What are Jupyter Notebooks? 

Jupyter Notebooks are shareable JSON documents that combine descriptive information such as rich text, images or videos with live code.

Why use Jupyter Notebooks?

The combination of documentation and data-analytical code makes Jupyter Notebooks the ideal choice for interactive data exploration – especially with support for over 40 programming languages, including Python, R and Julia, combined with data access via Apache Spark or REST APIs and many more.

With Jupyter Notebooks, you can get a first overview of your data. By adding additional code and text cells, you can gradually gain further insights and document your results until you have achieved your analysis goals. 

Moreover, you can share your notebooks, either as JSON so that others can use them with their data, or as PDF or HTML so that you can create reports. 

Zeppelin Notebooks – an alternative to Jupyter

Another way to create notebooks is using Zeppelin Notebooks. Zeppelin notebooks follow the same concepts as Jupyter notebooks – Zeppelin “paragraphs” can also contain text or code. Unlike Jupyter, you can mix programming languages in a single notebook. 

Zeppelin also offers a wide range of visualizations that make it easy to create and customize charts and dashboards. The integrated collaboration features allow multiple users to work on the same notebook at the same time. 

In addition, Zeppelin integrates well with big data tools such as Apache Spark, making it a preferred tool in big data environments.