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IBM Watson Explorer vs Weka comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM Watson Explorer
Ranking in Data Mining
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Weka
Ranking in Data Mining
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Anomaly Detection Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM Watson Explorer is 3.5%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Weka is 7.2%, down from 17.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Weka7.2%
IBM Watson Explorer3.5%
Other89.3%
Data Mining
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1319820 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
A data analysis tool that is scalable and includes keyword search functionality
The solution is used for a government company for data collection and analysis I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer. I have been using the solution for five…
SC
Student at Rochester Institute of Technology
Data mining projects have become faster and visualization now guides our pattern discovery
Weka can be improved in some areas. As a one-year user, I can share my experiences. I have tried installing other packages into Weka using the inbuilt package manager or adding modern algorithms that I wish to apply to my data sets or data processing. I think Weka needs to improve in that and also in integrating Python into Weka, which would help users much more. I chose eight out of ten because we need improvements in Weka, such as installing inbuilt packages. Weka uses skips such as N+2 or N+4 and eight-node, which makes sense basically, but I think it should improve in the package attribute, such as configuring Python easily and adding modern algorithms into Weka more easily.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM has been working with Bradesco since 1968, I think, and the support is very good, with a team of 10 IBM employees working every day, 24 hours, inside the bank in Sao Paolo."
"I really can't talk enough about the team."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"The main use case is FAQ for the user; it works for almost 80% of the use case coverage."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and being able to see hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"Implementing the solution really helped with manual labor, it takes care of a lot of FT work."
"We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"It doesn’t cost anything to use the product."
"The interface is very good, and the algorithms are the very best."
"Weka is just much better for the classification path and clustering path; if you are going with some predictions that a procedure recalls, it's better than any other tool like R Programming and Python."
"In Weka, anyone can access the program without being a programmer, which is a good feature since the entry cost is very low."
"Weka is a very easy to use Data Mining solution, great for learning and for doing small experiments before exploring the data deeper, with a large number and diversity of algorithms that make it an excellent solution for rapid testing."
"There are many options where you can fill all of the data pre-processing options that you can implement when you're importing the data. You can also normalize the data and standardize it in an easier way."
"But Weka helped me with this analysis in an easy way."
"It’s pretty straightforward, it's user-friendly, it’s free, and with YouTube videos, online guides, and e-books on machine learning using Weka, you can quickly learn to use its good interface for data visualization, filtering, and creating different scenarios and instances."
 

Cons

"No, it's not yet stable."
"Sometimes the service stops."
"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
"Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary or something of the like."
"We haven't used it in production yet so I can't answer this."
"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"Not particularly user friendly."
"In terms of scalability, I think Weka is not prepared to handle a large number of users."
"Scalability and performance are the main aspect of improvement in Weka, since it has the main Java limitations, regarding the JVM."
"The product is good, but I would like it to work with big data. I know it has a Spark integration they could use to do analysis in clusters, but it's not so clear how to use it."
"Help documentation could be more user friendly."
"The visualization of Weka is subpar and could improve. Machine learning and visualization do not work well together. For example, we want to know how we can we delete empty cells or how can we fill in the empty cells without cleaning the data system and putting it together."
"For production, it's not the best option."
"Weka is not horizontally scalable. If I had to run a large dataset over Weka I would have to have a very large usage."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"As far as I know, Weka is a freeware tool, and I am not aware if they have an online solution or if it is a commercial product."
"We use the free version now. My faculty is very small."
"Currently, I am using an open-source version so I don't know much about the price of this solution."
"The solution is free and open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Healthcare Company
12%
Performing Arts
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
19%
University
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Weka?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Weka is that I think it's a fair price since we are using it academically, so it is completely free to download and use. The license is als...
What needs improvement with Weka?
Weka can be improved in some areas. As a one-year user, I can share my experiences. I have tried installing other packages into Weka using the inbuilt package manager or adding modern algorithms th...
What is your primary use case for Weka?
My main use case for Weka is data exploration and data processing and data mining. I can give a quick, specific example of how I've used Weka for data exploration or data processing: we have a subj...
 

Also Known As

IBM WEX
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RIMAC, Westpac New Zealand, Toyota Financial Services, Swiss Re, Akershus University Hospital, Korean Air Lines, Mizuho Bank, Honda
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Watson Explorer vs. Weka and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.