Docs
...
Comparison of watsonx and Cloud Pak for Data

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

Last updated: Jun 09, 2025
Comparison of IBM watsonx and Cloud Pak for Data as a Service

IBM watsonx and Cloud Pak for Data as a Service have the same common core functionality and are compatible in many ways. The watsonx experience 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 functionality

The following 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
  • 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 experiences. See Switching your experience.

Services in each experience

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

  • watsonx.ai Studio
  • watsonx.ai Runtime
  • watsonx.governance

However, the services for watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance on the watsonx experience 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 watsonx services catalog.

Data science and AI tools

Both experiences 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 the data science and AI tools that are available on each experience.

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
Agent Lab ✓ No
AutoAI for RAG ✓ No
Data Refinery ✓ ✓
Visualizations ✓ ✓
Jupyter notebooks ✓ ✓
RStudio IDE ✓ ✓
SPSS Modeler ✓ ✓
Decision Optimization ✓ ✓
AutoAI for machine learning ✓ ✓
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 experience to the other. See Switching the experience for a project and Switching the experience for a deployment space.

AI governance tools

Both experiences 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