I think the jupyter devs are aware of this and trying to find a fix. There is an enhancement proposal on how to get diff to work with notebooks : https://github.com/jupyter/enhancement-proposals/blob/master...

And I think that's the project that should implement this : https://github.com/jupyter/nbdime

There are several startups in that space, e.g., Domino Data Labs, that have been trying to make it easy to do collaborative/versioned notebooks. I have only seen the product videos so don't know how well they work etc.

As long as you strip outputs and prompt numbers, diffing works quite well. I've been using this commit hook for quite a while: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25178118/opening-ipython-...

SageMathCloud has collaborative Jupyter notebooks (like Google docs) with TimeTravel and multiple cursors.