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IBM Watson Studio VS Azure Synapse Analytics

Compare IBM Watson Studio VS Azure Synapse Analytics and see what are their differences

IBM Watson Studio logo IBM Watson Studio

Learn more about Watson Studio. Increase productivity by giving your team a single environment to work with the best of open source and IBM software, to build and deploy an AI solution.

Azure Synapse Analytics logo Azure Synapse Analytics

Get started with Azure SQL Data Warehouse for an enterprise-class SQL Server experience. Cloud data warehouses offer flexibility, scalability, and big data insights.
  • IBM Watson Studio Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Azure Synapse Analytics Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-23

IBM Watson Studio features and specs

  • Integration
    IBM Watson Studio integrates well with other IBM products and services, making it easier for businesses already in the IBM ecosystem to adopt.
  • Scalability
    Watson Studio's cloud-based environment offers scalable computational resources, which facilitates the handling of large volumes of data and complex models.
  • Collaboration
    The platform supports collaboration among data scientists, analysts, and developers, offering tools that streamline the process of working together on projects.
  • Automated Machine Learning (AutoML)
    Watson Studio provides AutoML functionalities, which simplify the process of model selection, training, and optimization, making advanced analytics accessible to users with varying levels of expertise.
  • Security
    IBM prioritizes data security and offers various features such as encryption, access controls, and compliance certifications to protect critical data.

Possible disadvantages of IBM Watson Studio

  • Cost
    Watson Studio's pricing can be relatively high, especially for small businesses or startups with limited budgets, potentially making it less accessible for all users.
  • Complexity
    The platform's advanced features and tools can present a steep learning curve for new users or those without a background in data science and machine learning.
  • Customization
    While Watson Studio offers robust tools, there may be limitations in customization options compared to some open-source alternatives that allow for more tailored solutions.
  • Dependency on IBM Cloud
    The platform is deeply integrated with IBM Cloud, which might not be ideal for organizations that prefer or already use other cloud services like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
  • Dataset Limits
    Some users report limitations in dataset sizes and difficulties in managing extremely large datasets, which could be a hindrance for certain advanced applications.

Azure Synapse Analytics features and specs

  • Integration
    Azure Synapse Analytics integrates with other Azure services like Azure Data Lake Storage, Power BI, and Azure Machine Learning, enabling seamless data movement and business intelligence processes.
  • Scalability
    It allows on-demand scalability, both horizontally and vertically, providing the flexibility to handle workloads of any size efficiently.
  • Unified Experience
    Offers a unified interface for data ingestion, preparation, management, and serving, simplifying data operations and reducing the need for multiple tools.
  • Advanced Security
    Includes robust security features like encryption, network protection, and advanced threat protection to ensure data security and compliance.
  • Serverless and Dedicated Options
    Provides both serverless and dedicated resource models, allowing businesses to optimize their costs by selecting the appropriate compute resources for their needs.

Possible disadvantages of Azure Synapse Analytics

  • Complexity
    The comprehensive range of features and tools can lead to a steep learning curve and complexity in setup and management for new users.
  • Cost Management
    Although flexibility is offered, managing and predicting costs can be challenging, especially in serverless scenarios where usage might fluctuate.
  • Resource Limitations
    Despite its scalability, there might be certain limitations in terms of data size or query complexity compared to some on-premises solutions.
  • Dependency on Internet Connectivity
    As a cloud-based solution, it requires stable and reliable internet connectivity, which may not be available in all regions or circumstances.
  • Integration Learning Curve
    While integration is a strength, mastering the integration with various Azure services and third-party tools can require substantial time and effort.

