Choosing a deployment solution

Discovery is available both as a service that is hosted by IBM Cloud and as a service that you install on IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Learn about these deployment solutions and how they differ.

The product user interface and APIs are mostly equivalent regardless of whether you use the managed or installed version of the service. The few differences between the two solutions include:

• How you deploy and set up the service
• The underlying technology that is used to crawl data sources
• Limits for things like the maximum number of documents and enrichments or file sizes
• Who to contact for support and how you share product feedback

Although the documentation that describes how to use the product is the same (what you're reading now), more documentation about how to install and administer the service in IBM Cloud Pak for Data is available from the IBM Cloud Pak for Data product documentation that is hosted in IBM Documentation.

To keep up with product changes, check the following topics periodically:

• IBM Software Hub Release notes for IBM Software Hub service instances
• IBM Cloud Pak for Data Release notes for IBM Cloud Pak for Data service instances
• IBM Cloud Release notes for IBM Cloud service instances

Comparing features

The following table describes the feature support differences between the two deployment types.

The dynamic website web crawl feature, which is controlled by the Execute JavaScript during crawl switcher in Crawl settings, is deprecated and will be removed by September 2025. For more information, see Release notes.

The features that are listed in the IBM Cloud column apply to service instances that are deployed from IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service also.

Feature support details
This table has row and column headers. The row headers identify features. The column headers identify the different deployment types of the product. To understand which features are supported by a deployment type, go to the row that describes the feature, and then find the column for the deployment type that you are interested in.

Feature	IBM Cloud	IBM Cloud Pak for Data
Crawl the local file system, Window file system, databases, LDAP directories, FileNet P8, and HCL Notes
Schedule crawls with more precision
Apply document-level security to crawled collections
Enable JavaScript execution for web pages that you want to crawl
Crawl IBM Cloud Object Storage
Preview .pdf files that are crawled from external data sources
Build custom crawlers
Use App Connect to crawl other external data sources
Apply answer finding to search queries
Optical Character Recognition v2
Patterns enrichment
App switcher menu where you can get service instance information and usage statistics
Import and apply UIMA text analysis models created in Watson Explorer Content Analytics Studio
Monitor usage with activity tracker events
Monitor usage of the Analyze API from the product user interface