Google Cloud Datalab vs KNIME comparison

Cloud Datalab is a powerful interactive tool created to explore, analyze, transform and visualize data and build machine learning models on Google Cloud Platform. It runs on Google Compute Engine and connects to multiple cloud services easily so you can focus on your data science tasks.

KNIME is an open-source analytics software used for creating data science that is built on a GUI based workflow, eliminating the need to know code. The solution has an inherent modular workflow approach that documents and stores the analysis process in the same order it was conceived and implemented, while ensuring that intermediate results are always available. 

KNIME supports Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems and is suitable for enterprises of all different sizes. With KNIME, you can perform functions ranging from basic I/O to data manipulations, transformations and data mining. It consolidates all the functions of the entire process into a single workflow. The solution covers all main data wrangling and machine learning techniques, and is based on visual programming.

KNIME Features

KNIME has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Scalability through data handling (intelligent automatic caching of data in the background while maximizing throughput performance)
• High extensibility via a well-defined API for plugin extensions
• Intuitive user interface
• Import/export of workflows
• Parallel execution on multi-core systems
• Command line version for "headless" batch executions
• Activity dashboard
• Reporting & statistics
• Third-party integrations
• Workflow management
• Local automation
• Metanode linking
• Tool blending
• Big Data extensions

KNIME Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing KNIME. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Integrated Deployment: KNIME’s integrated deployment moves both the selected model, and the entire data model preparation process into production simply and automatically, allowing for continuous optimization in production and also saving time because it eliminates error.

• Elastic and Hybrid Execution: KNIME’s elastic and hybrid executions helps you reduce costs while covering periods of high demand, dynamically.

• Metadata Mapping: KNIME enables complete metadata mapping of all aspects of your workflow. In addition, KNIME offers blueprint workflows for documenting the nodes, data sources, and libraries used, as well as runtime information.

• Guided Analytics: KNIME’s guided analytics applications can be customized based on reusable components.

• Powerful analytics, local automation, and workflow difference: KNIME uses advanced predictive and machine learning algorithms to provide you with the analytics you need. In combination with powerful analytics, KNIME’s automation capabilities and workflow difference prepare your organization with the tools you need to make better business decisions.

• Supports enterprise-wide data science practices: The deployment and management functionalities of KNIME make it easy to productionize data science applications and services, and deliver usable, reliable, and reproducible insights for the business.

• Helps you leverage insights gained from your data: Using KNIME ensures the data science process immediately reflects changing requirements or new insights.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the KNIME solution.

An Emeritus Professor at a university says, “It can read many different file formats. It can very easily tidy up your data, deleting blank rows, and deleting rows where certain columns are missing. It allows you to make lots of changes internally, which you do using JavaScript to put in the conditional. It also has very good fundamental machine learning. It has decision trees, linear regression, and neural nets. It has a lot of text mining facilities as well. It's fairly fully-featured.”

Benedikt S., CEO at SMH - Schwaiger Management Holding GmbH, explains, “All of the features related to the ETL are fantastic. That includes the connectors to other programs, databases, and the meta node function. Technical support has been extremely responsive so far. The solution has a very strong and supportive community that shares information and helps each other troubleshoot. The solution is very stable. The initial setup is pretty simple and straightforward.”

Piotr Ś., Test Engineer at ProData Consult, says, “What I like the most is that it works almost out of the box with Random Forest and other Forest nodes.”