Anaconda vs. H2O.ai

I have asked all my juniors to work with Anaconda and Pycharm only, as this is the best combination for now. Coming to use cases: 1. When you have multiple applications using multiple Python variants, it is a really good tool instead of Venv (I never like it). 2. If you have to work on multiple tools and you are someone who needs to work on data analytics, development, and machine learning, this is good. 3. If you have to work with both R and Python, then also this is a good tool, and it provides support for both.

Incentivized

Use H2O.ai whenever you need easy to use tool, when you must be cost efficient (you can not charge the client extra money for software licenses used), need a tool with lots of algorithms that are normally used in data analytics, or need to work on one machine (it is either not allowed to move data to cloud storage or simply not necessary to connect to Hadoop, etc.). Also, you can call H2O directly from Python which makes analysis more efficient.

Incentivized

• Installing packages is very easy with Anaconda. Anaconda comes with 'anaconda navigator', a terminal-like utility from which you can easily install R packages and python libraries.
• Launching R and python IDEs as well as Jupyter notebooks from anaconda navigator is simple, and Anaconda makes it very easy to keep these packages up-to-date.
• I really like the fact that if you don't want to install the full version of Anaconda, you can opt to install a lightweight version (called Miniconda) that includes less python libraries and only core conda. I've installed it when I didn't want to take up as much disk space as Anaconda requires, but it works just the same.

Incentivized

• AutoML
• Bigdata support with H2O's Sparkling Water

Incentivized

• More graphics need in Spyder book. If you work for couple of years then you will be bored with the graphics.
• Extra tools are required for making it secure. We uses extra tools for adding Username /Password to Jupyter.
• R Studio Hangs a lot when open from Anaconda Navigator.

Incentivized

• No weaknesses found yet
• This is not really a drawback, but rather a warning - the Drivereless AI is not a replacement for a data scientist yet, and will not replace data scientists in the next decade neither. The Driverless AI feature delivers reliable results only if the analyst is sure about the meaning of input data. The data quality is usually a major issue and no tool can detect the meaning of data in the input. Data scientists are also required for business interpretation of the findings. So be careful, and do not rely on this feature without a good understanding of what it really does in each step.

Incentivized

It's really good at data processing, but needs to grow more in publishing in a way that a non-programmer can interact with. It also introduces confusion for programmers that are familiar with normal Python processes which are slightly different in Anaconda such as virtualenvs.

Incentivized

I am giving this rating because I have been using this tool since 2017, and I was in college at that time. Initially, I hesitated to use it as I was not very aware of the workings of Python and how difficult it is to manage its dependency from project to project. Anaconda really helped me with that. The first machine-learning model that I deployed on the Live server was with Anaconda only. It was so managed that I only installed libraries from the requirement.txt file, and it started working. There was no need to manually install cuda or tensor flow as it was a very difficult job at that time. Graphical data modeling also provides tools for it, and they can be easily saved to the system and used anywhere.

Incentivized

Anaconda provides fast support, and a large number of users moderate its online community. This enables any questions you may have to be answered in a timely fashion, regardless of the topic. The fact that it is based in a Python environment only adds to the size of the online community.

Incentivized

The overall experience I have with H2O is really awesome, even with its cost effectiveness.

Incentivized

One of the main competitors to Anaconda can be Google products such as Colab. Colab gives you the flexibility to handle large datasets gives it an edge over Anaconda. But again, the ease of access and usability of Anaconda stacks up against Colab. Besides, Anaconda relies more on your machine which makes it safe to use.

Incentivized

I have used Knime, RapidMiner, and Weka before I heard about H2O, but amongst all I really liked H2O. However, nowadays Googles AutoML and AWS SageMaker AutoML platform are really competitive, but more costly than H2O.

Incentivized

• Positive impact - Multiple options for data presenting , visualizing and sharing. (Eg: R-Markdown).
• Positive impact - Ease of access to build complex machine learning models. (I work in NLP, it has multiple built in models to analyze the various contexts).
• Positive impact - Conda package let's to deal with external packages which can be used in Jupyter.

Incentivized

• Positive impact: saving in infrastructure expenses - compared to other bulky tools this costs a fraction
• Positive impact: ability to get quick fixes from H2O when problems arise - compared to waiting for several months/years for new releases from other vendors
• Positive impact: Access to H2O core team and able to get features that are needed for our business quickly added to the core H2O product

Incentivized