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Comparison of IBM watsonx as a Service and Cloud Pak for Data as a Service

Comparison of IBM watsonx as a Service and Cloud Pak for Data as a Service

IBM watsonx as a Service and Cloud Pak for Data as a Service have the same common core functionality and are compatible in many ways. The watsonx platform provides a subset of the tools and services that are provided by Cloud Pak for Data as a Service. However, watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance on watsonx provide more functionality than the same set of tools on Cloud Pak for Data as a Service.

Common core functionality

The common core functionality is the same on watsonx and Cloud Pak for Data as a Service:

  • Security, compliance, and isolation
  • Compute resources for running workloads
  • Global search for assets across the platform
  • The Platform assets catalog for sharing connections across the platform
  • Role-based user management within workspaces
  • A services catalog for adding services
  • View compute usage from the Administration menu
  • Connections to remote data sources
  • Connection credentials that are personal or shared
  • Sample assets and projects

If you are signed up for both watsonx and Cloud Pak for Data as a Service, you can switch between platforms. See Switching your platform.

Services on each platform

Both platforms provide services for data science and MLOps and AI governance use cases:

  • Watson Studio
  • Watson Machine Learning
  • watsonx.governance

However, the services for watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance on the watsonx platform include features for working with foundation models and generative AI that are not included in these services on Cloud Pak for Data as a Service.

Cloud Pak for Data as a Service also provides services for these use cases:

  • Data integration
  • Data governance

See IBM Cloud services in the Cloud Pak for Data as a Service services catalog.

Data science and AI tools

Both platforms provide a common set of data science and AI tools. However, on watsonx, you can also perform foundation model inferencing with the Prompt Lab tool or with a Python library in notebooks. Foundation model inferencing and the Prompt Lab tool are not available on Cloud Pak for Data as a Service.

The following table shows which data science and AI tools are available on each platform.

Tools on watsonx and Cloud Pak for Data
Tool On watsonx
as a Service?
On Cloud Pak for Data
as a Service?
Prompt Lab No
Synthetic Data Generator No
Tuning Studio No
Data Refinery
Visualizations
Jupyter notebooks
Federated learning
RStudio IDE
SPSS Modeler
Decision Optimization
AutoAI tool
Orchestration Pipelines

If you are signed up for Cloud Pak for Data as a Service, you can access watsonx and you can move your projects and deployment spaces that meet the requirements from one platform to the other. See Switching the platform for a project and Switching the platform for a deployment space.

AI governance tools

Both platforms contain the same AI use case inventory and evaluation tools. However, on watsonx, you can track and evaluate generative AI assets and dimensions.See Comparison of governance solutions.

Learn more

Parent topic: Overview of watsonx

Generative AI search and answer
These answers are generated by a large language model in watsonx.ai based on content from the product documentation. Learn more