watsonx.ai Studio service plans

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

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

Note: The watsonx.ai Studio service was formerly known as the Watson Studio service.

If you are using both watsonx and Cloud Pak for Data as a Service in your account, you can switch between the two platforms. For details, see Comparison of IBM watsonx and Cloud Pak for Data as a Service.

Choosing a watsonx.ai Studio plan

IBM Cloud account owners can choose between one of the following plans based on your needs:

Lite plan: A free plan with limited capacity. Under the Lite plan, you can provision one watsonx.ai Studio instance per IBM Cloud account. The Lite plan allows only one user and limits the capacity unit hours (CUH) usage to 10 hours per month. Collaborators in your projects must have their own watsonx.ai Studio Lite plans.
Professional plan: A high-capacity enterprise plan. Under the Professional plan, you can provision multiple watsonx.ai Studio instances in an IBM Cloud account. The Professional plan allows unlimited users and charges you for compute usage measured in CUH.

For plan details and pricing, see the plan pages in IBM Cloud catalog: watsonx.ai Studio.

The available features with each plan depend on the region where you are provisioning the service from the IBM Cloud catalog. See Regional availability of services and features.

Both watsonx.ai Studio plans provide the following features you can use with structured data and to develop machine learning applications:

Watsonx 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.
Machine learning models to build analytical models.
AutoAI to automatically create a set of model candidates.
Decision Optimization to build models that solve business problems.
Visualizations to graphically explore and gain insights into your data.
Synthetic Data Generator to generate synthetic tabular data.

Both watsonx.ai Studio plans provide the following features you can use with unstructured data and to develop generative AI solutions:

The watsonx.ai Studio Professional plan includes the following features that are not available in the Lite plan:

Encrypting 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.
Exporting 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 Monitoring account resource usage. For compute usage pricing details, see and Billing details for watsonx.ai Studio tools and Billing details for machine learning assets.