Zeppelin vs Databricks Cloud

[Daan Debie]

Hi devs!

I also posted this question in Github, but I was made aware of this mailinglist, which might be a better place for my question. 

First of all: Zeppelin seems like an amazing tool! My colleague came across your tool inspired by a presentation by Databricks of their proprietary notebook software. We were wondering if an open source equivalent exists, and after some Googling my colleague discovered Zeppelin.
Now, I'm curious because Zeppelin and the Databricks software seem very similar. So did you create Zeppelin, inspired by the Databricks stuff, or did Databricks use your tool and commercialise it?

I did see some post on this mailing list implying that Databricks used Zeppelin as a foundation for their tool. Is this true?

[moon soo Lee]

Hi, Daan Debie!

Thanks for posting a good question.

Zeppelin is not inspired by a single tool but inspired by a lot of different tools like iPython notebook, Databricks cloud and many other opensource/proprietary softwares.

Plus, Zeppelin is successfully being evolved by it's users contributions, suggestions, ideas.

Databricks cloud is not using Zeppelin for it's foundation at the moment. 

Here's some comparison to Databricks cloud. (I have no direct relation with them. I've got their features from their video demo only. So the following comparison can be very wrong.)

Zeppelin

  - Opensource

  - On-premise

  - Major Features : Notebooks for Spark (scala), Data visualizations, Pivot, Scheduling, Configurable layout, Dynamic form generation, Pluggable language backend, collaborations.

Databrics cloud

  - Proprietary

  - As a Service

  - Major Features : Notebook for Spark (scala, python), (more) Data visualizations, Pivot, Dashboard, Dynamic form generation(they call it parameterized query), collaboration (with comment), authentications, spark job server, data import tool.

Zeppelin can be look similar to Databrics cloud at the moment. (though internal is different). 

But in the future, I'm not sure Zeppelin will still look similar to Databrics cloud or not. All depends on Contributors, Users, Community.

Thanks,

moon