Apache Zeppelin vs marimo
Apache Zeppelin
zeppelin.apache.org
marimo
marimo.ioSide by side
| Figure | Apache Zeppelin | marimo |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Notebook Software | 9.0 (#3) | 8.6 (#8) |
| Authentication | Zeppelin allows anonymous access by default, and its documentation recommends configuring Apache Shiro authentication or deploying only in a secured, trusted environment. | Token authentication is enabled by default for remote access in edit mode; run mode supports token flags or custom middleware. |
| Deployment | The project documents single-user and multi-user deployments, including multi-user support with LDAP. | Notebooks can be served as web apps, executed as scripts, or exported as WebAssembly-powered HTML. |
| Founded | 2013 | 2024 |
| Product | Apache Zeppelin is a web-based notebook for interactive data analytics and collaborative documents using SQL, Scala, Python, R, and other languages. | marimo is an open-source reactive Python notebook that automatically runs dependent cells and stores notebooks as Git-friendly Python files. |
| Support | The project directs users to its users mailing list for usage questions and help, and also provides a JIRA issue tracker. | The maker directs users with installation issues to GitHub or Discord and lists [email protected] for general contact. |
Plans
In their own words
Apache Zeppelin
Apache Zeppelin is a web-based notebook for interactive data analytics and collaborative documents. Its pluggable interpreters support work in SQL, Scala, Python, R, and other languages, with backends including Apache Spark and Flink. Use it to ingest and explore data, analyze results, and create visualizations. Built-in charts can display output from any language backend; pivot charts support drag-and-drop aggregation. The Spark integration can provide SparkContext and SQLContext automatically, load dependencies at runtime, and show job progress or cancel jobs. Its SQL interpreter connects to JDBC sources such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Redshift, and Apache Hive. Collaborators can share notebook URLs and receive changes in real time. The project documents single-user and multi-user deployments, including LDAP support. Zeppelin is open source under the Apache License 2.0 and costs nothing. It runs on Linux, macOS, self-hosted, and web environments. Anonymous access is enabled by default, so its documentation recommends configuring authentication or limiting use to a secured, trusted environment.
marimo
marimo is an open-source reactive Python notebook for reproducible experiments, data work, and interactive apps. When a cell runs, dependent cells run as well or are marked stale, helping keep code and outputs consistent. Notebooks are stored as Python files that can be tracked with Git, run as scripts, or reused as modules. Users can build interfaces with sliders, dropdowns, dataframe tables, and selectable plots, then deploy notebooks as interactive web apps or run them in browsers through WebAssembly. SQL cells work with dataframes, databases, CSVs, and Google Sheets, with named backends including Polars, Pandas, PyArrow, DuckDB, SQLite, and Postgres. AI notebook features support OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, and compatible APIs. marimo has extensions for VS Code and PyCharm, with the VS Code extension also working in Cursor and other VS Code forks. The free hosted option molab provides 4 CPUs, 32 GB RAM, and sessions up to 12 hours; notebooks are public by default. Running notebook code can execute arbitrary code, so the maker advises using trusted notebooks or reviewing code first. The open-source notebook is free.