 out of 10
Posit
Posit
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Watson DiscoveryTensorFlow
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(26 ratings)
6.0
(15 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(2 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Watson DiscoveryTensorFlow
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.
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Open Source
TensorFlow is great for most deep learning purposes. This is especially true in two domains: 1. Computer vision: image classification, object detection and image generation via generative adversarial networks 2. Natural language processing: text classification and generation. The good community support often means that a lot of off-the-shelf models can be used to prove a concept or test an idea quickly. That, and Google's promotion of Colab means that ideas can be shared quite freely. Training, visualizing and debugging models is very easy in TensorFlow, compared to other platforms (especially the good old Caffe days). In terms of productionizing, it's a bit of a mixed bag. In our case, most of our feature building is performed via Apache Spark. This means having to convert Parquet (columnar optimized) files to a TensorFlow friendly format i.e., protobufs. The lack of good JVM bindings mean that our projects end up being a mix of Python and Scala. This makes it hard to reuse some of the tooling and support we wrote in Scala. This is where MXNet shines better (though its Scala API could do with more work).
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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.
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Open Source
  • A vast library of functions for all kinds of tasks - Text, Images, Tabular, Video etc.
  • Amazing community helps developers obtain knowledge faster and get unblocked in this active development space.
  • Integration of high-level libraries like Keras and Estimators make it really simple for a beginner to get started with neural network based models.
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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.
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Open Source
  • RNNs are still a bit lacking, compared to Theano.
  • Cannot handle sequence inputs
  • Theano is perhaps a bit faster and eats up less memory than TensorFlow on a given GPU, perhaps due to element-wise ops. Tensorflow wins for multi-GPU and “compilation” time.
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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.
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Open Source
Support of multiple components and ease of development.
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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.
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Open Source
Community support for TensorFlow is great. There's a huge community that truly loves the platform and there are many examples of development in TensorFlow. Often, when a new good technique is published, there will be a TensorFlow implementation not long after. This makes it quick to ally the latest techniques from academia straight to production-grade systems. Tooling around TensorFlow is also good. TensorBoard has been such a useful tool, I can't imagine how hard it would be to debug a deep neural network gone wrong without TensorBoard.
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Implementation Rating
IBM
No answers on this topic
Open Source
Use of cloud for better execution power is recommended.
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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).
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Open Source
Keras is built on top of TensorFlow, but it is much simpler to use and more Python style friendly, so if you don't want to focus on too many details or control and not focus on some advanced features, Keras is one of the best options, but as far as if you want to dig into more, for sure TensorFlow is the right choice
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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?
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Open Source
  • Learning is s bit difficult takes lot of time.
  • Developing or implementing the whole neural network is time consuming with this, as you have to write everything.
  • Once you have learned this, it make your job very easy of getting the good result.
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ScreenShots