H2O.ai Driverless AI vs The AI & Analytics Engine - AutoML Comparison

The H2O Driverless AI is one of the more popular AutoML tools in the market. As mentioned on their website, their goal is to help data scientists work more efficiently. The Driverless AI automates machine learning (ML) tasks, with minimal effort required from the user to build models. By automating data science and ML tasks into repeatable workflows, data scientists can be more efficient on their projects.

PI.EXCHANGE’s AI & Analytics Engine is a no-code AutoML platform. It enables users to go from raw data to building and deploying a model in minutes, instead of hours. Similar to the Driverless AI, data scientists are one of the key groups that stand to benefit from the Engine. That said, the Engine also looks to provide ML solutions for analysts, business users, entrepreneurs, as well as students, and researchers. The Engine’s differentiating factor is that it makes AI accessible to everyone. Even users without the appropriate data science or coding experience.

For more AutoML comparison articles, check these out:

• AI & Analytics Engine vs. AWS Glue DataBrew
• AI & Analytics Engine vs. AWS SageMaker Canvas
• AI & Analytics Engine vs. Trifacta
• AI & Analytics Engine vs. DataIku

Pricing

H2O.ai does not list its pricing structure on its website. Scouring the web for its pricing plan, we’ve come across this pricing list from IBM.

A 3-year non-GPU subscription would set you back $390,000 USD, while a 3-year subscription with GPU would take you up to $510,000 USD. With this hefty price tag, it seems that the Driverless AI is catered more towards larger corporations with teams of data scientists and ML specialists. Of course, for that price, you do get some incredible features that users, especially those with a data science background, would find helpful in their tasks.

The AI & Analytics Engine’s pricing structure can be found directly on the website. The prices for individual and group users are designed to be fixed and easy to understand. Larger enterprises and corporations who wish to configure their data storage limit or usage quotas will have custom-based pricing based on their configurations.

The Engine’s purpose is to democratize AI to allow EVERYONE access to AI/ML capabilities, and the affordable pricing structure clearly reflects that.

When comparing pricing, the AI & Analytics Engine is significantly more affordable - enabling organizations without a data science team to still reap the benefits of AI/ML.

Knowledge Base & Support

The H2O Driverless AI comes equipped with an extensive user guide taking you through the steps within the workflow, as well as an FAQ section to troubleshoot issues, should you come across any. Along with their comprehensive user guide, H2O.ai mentions on their website that all Driverless AI customers will have access to a full range of support, training, and expertise to assist them along their journey. In addition, users will have access to their Slack community channel, blogs, and videos, as well as their Driverless AI self-paced courses.

The AI & Analytics Engine has a Knowledge Hub with a wealth of articles. These articles help guide users through the Engine’s workflow, with how-to guides and video tutorials. There is also a repertoire of articles on the Engine’s concepts, to aid users who may not be familiar with the ML terms used within the Engine. Users (and non-users) of the Engine can be a part of the Slack community. Users who join the Slack community channel can discuss ideas, suggest potential features, and most importantly, get direct help from the team. When it comes to customer success support, all trial users are given the option to set up a complimentary personalized onboarding session with the team to help them get the most out of their trial.

GPU-Supported Algorithms

The H2O Driverless AI allows users the ability to train models through a GPU. Similarly, the Engine comes with that feature as well! Users can train their models with some of the GPU-supported machine learning algorithms. With this feature, models can be trained much quicker - a couple of hours as opposed to days and weeks!

Here’s where the AI & Analytics Engine is superior in comparison. As stated above, H2O users would have to pay more for a subscription with GPU support. However, with the Engine, all users, regardless of their subscription tier will have access to GPU-optimized model templates at the same pricing!

AI-Guided Recommendations

AI-guided recommendations are a key differentiator of the Engine, separating it from the crowd. These guided recommendations mean users with little to no ML or data science experience can be guided through the ML pipeline, to use the Engine effectively.

At the time of writing, the H2O Driverless AI does not come with an in-platform guided process of the workflow - Highlighting the fact that the Driverless AI is more suited to individuals or teams with sufficient data science and ML expertise.

AI-guided Data Wrangling

Starting with data wrangling, the Engine provides users with suggestions on the type of actions to take in their data wrangling recipe, like dropping columns that are not predictive of the selected target.

AI-Guided Model Selection

Following that, when it’s time to choose a model to train your dataset on, the Engine’s Model Recommender provides a ranked list of optimal models given your data, and what you are trying to solve.

The ranking is provided, depending on what is most important to you:

• Predictive Performace

• Training Time

• Prediction Time

This means without having to train your models, you can understand what might be best - saving you time in your ML process.

Data Visualization

If you’re an analyst or someone who understands the importance of getting insights from data, the data visualization feature is one that you’d be interested in. The H2O Driverless AI offers data visualization for its datasets, along with the ability to create custom graph plots. H2O’s data visualization feature is pretty sophisticated and advanced.

While users do not have the ability to create custom graph plots in the AI & Analytics Engine, it does offer various visualizations such as data analysis and model evaluation charts where applicable.

Wrapping up

To conclude, both the H2O Driverless AI and the AI & Analytics Engine are end-to-end AutoML platforms that speed up and automate data science and ML processes. Both share a lot of similarities in their use and features. If you’re a large enterprise with a team of data scientists or ML specialists and can afford the Driverless AI’s price tag, you will probably enjoy the extra features that come with it. If you are looking for an affordable tool to build and use ML models, or if you would like to automate some of the repeatable ML tasks, then the Engine proves to be a low-risk all-inclusive way to get started. The Engine is your complete connected ML pipeline, that is easy to use, and fast to implement - So you can start making predictions today.

Not sure where to start with machine learning? Reach out to us with your business problem, and we’ll get in touch with how the Engine can help you specifically.