I’m not familiar with Deepnote, but I have quite a lot of experience with Jupyter, and if someone were to ask me if there are more modern alternatives I would immediately point them to marimo (https://marimo.io/). For me marimo is already a successor to Jupyter, it has replaced it entirely for me.
Title and first paragraph make it sound like this is a project by the same people as (or endorsed by them) Jupyter. Apparently that's not the case and also it looks very similar to google colab so jupyter + better UI + some LLM integrations
I'm not involved in any capacity with the development or use of Jupyter—I think ipynb is fundamentally flawed at a deep level, starting with its (I)Python roots—but this company's framing of their product as "the successor to Jupyter notebook" comes across as passive aggressive at best and misleading at worst. What is their relationship to Jupyter besides building a Jupyter alternative?
What’s these folks relationship to Jupyter? I guess they must be some of the really prominent Jupyter developers? Otherwise declaring their system the successor to such a widely used tool seems pretty presumptuous.
A lot of the comments on here are too pessimistic. Deepnote has had the single best jupyter interface for years now - unfortunately locked behind a cloud subscription though. Jupyter itself has been stagnant for far too long, and it's much appreciated there's more options coming online that have a modern level of polish.
Marimo is great, but it's good to have competition in the space (especially when both projects are still owned and maintained by VC backed companies).
I love notebooks, I use them all the time for teaching, writing (all of my books are written in notebooks), EDA, model development, and more. I've spoken at Jupytercon.
Having said that, I've never played around with other notebook implementations (ok, I've used IPython Notebook, Jupyter Notebook and Lab, Google Colab, ein (emacs), Jupyter in Vscode, and Notebook (.py) files in Vscode).
I've seen Joel's rant about notebooks, and they do have drawbacks.
But I would rather push better programming practices (chaining pandas, using functions, rearranging cells) than have dependent cells written in the horrible piecemeal style that I see all around the industry.
My biggest issue with notebooks is JSON. I've used Jupyter to get around it for years, and now many LLMs are decent at writing Jupyter JSON.
Claiming that the number of job postings mentioning Jupyter has decreased, so Jupyter is no longer popular is not something a company in the data space should do. It is just embarrassing.
At the time when job openings are declining across the board, it's easy to lie with statistics.
It's like publications saying "research discipline X is gaining traction in recent years" based on search matches in PubMed, but not normalizing for the total number of articles submitted increasing.
> Teams need notebooks that are reactive, collaborative, and AI‑ready
reactive: this matters, but all the alternatives have it
collaborative: this matters very little in the Figma / Google Docs sense of collaborative in practice. It's very rare you want two people working on the same notebook at the same time. What you really want is git style version control.
AI‑ready: you want something as close to plain python (which is already as AI-ready as it gets) as possible.
if you're measuring across these dimensions, I'd go with marimo.
marimo is saved as plain .py files, easy to version control and has a reactive model.
I don't know much about this, but I understand Project Jupyter is Nonprofit. If I go to "jupyter.org" I see a tab "Community" and another "Governance". If I go to "deepnote.com" I see "Customers" and "Pricing".
Why would people want a standard to be controlled by a private company? I don't think the "Open-Sourcing" of it says enough. How does licensing work with formats or standards?
Way to undermine an interesting product launch through poorly chosen language:
> Let’s be frank the single‑player notebook has felt outdated for a while now. We’re open‑sourcing its successor. Jupyter belongs in the hall of great ideas — alongside “Hello, world.” and “View Source.”
If you're trying to reach out to the Python community this is not the way to do it. Completely unnecessary hostile language there! Have some respect.
My advice to Deepnote is to scrap this launch announcement (ideally with an apology) and try again. They've built something genuinely useful and interesting but it's going go get a lot less attention than it deserves if they introduce the open source version to the world like this.
Haha I've asked LLMs to avoid fluff in a prompt and gotten exactly a heading like that one wkth "(no fluff)" before.
Otherwise I've followed DeepNote since they started. I agree with other comments that it's icky to announce yourself as a successor to someone else's project, but always nice to have more options for open source
>Meanwhile, the market is voting with its feet. Across the Fortune 1000, job postings that mention and require Jupyter knowledge are down sharply; the most recent month was deep in the red YTD.
47 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 56.5 ms ] threadBut kudos for going oss
Marimo is great, but it's good to have competition in the space (especially when both projects are still owned and maintained by VC backed companies).
Sincerely, nice.
For me, it's cringe to borderline painful to read.
I love notebooks, I use them all the time for teaching, writing (all of my books are written in notebooks), EDA, model development, and more. I've spoken at Jupytercon.
Having said that, I've never played around with other notebook implementations (ok, I've used IPython Notebook, Jupyter Notebook and Lab, Google Colab, ein (emacs), Jupyter in Vscode, and Notebook (.py) files in Vscode).
I've seen Joel's rant about notebooks, and they do have drawbacks.
But I would rather push better programming practices (chaining pandas, using functions, rearranging cells) than have dependent cells written in the horrible piecemeal style that I see all around the industry.
My biggest issue with notebooks is JSON. I've used Jupyter to get around it for years, and now many LLMs are decent at writing Jupyter JSON.
It's like publications saying "research discipline X is gaining traction in recent years" based on search matches in PubMed, but not normalizing for the total number of articles submitted increasing.
reactive: this matters, but all the alternatives have it
collaborative: this matters very little in the Figma / Google Docs sense of collaborative in practice. It's very rare you want two people working on the same notebook at the same time. What you really want is git style version control.
AI‑ready: you want something as close to plain python (which is already as AI-ready as it gets) as possible.
if you're measuring across these dimensions, I'd go with marimo.
marimo is saved as plain .py files, easy to version control and has a reactive model.
(Anybody still familiar with "bullshit bingo"?)
Why would people want a standard to be controlled by a private company? I don't think the "Open-Sourcing" of it says enough. How does licensing work with formats or standards?
> Let’s be frank the single‑player notebook has felt outdated for a while now. We’re open‑sourcing its successor. Jupyter belongs in the hall of great ideas — alongside “Hello, world.” and “View Source.”
If you're trying to reach out to the Python community this is not the way to do it. Completely unnecessary hostile language there! Have some respect.
My advice to Deepnote is to scrap this launch announcement (ideally with an apology) and try again. They've built something genuinely useful and interesting but it's going go get a lot less attention than it deserves if they introduce the open source version to the world like this.
Otherwise I've followed DeepNote since they started. I agree with other comments that it's icky to announce yourself as a successor to someone else's project, but always nice to have more options for open source
This is a joke, right?