Compare certifications

Each exam section on this site compares an exam with its predecessor or closest relative. These pages do something different: they compare exams across vendors, for people choosing between ecosystems rather than between levels.

Every comparison is written against the official skills outlines rather than marketing material, and says plainly which exam suits which situation — including when the honest answer is that neither is worth your time yet.

If you have already picked a vendor, the certification paths are more useful than these pages.

Whichever you choose, check the exam changes tracker before paying — a reweighted outline changes what you should study.

How to choose between vendors

Start from the platform you work on, not the exam you find most interesting. A certification on a platform you never touch is hard to talk about in an interview and hard to remember a month later. If your organisation runs on one cloud or one CRM, take that vendor’s exam. If you are choosing an ecosystem for a new job or a career change, look at what the roles you want ask for and what your employer will pay for.

Then compare what the exams ask you to do, not their names. Two exams with similar titles can test different jobs: one may be about managing risk and writing decisions, the other about configuring controls. Read the domain weights in the skills outlines, because the heaviest domain shows where the questions will come from.

Finally, check the practical details before paying: whether the exam is current, whether a vendor publishes a passing score, and whether a recent change to the outline affects your study material. The exam changes tracker lists reweighted outlines and retirements.

The five comparisons

• AIF-C01 vs AI-901: AWS or Azure for a first AI certification, and how little the choice of exam matters compared with the cloud you work near.
• MLA-C02 vs AI-103: machine learning engineering and operations on AWS against generative AI applications and agents on Azure.
• Databricks vs Azure data engineering: when a platform-specific lakehouse credential is the better signal and when a broader Microsoft one is.
• AB-620 vs Agentforce Specialist: Microsoft Copilot Studio or Salesforce Agentforce for building agents, decided by your platform.
• AAISM vs SecAI+ (CY0-001): a management credential from ISACA against a practitioner one from CompTIA, both about securing AI.

Which page to open first

If you are already inside one vendor and unsure which level to take, skip these pages and open that exam’s section from the exam list, which compares each exam with its predecessor and nearest neighbour. If you are weighing a whole route, such as Azure administrator to architect, or AWS into AI, the certification paths show the order in which the exams build on each other. Use the comparisons above when the real question is “this vendor or that one”, and use the exam pages when the question is “which exam, and how do I pass it”.