First, let’s talk about both Lab and Notebook separately and then will talk about the differences.

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive computational environment for creating Jupyter notebook documents. It supports several languages like Python (IPython), Julia, R, etc. and is mostly used for data analysis, data visualization, and other interactive, exploratory computing. For beginners in data science, jupyter notebook is more preferred; it only consists of a file browser and a (notebook) editor view, which is easier to use. When you get familiar with it and need more features(which we will talk about later), you can then definitely switch to JupyterLab.

JupyterLab is the next-generation user interface, including notebooks. It has a modular structure, where you can open several notebooks or files (e.g., HTML, Text, Markdowns, etc.) as tabs in the same window. It offers more of an IDE-like experience. JupyterLab uses the same Notebook server and file format as the classic Jupyter Notebook to be fully compatible with the existing notebooks and kernels. The Classic Notebook and Jupyterlab can run side to side on the same computer. One can easily switch between the two interfaces. The interface of both Lab and notebook are similar, except the panel of the file system on the left side in Jupyter lab. You can see that in the images below.

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