The big difference between Zeppelin and Jupyter is how you can easily build interactive notebooks with input fields, checkboxes, selects, etc. This is much closer to what I thought notebooks were going to evolve into back when I saw them the first time; Hypercard for the data engineer. Observable has kind of delivered that, but on the frontend. Jupyter seems to me to have gone down the path of code editor with cells, and Zeppelin unfortunately never got any traction.
This is possible to do with ipywidgets [0] and all the ipy[stuff] packages.
bqplot [1] for example is great for 2D dataviz, very responsive and updates real-time. Based on D3 I believe. Usually I can do what I want with base widgets and bqplot and the result is pretty.
ipyleaflet is another popular library for maps.
I especially enjoy using them with voila [2] to create an app, or voici [3] for a pure-frontend (wasm) version.
If you want to develop a widget, the new-ish anywidget library can reveal handy [4].
For an example, see this demo [5] I made with bqplot and voici, that visualizes a log-normal distribution.
1. VizHub [1]: for D3 based visualizations. I have not tried it, but I have watched some D3 videos [2] by its creator Curran Kelleher who uses it quite a bit (oh, and a shout out to the great D3 content he has!).
2. This is slightly unusual but I have recently been using svelte's REPL notebooks [3] to try out ideas. Yes this is for svelte scripts, but you can do D3 stuff too. And on that note, svelte (which is normally seen as a UI framework) can be used for pretty interesting visualizations too, because how it can bind variables with SVG elements in HTML (you can get similar results with React as well). For ex., here's a notebook I wrote for trying out k-means using pure svelte [4]. Be warned: fairly unoptimized code, because this was supposed to be an instructive example! On a related note, Mathias Stahl has some content specifically for utilizing svelte with D3 [5].
I don't understand if you're saying that Zeppelin or Jupyter is easier for input fields, checkboxes, etc., though it reminds me either way of Mathematica (going strong since 1988 too!).
You can create interactive notebooks with marimo, an open-source reactive notebook inspired in part by Observable and Pluto.jl. We have sliders, checkboxes, selectable tables and charts, and more, built-in.
