"Are there any downsides..?" - in Jupyter you have to decide upfront what language each notebook is going to be in. But in Zeppelin you can switch between languages within a single notebook, passing variable values between the languages. This allows you immense flexibility. For example, you could use Scala to calculate some results in Spark and then display the results in JavaScript/HTML /Angular using your own custom visualizations. You can use the best tool for the job if you're comfortable working in more than one language. Disclaimer: I've hardly used Jupyter and I know it has cell 'magics' which I think allow you to write individual cells in a language different to the one assigned for the whole notebook. However I don't know if you can pass data between cells of different languages in the same notebook. The issue at https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/4386 suggests not (although that is almost a year old now): "ipython/jupyter will not be supporting multiple kernels for a single notebook with variables being passed around between them, so I am closing this issue." For me, this is a big downside for using Jupyter.
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