What is Jupyter Notebook used for?

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based Jupyter Notebook environment for interactive computing, mixing code, output and notes in shareable documents. It is a good fit for exploring data interactively and teaching programming with runnable notes.

Is Jupyter Notebook open source?

Yes. Jupyter Notebook is open source under the BSD-3-Clause licence. Its source code is on GitHub at jupyter/notebook.

Is Jupyter Notebook free?

Yes. Jupyter Notebook is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

What is Jupyter Notebook an alternative to?

Jupyter Notebook is an open-source alternative to MATLAB, Hex and DataSpell. Other open-source alternatives to MATLAB include JupyterLab, Spyder and RStudio.

Is Jupyter Notebook actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Jupyter Notebook was on 28 September 2026, and the latest release is v7.6.3, published on 21 September 2026. The project has 13k stars on GitHub.

Jupyter Notebook: open-source alternative to MATLAB, Hex

About Jupyter Notebook

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based notebook environment for interactive computing. Users write code in cells, run it, and see the results next to explanatory text in the same document, which makes it a common choice for data exploration, teaching and documenting analysis.

The project is language-agnostic: it grew out of the IPython notebook, which was split into language-neutral and Python-specific parts in 2015. The current Notebook v7 is built on JupyterLab components for the frontend and the Jupyter Server for the Python backend. Classic Notebook v6 is still maintained for fixes only, and extensions written for older versions are not compatible with v7.

The code is released under the BSD-3-Clause license. The maintainers support the two most recent major versions, Notebook v7 and Classic Notebook v6, and recommend moving off version 5. New features are directed at v7, and contributors are encouraged to build them as Jupyter Server or JupyterLab extensions so they work across Jupyter's interfaces.

Key features

Browser-based notebooks with executable code cells
Language-agnostic kernels
Built on JupyterLab components in v7
Jupyter Server backend
Extension support through JupyterLab extensions

Good fit for

→Exploring data interactively
→Teaching programming with runnable notes

Built with: Jupyter Notebook
Tags: jupyter; notebook; data-science; python; interactive-computing; education; web-app

Jupyter Notebook: questions and answers

What is Jupyter Notebook used for?: Jupyter Notebook is a web-based Jupyter Notebook environment for interactive computing, mixing code, output and notes in shareable documents. It is a good fit for exploring data interactively and teaching programming with runnable notes.
Is Jupyter Notebook open source?: Yes. Jupyter Notebook is open source under the BSD-3-Clause licence. Its source code is on GitHub at jupyter/notebook.
Is Jupyter Notebook free?: Yes. Jupyter Notebook is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
What is Jupyter Notebook an alternative to?: Jupyter Notebook is an open-source alternative to MATLAB, Hex and DataSpell. Other open-source alternatives to MATLAB include JupyterLab, Spyder and RStudio.
Is Jupyter Notebook actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Jupyter Notebook was on 28 September 2026, and the latest release is v7.6.3, published on 21 September 2026. The project has 13k stars on GitHub.