metatools
SDTM supplemental-qualifier merging got sturdier, then the package went quiet for two years.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of admiraldev and ggsurvfit — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
The admiral family's toolbox package keeps absorbing infrastructure the main package used to carry.
admiraldev is the developer-facing utility layer beneath the {admiral} clinical-programming family: assertions, custom roxygen roclets, linter configuration and deprecation helpers. Recent releases have pulled shared machinery out of {admiral} itself, most recently the roxygen helper functions in 1.5.0. Its users are other package authors, not clinical programmers.
ggsurvfit is in correctness-and-compatibility mode, not feature mode.
The package draws survival and cumulative-incidence curves on a ggplot2 grammar, with risk tables, p-values and quantile annotations. Recent releases are entirely fixes and upstream tracking: ggplot2 v4.0.0 compatibility in 2025, and a 2026 patch correcting a Gray-test p-value that could be reported for the wrong competing event.
admiraldev is the developer-facing utility layer beneath the {admiral} clinical-programming family: assertions, custom roxygen roclets, linter configuration and deprecation helpers. Recent releases have pulled shared machinery out of {admiral} itself, most recently the roxygen helper functions in 1.5.0. Its users are other package authors, not clinical programmers.
The arc is consolidation — each release moves one more piece of cross-package tooling into a single place and tightens the standards it enforces. 1.4.0 added an admiral_linters() configuration mandating cli::cli_abort() over stop() across the family, and 1.1.0 had already migrated the assertion layer to {cli} messaging. Breaking changes are routine here and are managed through an explicit four-phase deprecation process.
Expect further extraction of shared helpers from {admiral} into this package, and continued roxygen2 8.0.0 follow-through in the documentation tooling.
The package draws survival and cumulative-incidence curves on a ggplot2 grammar, with risk tables, p-values and quantile annotations. Recent releases are entirely fixes and upstream tracking: ggplot2 v4.0.0 compatibility in 2025, and a 2026 patch correcting a Gray-test p-value that could be reported for the wrong competing event.
The feature surface settled around 1.0.0, when risk-table alignment was exported and colour and linetype defaults became configurable. Since then the work is keeping pace with survival, ggplot2 and tidycmprsk changes, and closing cases where the plotted curve and the annotation disagreed — the p-value matched by position rather than name, confidence limits swapped for multi-state models, quantiles read off a plateau.
Expect the next release to track upstream survival or ggplot2 changes rather than add plotting features; the CDISC censoring convention adopted in Surv_CNSR() suggests further alignment with clinical data standards is the likelier direction.
Other Analytics products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either admiraldev or ggsurvfit.
SDTM supplemental-qualifier merging got sturdier, then the package went quiet for two years.
marquee is filling in the typographic details — outlines, border types, real font metrics for underlines.
A clinical-script logger that stopped shipping after its 0.2 line, changelogs made of merged PRs.
R's object inspector is losing its view of the internals as CRAN closes off the private C API.
A weather-station data client that broke one return type to hand back distances instead of bare IDs.
giscoR's 1.0 moved its dataset index into the cache, so new Eurostat releases arrive without a package update.
See all admiraldev alternatives → · See all ggsurvfit alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. ggsurvfit is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. ggsurvfit is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
Top admiraldev alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "admiraldev alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/admiraldev for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top ggsurvfit alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggsurvfit alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggsurvfit for the full list with editorial commentary on each.