Agentic Index
Dust vs IBM watsonx Orchestrate (2026)
Both orchestrate agents across an enterprise and they start from opposite ends. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Dust starts at the workspace, grounding agents in the documents and conversations your teams already produce, self serve at 30 dollars per user a month. IBM watsonx Orchestrate starts at the backend, coordinating systems, approvals and contracts, with Essentials around five hundred dollars a month and a thirty day trial, documenting 12 of 14 against Dust's 10. Knowledge work against system work, and the per user price difference tells you which one expects to be rolled out to everybody.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Dust and IBM watsonx Orchestrate are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 969 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Dust if
- The value is in your unstructured knowledge, and grounding agents on Notion, Slack and Drive is the point.
- Per user pricing you can start on today beats an enterprise platform commitment.
- You want individuals building their own agents rather than a central team defining them.
Choose IBM watsonx Orchestrate if
- The work is transactional: backend systems, approvals and contracts rather than documents and chat.
- Documented testing and evaluation coverage is stronger, which matters for agents touching systems of record.
- You want a vendor with enterprise deployment options and a governance story procurement already recognizes.
| At a glance | Dust | IBM watsonx Orchestrate |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Enterprise operations agent | Enterprise operations agent |
| Entry price | Free seat at 0€ with 500 lifetime credits; paid entry is Pro at 24€ per seat per month billed yearly (30€ monthly), and Max at 120€ yearly (150€ monthly). All excluding VAT. Enterprise on application. Figures are euros, not dollars. | Essentials from $530/mo · Standard from $6,360/mo · Premium contact us · 30-day free trial |
| Free / trial | Free option (no card, up to 5 users) + 15-day Pro trial | — |
| Pricing confidence | public exact | public exact |
| Feature | D Dust |
I IBM watsonx Orchestrate |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
|
Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
Full / Explicit | Partial |
| Knowledge & context | ||
|
Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
Partial | Partial |
| Control & trust | ||
|
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
|
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
|
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Solution readiness | ||
|
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
| Platform extensibility | ||
|
Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
No / Not documented | Full / Explicit |
| Specialist automation | ||
|
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | D Dust |
I IBM watsonx Orchestrate |
|---|---|---|
|
Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Free seat at 0€ with 500 lifetime credits; paid entry is Pro at 24€ per seat per month billed yearly (30€ monthly), and Max at 120€ yearly (150€ monthly). All excluding VAT. Enterprise on application. Figures are euros, not dollars. | Essentials from $530/mo · Standard from $6,360/mo · Premium contact us · 30-day free trial |
|
Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, exact | Public, exact |
|
Billing Primary billing axis |
Per seat per month with a monthly credit allocation attached to each seat, across three seat types inside one self-serve Business plan, plus a sales-led Enterprise plan. Seats are priced in EUROS excluding VAT; programmatic API usage is priced in US dollars at $0.01 per credit. Admins assign a seat type per user and can mix and reassign them at any time. | hybrid |
|
Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
Medium variable cost | Medium variable cost |
|
Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tierTrial
|
No free tierTrial
|
|
Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Self-serve |
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