Best alternatives to marimo in 2026

Data scientists write their analyses in 'notebooks' — documents that mix code, text and charts. The standard tool, Jupyter, has old design flaws: results can silently get out of sync with the code, and its files don't work well with team collaboration tools. marimo is a modern replacement that fixes those flaws, and it can even turn a notebook into a small interactive web page. marimo is a reactive Python notebook that fixes the two structural problems of Jupyter: hidden state and unversionable files. Notebooks are stored as pure Python files, so they diff cleanly in Git and run as scripts; execution is a reactive dependency graph, so changing a cell automatically re-runs everything that depends on it and stale state simply cannot exist. SQL is first class — cells can query dataframes (Polars, Pandas), DuckDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite and return results as dataframes. Interactive UI elements like sliders, dropdowns, dataframe viewers and chat panels bind directly to Python values without callback plumbing, which lets a notebook double as a deployable web application, a slide deck, or a WebAssembly page that runs entirely in the browser. AI-assisted coding is built in, and a VS Code extension plus CLI cover both editor camps. In one tool it replaces Jupyter, Jupytext, ipywidgets, Papermill and part of Streamlit. marimo is Apache 2.0 with no paid tier, has 21k+ GitHub stars, and is used at Stanford, UC Berkeley, OpenAI, BlackRock, Shopify and Moderna.