Watson Studio service plans

The plan you choose for Watson Studio affects the features and capabilities that you can use.

When you provision or upgrade Watson Studio, you can choose between a Lite and a Professional plan.

See the plan pages in IBM Cloud catalog: Watson Studio for pricing and feature information.

IBM Cloud account owners can choose between the Lite (unpaid) and Professional (paid) plan.

Under the Professional plan, you can provision multiple Watson Studio instances in an IBM Cloud account. The Professional plan allows unlimited users and charges for compute usage which is measured in capacity unit hours (CUH). The Professional plan is the only paid plan option.

Under the Lite plan, you can provision one Watson Studio instance per IBM Cloud account. The Lite plan allows only one user and limits the CUH to 10 hours per month. Collaborators in your projects must have their own Watson Studio Lite plans.

Both Watson Studio plans contain these features without additional services:

• Watson services APIs to run in notebooks.
• Jupyter notebooks to analyze data with Python or R code.
• RStudio to analyze data with R code.
• SPSS Modeler to develop predictive models on a graphical canvas.
• Data Refinery to shape and cleanse data.
• Orchestration Pipelines to orchestrate an end-to-end flow of assets from creation through deployment.
• Small runtime environments as compute resources for analytical tools.
• Spark runtime environments. The maximum number of Spark executors that can be used is restricted by the service plan.
• Environments with the Watson Natural Language Processing library with pre-trained models for language processing tasks that you can run on unstructured data.
• Environments with Decision Optimization libraries to model and solve decision optimization problems that exceed the complexity that is supported by the Community Edition of the libraries in the other default Python environments.
• Connectors to data sources.
• Collaboration in projects and deployment spaces.
• Resource hub for resources to help you learn and samples that you can use.

Both Watson Studio plans contain these features that also require the Watson Machine Learning service:

• Machine learning models to build analytical models.
• AutoAI to automatically create a set of model candidates.
• Federated learning to collaboratively train a model with multiple remote parties without sharing data.
• Decision Optimization to build models that solve business problems.
• Synthetic Data Generator to generate synthetic tabular data.

The Watson Studio Professional plan includes features that are not available in the Lite plan, including the following:

• Encrypt your IBM Cloud Object Storage instance with your own key.
• Large runtime environments with 8 or more vCPUs as compute resources for analytical tools.
• GPU environments for running notebooks.
• Export projects.

The Professional plan charges for compute usage consumed per month. Compute usage is measured in capacity unit hours (CUH). For details on computing resource allocation and consumption, see Runtime usage.