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.

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.

When you provision watsonx.data on IBM Cloud, you can access both UIs.

On AWS and Azure, you have access to 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
  • Infrastructure components, with exceptions noted
  • Access management
  • Ingesting structured data
  • MCP server for managing data
  • Spark applications

Platform UI-only features:

  • Share queries as SQL worksheets in projects
  • Table optimizer
  • 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
  • Resource hub
  • Retrieval service
  • MCP server for RAG pipelines

Console UI-only features:

  • Query History Monitoring and Management
  • Query Optimizer
  • Ingestion history
  • Data Build Tool (dbt) integration
  • Netezza Performance Server integration
  • DataStage integration
  • BI visualization tools integrations
  • Apache Airflow integration
  • OpenTelemetry tools
  • Semantic enrichment
  • Resource usage monitoring
  • Account scoped metadata model
  • Astra DB infrastructure componenent on AWS

Platform UI capabilities from other services

If you provision other watsonx services, the following features become available in the watsonx.data experience.

Features from other services
Feature Required services
Unstructured data curation IBM watsonx.data intelligence
Unstructured data integration flow IBM watsonx.data intelligence, watsonx.data integration, watsonx.ai Runtime
Prompt Lab watsonx.ai Studio, watsonx.ai Runtime
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.

Comparison of methods with different names
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 tool A Spark job
Select a set of related datasets from a data source Select a catalog Select a database

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