IBM Watson Studio videos

Product Review: IBM Watson Studio AutoAI

More videos:

  • Review - Overview of IBM Watson Studio
  • Review - Configuring IBM Watson Studio (Free) with 2.3 (coursera), April 30th '19 Release

Azure Synapse Analytics videos

Azure Synapse Analytics - Next-gen Azure SQL Data Warehouse

More videos:

  • Review - Is Azure SQL Data Warehouse the Right SQL Platform for You?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to IBM Watson Studio and Azure Synapse Analytics)
Data Science And Machine Learning
Office & Productivity
0 0%
100% 100
Machine Learning
100 100%
0% 0
Development
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare IBM Watson Studio and Azure Synapse Analytics

IBM Watson Studio Reviews

The 16 Best Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms for 2021
Description: IBM Watson Studio enables users to build, run, and manage AI models at scale across any cloud. The product is a part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data, the company’s main data and AI platform. The solution lets you automate AI lifecycle management, govern and secure open-source notebooks, prepare and build models visually, deploy and run models through one-click...

Azure Synapse Analytics Reviews

Data Warehouse Tools
Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly Azure Data Warehouse) is a cloud-native data warehouse integrated with other Azure services. It unifies data warehousing and big data analytics for comprehensive insights, offering visually interactive tools for user-friendly data exploration.
Source: peliqan.io
Top 6 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Azure Synapse analytics is scalable for large data tables based on its distributed computing. It relies on the MPP (mentioned in the beginning, revisit if you did not grasp it) to quickly run high volumes of complex queries across multiple nodes. With Synapse, there’s an extra emphasis on security and privacy.
Source: geekflare.com
Top 5 BigQuery Alternatives: A Challenge of Complexity
Azure SQL Data Warehouse, now subsumed by Azure Synapse Analytics, brings together the worlds of big data analytics and enterprise data warehousing. Over the years, Azure has made a name for enabling the seamless transfer of data between on-premise and cloud ecosystems.
Source: blog.panoply.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Azure Synapse Analytics seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 4 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

IBM Watson Studio mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of IBM Watson Studio yet. Tracking of IBM Watson Studio recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Azure Synapse Analytics mentions (4)

  • DbVisualizer 24.2: A Complete Review
    Azure Synapse Analytics: DbVisualizer now has extended support for dedicated and serverless SQL pools in Azure Synapse Analytics. That includes support for database-scoped credentials, external file formats and data sources, and external tables. For more information, see the Azure Synapse Dedicated and Azure Synapse Serverless pages on the official site. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Deploying a Data Warehouse with Pulumi and Amazon Redshift
    A data warehouse is a specialized database that's purpose built for gathering and analyzing data. Unlike general-purpose databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL, which are designed to meet the real-time performance and transactional needs of applications, a data warehouse is designed to collect and process the data produced by those applications, collectively and over time, to help you gain insight from it. Examples of... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • [WSJ] Facebook Parent Meta Expected to Post Slowest Revenue Growth Since IPO
    You don't run into these kinds of problems with other tools, like the ones I mentioned. I've never tried the Azure ones, but my gut says they may have some scaling issues (synapse analytics looks promising but I have no experience with it). Source: about 3 years ago
  • The Difference Between Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, and Data Lakehouses.
    Popular managed cloud data warehouse solutions include Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure SQL Database, and Amazon Redshift. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing IBM Watson Studio and Azure Synapse Analytics, you can also consider the following products

TensorFlow - TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning framework designed and published by Google. It tracks data flow graphs over time. Nodes in the data flow graphs represent machine learning algorithms. Read more about TensorFlow.

Databricks Unified Analytics Platform - One platform for accelerating data-driven innovation across data engineering, data science & business analytics

Alteryx - Alteryx provides an indispensable and easy-to-use analytics platform for enterprise companies making critical decisions that drive their business strategy and growth.

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

RapidMiner - RapidMiner is a software platform for data science teams that unites data prep, machine learning, and predictive model deployment.

Saturn Cloud - ML in the cloud. Loved by Data Scientists, Control for IT. Advance your business's ML capabilities through the entire experiment tracking lifecycle. Available on multiple clouds: AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI.