Azure AI Search vs. Vertex AI

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure AI Search
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Vertex AI
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Vertex AI on Google Cloud is an MLOps solution, used to build, deploy, and scale machine learning (ML) models with fully managed ML tools for any use case.
$0
Starting at
Pricing
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0.101
Per Hour
Standard S1
$0.336
Per Hour
Standard S2
$1.344
Per Hour
Standard S3
$2.688
Per Hour
Imagen model for image generation
$0.0001
Starting at
Text, chat, and code generation
$0.0001
per 1,000 characters
Text data upload, training, deployment, prediction
$0.05
per hour
Video data training and prediction
$0.462
per node hour
Image data training, deployment, and prediction
$1.375
per node hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsPricing is based on the Vertex AI tools and services, storage, compute, and Google Cloud resources used.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Considered Both Products
Azure AI Search
Chose Azure AI Search
Product enhancement and recent updates, Azure AI Search has become more cost-effective, especially for large-scale generative AI applications2.
Chose Azure AI Search
Azure Search is a competitor against Google's own AI autosuggest a feature. We went with Azure because our network security folks found it to be more robust from a security standpoint, which is incredibly important when you have proprietary manufacturing information. …
Chose Azure AI Search
As I've mentioned, the biggest competitor to Azure Search is actually Azure SQL Database. It doesn't have as many features, but it's more economical and most .Net applications will have one already. As long as you can arrive at a schema and ranking strategy, it's a "good …
Vertex AI
Chose Vertex AI
Out the gate, Vertex just seemed to be more accurate on command with our prompts. We spent less time versus other platforms getting exactly what we wanted. Google's UI is way more robust, too, with how you can configure the exact settings you want when doing image generation. …
Chose Vertex AI
We tend to adapt and use the platform that suits the customers needs the best. We return to Vertex AI because it is the most in-depth option out there so we can configure it any which way they want. However, it is not quick to market and constantly changing or updating it's …
Chose Vertex AI
I have used OpenAI for their LLM and Vector Embedding service, they are really good at it. But Vertex AI has other better services like training pipeline , depolyment creation etc.
Chose Vertex AI
I have used AWS sagemaker is the past for AI/ML model development in my previous organization for everything. Sagemaker is good with respect to certain services but when we talk about Vertex AI in comparison, AutoML is the differentiator. AutoML is very strong and is able to …
Chose Vertex AI
Let's say that Azure OpenAI Service offers you exactly what you look for in simple-to-understand terms: your own private instance of OpenAI API backend.

Chose Vertex AI
Vertex AI is much more accessible to non-developers than IBM's product. Moreover, Vertex AI integrates well with other Google products, enhancing its capabilities. A big plus is its integration with cloud storage, that allows for better management and access of data. In all …
Best Alternatives
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Small Businesses
Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 7.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.5 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 7.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.5 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 7.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
6.8
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure AI SearchVertex AI
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a medium amount of data (2GB - 2.4TB), high-security concerns, and search is a key requirement in your single-tenant application then Azure Search likely has you covered. If you have a small amount of data per tenant (EG, about 2GB), have low-security concerns, and a multi-tenant application where search is a key requirement, then Azure Search would likely be a good choice - though you would need to implement your own concept of sharding and managing across potentially multiple Azure Search instances. If you can reflect your would-be indexes in Azure Search by depositing the data in columns in a SQL table and just index it for full-text search - and that still fits your requirements - it's probably better to start with SQL Database then scale up to Azure Search when you need the advanced features like ranking or cognitive abilities.
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Since we have used this platforms in multiple scenarios we can confidently say that where this excels is when you want to combine free form Q&A bots with structured responses. Gemini shines through and stands tall with it's natural language model and accurate reading of knowledge base to provide the best answers to whatever prompt you can throw at it.
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Pros
  • Incredibly robust back-end infrastructure.
  • Streamlined integration into Microsoft's Azure Cloud.
  • From a user standpoint, it lets the customer easily access their data and provide useful search tips.
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  • Vertex AI comes with support for LOTs of LLMs out of the box
  • MLOps tools are available that help to standardize operational aspects
  • Document AI is an out of the box feature that works just perfectly for our use cases of automating lots to tedious data extraction tasks from images as well as papers
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Cons
  • Like virtually all Azure services, it has first-class treatment for .Net as the developer platform of choice, but largely ignores other options. While there is a first-party Python SDK, there are only community packages for other languages like Ruby and Node. Might be a game of roulette for those to be kept up-to-date. This might make it a non-starter for some teams that don't want to do the work to integrate with the REST API directly.
  • In my opinion, partitions inside of Azure Search don't count as data segregation for customers in a multi-tenant app, so any application where you have many customers with high-security concerns, Azure Search is probably a non-starter.
  • To elaborate on the multi-tenant issue: Azure Search's approach to pricing is pretty steep. While there is a free tier for small applications (50MB of content or less) the first paid tier is about 14x more expensive than the first SQL Database tier that supports full-text search. For many applications, it makes a lot more economic sense to just run some LIKE or CONTAINS queries on columns in a table rather than going with Azure Search.
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  • Customization of AutoML models - A must needed capability to be able to tweak hyperparameters and also working with different models
  • Model Explainability -Providing more comprehensive explanations about how models are utilizing features could be very beneficial
  • Model versioning and experiments tracking - Enhancing the versioning capability could be good for end users
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Performance
No answers on this topic
Google is always top notch with their security and user interface performance. We use Google's entire suite in our business anyways, so using Vertex became second nature very quickly. I will say, though, that Google does need to come down on the price somewhat with their token allocation. Also, their UI is very robust, so it does require some time for training to really master it.
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Alternatives Considered
Azure Search is a competitor against Google's own AI autosuggest a feature. We went with Azure because our network security folks found it to be more robust from a security standpoint, which is incredibly important when you have proprietary manufacturing information. Additionally, we're a Microsoft shop so it plugged into our cloud hosting package and client facing OS.
Read full review
Out the gate, Vertex just seemed to be more accurate on command with our prompts. We spent less time versus other platforms getting exactly what we wanted. Google's UI is way more robust, too, with how you can configure the exact settings you want when doing image generation. The other platforms do a decent job, but we've gravitated more towards using Vertex now.
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Return on Investment
  • Service cannot be downgrade or upgrade after creation
  • Good tool provide maximum ROI
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  • It is pay as you go model so it'll save more cost of your org. In our case previously we used to incurred 1-2L/Month now we are reduced it to 80k-1L.
  • It'll help you save your model training & model selection time as it provides pre-trained models in autoML.
  • It'll help you in terms of Security wherein we can use row level security access to authorized persons.
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ScreenShots

Vertex AI Screenshots

Screenshot of an introduction to generative AI on Vertex AI - Vertex AI Studio offers a Google Cloud console tool for rapidly prototyping and testing generative AI models.Screenshot of gen AI for summarization, classification, and extraction - Text prompts can be created to handle any number of tasks with Vertex AI’s generative AI support. Some of the most common tasks are classification, summarization, and extraction. Vertex AI’s PaLM API for text can be used to design prompts with flexibility in terms of their structure and format.Screenshot of Custom ML training overview and documentation - An overview of the custom training workflow in Vertex AI, the benefits of custom training, and the various training options that are available. This page also details every step involved in the ML training workflow from preparing data to predictions.Screenshot of ML model training and creation -  A guide that shows how Vertex AI’s AutoML is used to create and train custom machine learning models with minimal effort and machine learning expertise.Screenshot of deployment for batch or online predictions - When using a model to solve a real-world problem, the Vertex AI prediction service can be used for batch and online predictions.