Compare
Neptune vs Azure ML
vs
Neptune
Azure ML
Commercial Requirements
Commercial requirements
Standalone component or a part of a broader ML platform?
Standalone component. ML metadata store that focuses on experiment tracking and model registry
Part of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem
Is the product available on-premises and / or in your private/public cloud?
Azure ML is available only as a fully managed cloud service.
Is the product delivered as commercial software, open-source software, or a managed cloud service?
Managed cloud service
Managed Cloud Service
What is the pricing model?
SLOs / SLAs: Does the vendor provide guarantees around service levels?
General Capabilities
Setup
What are the infrastructure requirements?
No special requirements other than having the neptune-client installed and access to the internet if using managed hosting. Check here for infrastructure requirements for on-prem deployment
Only internet access needed to access the Azure ecosystem
Does it integrate with the training process via CLI/YAML/Client library?
Yes, through the neptune-client library
Yes, through the Azure ML CLI and SDKs
Serverless UI
No
No
Flexibility, speed, and accessibility
How can you access model metadata?
– Julia SDK
No
No
Supported operations
Logging modes
Mobile support
No
No
Experiment Tracking
Log and display of metadata
Dataset
– Dataset slicing support
No
No
Code versions
Metrics and losses
Rich format
– Neural Network Histograms
No
No
– Prediction visualization (tabular)
No
No
– Prediction visualization (image)
No
No
– Prediction visualization (image – interactive confusion matrix for image classification)
No
– Prediction visualization (image – overlayed prediction masks for image segmentation)
No
– Prediction visualization (image – overlayed prediction bounding boxes for object detection)
No
– TPU
No
No
System information
– Execution command
No
No
Environment config
Files
Comparing experiments
Parameters and metrics
– Parameter Importance plot
No
No
– Slice plot
No
No
– EDF plot
No
No
Rich format (side by side)
– Video
No
No
– Audio
No
No
– Plots
No
No
– Interactive visualization (HTML)
No
No
– Neural Network Histograms
No
No
– Prediction visualization (image, video, audio)
No
No
Code
– Git
No
No
– Source files
No
No
Environment
– pip requirements.txt
No
No
– conda env.yml
No
No
– Docker Dockerfile
No
No
Hardware
System information
– Execution command
No
No
Data versions
– External reference version diff (s3)
No
No
Files
– Models
No
No
– CSV
No
No
Custom compare dashboards
– Logging custom comparisons from notebooks/code
No
No
Organizing and searching experiments and metadata
Experiment table customization
– Renaming columns in the UI
Yes
No
– Adding colors to columns
Yes
No
Experiment filtering and searching
– Query language vs fixed selectors
Query language
Fixed selectors
Custom dashboards for a single experiment
– Custom widgets and plugins
No
No
Reproducibility and traceability
One-command experiment re-run
No
No
Experiment lineage
– List of datasets used downstream
No
No
– List of other artifacts (models) used downstream
No
No
– Downstream artifact dependency graph
No
No
Reproducibility protocol
Limited
No
Model Registry
Model versioning
Model lineage and evaluation history
Access control, model review, and promoting models
Custom stage tags
No
No
Locking model version and downstream runs, experiments, and artifacts
No
No
Model compare (current vs challenger etc)
Limited
No
Compatibility audit (input/output schema)
No
No
Compliance audit (datasets used, creation process approvals, results/explanations approvals)
No
No
CI/CD/CT compatibility
Model searching
Integrations and Support
Model training
Gluon
No
No
H2O
No
No
Paddle
No
No
Spacy
No
No
Spark MLlib
No
No
Statsmodel
No
No
Hyperparameter Optimization
IDEs and Notebooks
Data versioning
Model versioning
LLMs
This table refers to Azure Machine Learning SDK v1. The SDK v2 does not include any native logging functionality. This table was updated on 10 May 2023. Some information may be outdated. Report outdated information here.
What are the key advantages of Neptune then?
- Focus on the experiment tracking and model registry
- More extensive comparison functionality
- Customizable metadata structure
- Team collaboration features
See these features in action
1
Sign up to Neptune and install client library
pip install neptune2
Track experiments
import neptune
run = neptune.init_run()
run["params"] = {
"lr": 0.1, "dropout": 0.4
}
run["test_accuracy"] = 0.843
Register models
import neptune
model = neptune.init_model()
model["model"] = {
"size_limit": 50.0,
"size_units": "MB",
}
model["model/signature"].upload(
"model_signature.json")
Thousands of ML people already chose their tool
Previously used tensorboard and azureml but Neptune is hugely better. In particular, getting started is really easy; documentation is excellent, and the layout of charts and parameters is much clearer.
Simon Mackenzie
AI Engineer and Data Scientist
(…) thanks for the great tool, has been really useful for keeping track of the experiments for my Master’s thesis. Way better than the other tools I’ve tried (comet / wandb).
I guess the main reason I prefer neptune is the interface, it is the cleanest and most intuitive in my opinion, the table in the center view just makes a great deal of sense. I like that it’s possible to set up and save the different view configurations as well. Also, the comparison is not as clunky as for instance with wandb. Another plus is the integration with ignite, as that’s what I’m using as the high-level framework for model training.
Klaus-Michael Lux
Data Science and AI student, Kranenburg, Germany
I guess the main reason I prefer neptune is the interface, it is the cleanest and most intuitive in my opinion, the table in the center view just makes a great deal of sense. I like that it’s possible to set up and save the different view configurations as well. Also, the comparison is not as clunky as for instance with wandb. Another plus is the integration with ignite, as that’s what I’m using as the high-level framework for model training.
This thing is so much better than Tensorboard, love you guys for creating it!
Dániel Lévai
Junior Researcher at Rényi Alfréd Institute of Mathematics in Budapest, Hungary
While logging experiments is great, what sets Neptune apart for us at the lab is the ease of sharing those logs. The ability to just send a Neptune link in slack and letting my coworkers see the results for themselves is awesome. Previously, we used Tensorboard + locally saved CSVs and would have to send screenshots and CSV files back and forth which would easily get lost. So I’d say Neptune’s ability to facilitate collaboration is the biggest plus.
Greg Rolwes
Computer Science Undergraduate at Saint Louis University
Such a fast setup! Love it:)
Kobi Felton
PhD student in Music Information Processing at Télécom Paris
For me the most important thing about Neptune is its flexibility. Even if I’m training with Keras or Tensorflow on my local laptop, and my colleagues are using fast.ai on a virtual machine, we can share our results in a common environment.
Víctor Peinado
Senior NLP/ML Engineer
It only takes 5 minutes to integrate Neptune with your code
Don’t overthink it