Platform UI and Console UI comparison
IBM watsonx.data provides two user interfaces: the Platform UI and the Console UI. While the UIs have a significant overlap in capabilities and show the same watsonx.data instances, some capabilities are available in only one of the interfaces. You must determine which interface is appropriate for each of your tasks.
Platform UI:
- The Platform UI is part of the watsonx platform, which includes watsonx.data as one of its experiences. You can switch between other experiences and share resources across the platform.
- You can access and work with all watsonx.data instances and build collaborative workflows in projects.
- Most Console UI capabilities are available in the Platform UI, along with more capabilities.- The watsonx Premium service must be installed.
Console UI:
- The Console UI is dedicated to watsonx.data only. The Console UI shows the specific watsonx.data instance that you open.
- You can focus on data lakehouse features for structured data.
If you install the IBM watsonx.data Premium service on IBM Software Hub, you can access both UIs. If you install the watsonx.data service, you can access the Console UI.
If you install the watsonx.data Developer Edition, you can access the Console UI.
Comparison of features in each UI
You can access the same watsonx.data instances on both UIs. Most infrastructure, data, and access management actions that you complete in one UI are reflected in the other UI. For example, access management that you configure in the Console UI also applies on the Platform UI.
Features in both UIs:
- AI assistant
- Setting up and managing infrastructure components
- Ingesting data
- Querying structured data with SQL statements or through an MCP server
- Running Spark jobs to analyze data
Platform UI-only features:
- OpenSearch service infrastrastructure component
- Share queries as SQL worksheets in projects
- Projects for collaborative work across watsonx experiences
- Jobs for running scheduled or one-time processes
- Platform connections for sharing connections to data sources across the platform
- Parameter sets
- Orchestration pipelines
- Jupyter notebooks
- watsonx BI integration
Console UI-only features:
- Access management
- Query History Monitoring and Management
- Data Build Tool (dbt) integration
- Netezza Performance Server integration
- DataStage integration
- BI visualization tools integrations
- Apache Airflow integration
- OpenTelemetry tools
- Semantic enrichment
- Spark Lab experience
Platform UI capabilities from other services
If other watsonx services are installed, the following features become available in the watsonx.data experience.
| Feature | Required services |
|---|---|
| Unstructured data curation | IBM watsonx.data intelligence |
| Unstructured data integration flow | IBM watsonx.data intelligence, watsonx.data integration, Machine Learning |
| Prompt Lab | watsonx.ai Studio, Machine Learning |
| Data governance | IBM watsonx.data intelligence |
| Asset catalogs | IBM watsonx.data intelligence |
| Data Product Hub | IBM watsonx.data intelligence |
| Data lineage | IBM watsonx.data intelligence |
Terminology differences
Some features have similar capabilities in both UIs but have different names.
The following table summarizes the main differences between tool names and terminology in the UIs.
| Task | Console UI method | Platform UI method |
|---|---|---|
| Find or explore data | The Data Manager tool | Metastores |
| Query data | The Query Workspace | The Data workbench |
| Ingest data with Spark | The Data Manager too | A Spark job |
| Select a set of related datasets from a data source | Select a catalog | Select a database |