easystats
The easystats meta-package is install tooling wrapped around a relicensed ecosystem.
Comparison · Analytics
animation vs leaflet
A side-by-side editorial comparison of animation and leaflet — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
animation vs leaflet: at a glance
What is animation?
Contribution-driven maintenance on a package whose last structural change was magick support.
animation renders statistical and mathematical animations from R to GIF, HTML, video and LaTeX. The most recent release adds a single contributed demo; the substantive work — magick-based conversion and resolution control — landed in the 2.6/2.7 pair. Several entries carry near-identical import timestamps, so the visible dates compress the real release history.
What is leaflet?
leaflet relicensed to MIT and finished migrating off R's retired spatial stack
leaflet is the R binding for the Leaflet mapping library. Its recent releases are dominated by one long migration: away from sp, rgdal, rgeos and raster, and toward sf and terra. Version 2.2.3 completed the user-facing half of that - sp is no longer installed by default, and bundled datasets ship as sf objects - while also relicensing the package from GPL-2 to MIT.
animation vs leaflet: editorial side-by-side
animation
0.0ANALYTICS
Contribution-driven maintenance on a package whose last structural change was magick support.
◆ Current state
animation renders statistical and mathematical animations from R to GIF, HTML, video and LaTeX. The most recent release adds a single contributed demo; the substantive work — magick-based conversion and resolution control — landed in the 2.6/2.7 pair. Several entries carry near-identical import timestamps, so the visible dates compress the real release history.
◆ Where it's heading
The package has settled into contribution-driven maintenance: outside users file demos and device fixes, and the maintainer merges them. The direction set in 2.6 — dropping the shell-out to an external ImageMagick install in favour of the magick R package — was the last structural change. Nothing in the entries suggests a redesign is underway.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next release to be another accepted contribution — a demo or a device-specific fix — rather than a change to how animations are produced.
leaflet
0.0ANALYTICS
leaflet relicensed to MIT and finished migrating off R's retired spatial stack
◆ Current state
leaflet is the R binding for the Leaflet mapping library. Its recent releases are dominated by one long migration: away from sp, rgdal, rgeos and raster, and toward sf and terra. Version 2.2.3 completed the user-facing half of that - sp is no longer installed by default, and bundled datasets ship as sf objects - while also relicensing the package from GPL-2 to MIT.
◆ Where it's heading
This is a package being brought into line with an ecosystem that changed underneath it. The retirement of rgdal and rgeos forced the terra and sf work; the license change and dependency reductions are the maintainers taking the opportunity to clean up while they are already in there. Feature work, such as the full viridisLite palette set, arrives as a side effect of the tidying.
◆ Prediction
With the sp path now opt-in and the retired geospatial dependencies gone, expect the remaining work to be small: palette and provider-tile handling, and keeping the bundled JavaScript current.
Alternatives to animation and leaflet
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 animation or leaflet.
discrim
discrim settled into a thin engine shim after handing its model definitions to parsnip.
dbparser
dbparser shed its database and CSV writers to become just a DrugBank parser.
desirability2
desirability2 is making multi-metric model selection a first-class tidymodels step.
crosstalk
crosstalk is frozen infrastructure: four releases in five years, mostly CRAN upkeep.
cmdstanr
cmdstanr keeps adding fast approximations beside full HMC, and fighting Windows toolchains.
See all animation alternatives → · See all leaflet alternatives →
Recent activity from animation and leaflet
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 11mo agoleafletMIT relicensing and sp dropped from default installs ⚡
- 11mo agoanimationNew estimate_pi demo added
- 2y agoleafletterra CRS handling fixed; raster images accept layer options
- 2y agoleafletProvider tile dependency is cacheable by knitr again
- 2y agoleafletAdds terra support and removes rgdal and rgeos
- 3y agoleafletUpdates proj4.js and fixes examples to stay on CRAN
- 4y agoanimationani.res now honored by saveHTML(), saveVideo() and any device
- 4y agoanimationGIF conversion via the magick package; new ani.res option
- 4y agoanimationExamples stripped from the package to pass CRAN checks
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between animation and leaflet?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. animation and leaflet are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is animation better than leaflet?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. animation and leaflet are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to animation?
Top animation alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "animation alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/animation for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to leaflet?
Top leaflet alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "leaflet alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/leaflet-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.