JupyterLab vs JupyterNotebook

Question

Hello everyone on Stack Overflow. Today, I would like to ask something very different question.

I am currently working as a data scientist, and I work alot on JupyterLab/Notebook. Couple of my co-workers use Notebook instead of JupyterLab. It seems like there are not much difference between those two (I really like how JupyterLab presents codes in different colors). I searched on the internet, and it says

"JupyterLab is the next generation of the Jupyter Notebook"

However, some featuers like plotly figures do not work well on JupyterLab but works well on Jupyter Notebook. I do not know why this is happening.

Can anyone who work on these two tell me the actual differences?

Thank you for your replies!

Answer 1

I used to work with Jupyter Notebook for about 4 years and last year I switched to Jupyter Lab. I think it is a nice improvement, I believe the biggest advantage is the improved user interface: it is much easier to switch between notebooks and everything feels more organized with tabs.

Concerning functionalities, the JupyterLab improvement is being modular: you can easily write your own plugins if you need it.

I have no experience using plotly, but I have similar issues with other packages. Everything was fixed in a short time, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.