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IBM Watson Discovery vs Microsoft FAST comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Watson Discovery
Ranking in Indexing and Search
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft FAST
Ranking in Indexing and Search
5th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of IBM Watson Discovery is 3.7%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft FAST is 6.0%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search
 

Featured Reviews

Geraldo Lima - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 12, 2023
Stable, scalable, and has testing and conversational AI features
The total time it takes to deploy IBM Watson Discovery depends on the documents you'll be working with. For example, I was in a situation where I was working with some painting files and folders for a painting store. The store had PDF documents, but the information was mixed up, so I had to treat the documents on IBM Watson Discovery, and discovering and understanding each PDF file took longer. The process is more straightforward for plain documents, and you have to work with questions that will help IBM Watson Discovery understand the documents. The time to deploy the product depends on the quantity and type of documents you'll be working with.
JJ
Dec 6, 2020
Robust solution with good value
Microsoft FAST is quite robust. Our clients are quite happy with it. For other users who already have a solution in place, we recommend Microsoft FAST because it is more compatible and you can organize the solution with Microsoft components. If you are with any other third party, there could be a chance that the required output is not what you would expect. But with Microsoft, it will work better. It is compatible with the older generation systems, so you can offer it. On a scale of one to ten, I would give Microsoft FAST an eight because I'm quite comfortable with it.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features of IBM Watson Discovery are the integration with the rest of the Watson Suite and the Watson Assistant capability. If you use Watson Assistant, the ability for it to be able to determine the accuracy of your voice models and your voice response systems is a benefit."
"Language support and the ability to build a natural language of speech recognition are the most valuable features."
"Being able to have some rules to extract the entities is valuable. The capability to crawl external sites and internal documents, and then draw internal information with external contents is also valuable."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Watson Discovery is testing, mainly because the product applies conversational AI, which means I can ask questions to get the information I want from a specific test area."
"Microsoft FAST is quite robust. Our clients are quite happy with it."
 

Cons

"It needs a lot of memory. Our index is very big. It is around 100 gigabytes. So, we need more than 100 gigabytes of memory to use Watson."
"The support from IBM Watson Discovery is good but could improve to make it great."
"The pricing is an area for improvement in IBM Watson Discovery because the customer initially used the free version. Still, when he needed more questions and documents, he had to move to a different version, which was paid and cost $500 per month. That change in pricing made my company lose many customers."
"There are probably other chatbots out there that were built for specific use cases and are easier to deploy than this. Having said that, Watson is way more flexible. While it may require a greater amount of effort, it is not substantially more than some of the other ones that are kind of prebuilt for a specific use case. It would be good to have more prebuilt and specific use cases and specific business models. It can have better phone integration, even though I think that it is actually becoming less of an issue. Most people are online nowadays."
"If there is any change in a system or a configuration or an update, we might face some issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cost-wise, it is very reasonable because it is cloud-based."
"IBM Watson Discovery is an expensive product."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Government
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Retailer
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Watson Discovery?
The most valuable feature of IBM Watson Discovery is testing, mainly because the product applies conversational AI, which means I can ask questions to get the information I want from a specific tes...
What needs improvement with IBM Watson Discovery?
The pricing is an area for improvement in IBM Watson Discovery because the customer initially used the free version. Still, when he needed more questions and documents, he had to move to a differen...
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Also Known As

No data available
MS FAST
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Prudential, Bradesco, Woodside
Moffitt Cancer Center, Hitachi Solutions, Manupatra Information Solutions, Unique World, _KODA AUTO a.s., MindTree Ltd, Mississippi Department of Transportation
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Watson Discovery vs. Microsoft FAST and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.