Azure Machine Learning Studio vs. Workbench

Azure Machine Learning Workbench is a preview downloadable application. It provides a UI for many of the Azure Machine Learning CLI commands, particularly around experimentation submission for Python based jobs to DSVM or HDI. The Azure Machine Learning CLI is made up of many key functions, such as job submisison, and creation of real time web services. The workbench installer provided a way to install everything required to participate in the preview.

Azure Machine Learning Studio is an older product, and provides a drag and drop interface for creating simply machine learning processes. It has limitations about the size of the data that can be handled (about 10gigs of processing). Learning and customer requests have based on this service have contributed to the design of the new Azure Machine Learning CLI mentioned above.


It should be added that Azure Machine Learning Workbench is deprecated since september 2018 and has been replaced by the Azure Machine Learning services, which was made generally available in december 2018. The core functionality is still intact, but some major changes to point out about the architecture are:

  • A simplified Azure resources model
  • New portal UI to manage your experiments and compute targets
  • A new, more comprehensive Python SDK
  • A new expanded Azure CLI extension for machine learning