tabular
tabular went from clinical tables to complete TFL output in under two months.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of artoo and statpsych — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
artoo makes any-to-any clinical dataset conversion lossless by construction.
artoo reads and writes SAS XPORT, CDISC Dataset-JSON, NDJSON, Parquet and RDS around one canonical metadata model, so a conversion between any two formats carries labels, CDISC types, lengths, display formats, controlled-terminology references and sort keys intact. It is pure R with no SAS or Java runtime. It reached CRAN at 0.1.1 and has spent 0.1.2 and 0.1.3 on the character-encoding edges.
A statistics catalogue for psychology that grows by the release and rarely changes shape.
statpsych supplies confidence intervals, hypothesis tests, power calculations and sample-size planning for the designs psychology researchers actually run, exposed as several hundred small named functions rather than a modelling framework. Version 2.0.0 adds eight functions across logistic model performance, Kendall tau-a intervals and sample sizes, intraclass correlation testing, Geary kurtosis and Mann-Whitney power, and retires three names in favour of generalised replacements. The major version number reflects those removals rather than a change in how the package is used.
artoo reads and writes SAS XPORT, CDISC Dataset-JSON, NDJSON, Parquet and RDS around one canonical metadata model, so a conversion between any two formats carries labels, CDISC types, lengths, display formats, controlled-terminology references and sort keys intact. It is pure R with no SAS or Java runtime. It reached CRAN at 0.1.1 and has spent 0.1.2 and 0.1.3 on the character-encoding edges.
Recent work is all about text that does not survive a format change. 0.1.3 adds an invalid_encoding dimension to artoo_checks() that flags bytes which are not valid UTF-8 before a writer aborts on them, accepts the SAS OEM/DOS encoding names, and gives the writers on_invalid = "translit" and "fold" so smart punctuation and accented characters resolve to pinned ASCII instead of failing. The fold tables ship as data specifically so the result is identical on every platform, which is the same determinism argument behind C-locale row sorting in 0.1.0.
The new WLATIN1-to-UTF-8 migration article and the width warning on write_xpt() point the next attention at length and truncation semantics rather than at additional formats. These notes name no further target format.
statpsych supplies confidence intervals, hypothesis tests, power calculations and sample-size planning for the designs psychology researchers actually run, exposed as several hundred small named functions rather than a modelling framework. Version 2.0.0 adds eight functions across logistic model performance, Kendall tau-a intervals and sample sizes, intraclass correlation testing, Geary kurtosis and Mann-Whitney power, and retires three names in favour of generalised replacements. The major version number reflects those removals rather than a change in how the package is used.
Every release in this window is the same shape: a list of new functions, occasionally a rename. The package grows by filling cells in a grid of estimand, design and inferential goal, and 2.0.0 is notable only for finally deleting the three names its generalised replacements had superseded. That makes it a reference library whose value is coverage and stability, not direction, and the entries give no sign of that changing.
Expect the accretion to continue along the same axes, with sample-size and power counterparts filled in for estimands that currently have interval functions but no planning ones. The 2.0.0 deletions suggest occasional consolidation passes when a generalised function makes older specific ones redundant.
Other Infra & APIs 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 artoo or statpsych.
tabular went from clinical tables to complete TFL output in under two months.
usmapdata ships its 2025 shapefiles on the year-indexed model it adopted in 0.4.0.
glcdp reaches 1.0.0 with a stable schema contract behind its data explorer.
prova adds expected-utility calculation on top of its Bayesian inference core.
checkhelper grew from a check wrapper into a CRAN pre-submission auditor.
Four years dormant, rstudio.prefs returns under a new maintainer.
See all artoo alternatives → · See all statpsych alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. artoo 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. artoo 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 Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
Top artoo alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "artoo alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/artoo for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top statpsych alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "statpsych alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/statpsych for the full list with editorial commentary on each.