afcharts
UK government chart styling in ggplot2, chasing ggplot2 v4 and stretching its palette to five.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of authentik and Rmonize — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
authentik 2026.8 ships: Actors, domain-joined Agents, and a push past browser-mediated SSO
2026.8.0 is out, closing a seven-candidate train that ran through early August. The GA tag itself is the last cherry-pick batch — SCIM group membership removals, a proxy redirect that preserves query strings, session deletion on user deactivation — but the release it finalizes is where the substance lives: an Actors primitive in core, an enterprise Agent requiring a domain join and its own API scope, OAuth2 token exchange delegation, and a CAS source integration.
Collapsed a pile of parameters into one object and renamed every report column
Rmonize supports data harmonization: taking heterogeneous input datasets, applying processing rules against a DataSchema, and producing a harmonized dossier with assessment, summary and visual reports. Version 2.0.0 reshaped how that is driven — the evaluate, summarize and visualize functions now take the dossier alone rather than six or seven parallel arguments — and renamed every column in the assessment and summary outputs into plain language. The package is closely coupled to madshapR, whose changes the notes warn may require updates to existing user code.
2026.8.0 is out, closing a seven-candidate train that ran through early August. The GA tag itself is the last cherry-pick batch — SCIM group membership removals, a proxy redirect that preserves query strings, session deletion on user deactivation — but the release it finalizes is where the substance lives: an Actors primitive in core, an enterprise Agent requiring a domain join and its own API scope, OAuth2 token exchange delegation, and a CAS source integration.
Two threads converge in this major. The identity surface keeps broadening at the protocol edge — CAS, WS-Fed, token exchange delegation, on-behalf-of — while the enterprise tier grows an endpoint story that reaches machines and devices rather than browser sessions. The RC train's shape reinforces it: six candidates fired in one day on CI and docs, then one heavy candidate carrying the features, then a fix-only close. That is release engineering hardened around a major, not a routine point release.
With Agents and Actors now GA rather than cherry-picks, the next branch should build out what they enable — device-conditioned policies or agent-brokered credentials — while 2026.8.x settles into backport patches.
Rmonize supports data harmonization: taking heterogeneous input datasets, applying processing rules against a DataSchema, and producing a harmonized dossier with assessment, summary and visual reports. Version 2.0.0 reshaped how that is driven — the evaluate, summarize and visualize functions now take the dossier alone rather than six or seven parallel arguments — and renamed every column in the assessment and summary outputs into plain language. The package is closely coupled to madshapR, whose changes the notes warn may require updates to existing user code.
The arc runs from correctness toward interface. Version 1.0.1 was bug fixes found on real data, 1.1.0 added a debug parameter so harmonization could be tested with incomplete inputs, and 2.0.0 is a deliberate simplification that breaks existing code in exchange for a smaller surface. Renaming outputs from expressions like 'Categories::missing' and 'Nb. non-valid values' to 'Non-valid categories' and 'Number of non-valid values' points at reports being read by people who are not the person who wrote the harmonization rules.
Expect the superseded parameters and the renamed demo object to be removed outright rather than left superseded, and continued work on the visual reports, which carry the largest volume of referenced issues across all three versions.
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 authentik or Rmonize.
UK government chart styling in ggplot2, chasing ggplot2 v4 and stretching its palette to five.
A gamma-convolution density package that reached completion in 2018 and has coasted since.
Animal-movement models in R, where new stochastic processes arrive years apart.
A basic DNA and RNA sequence toolkit that went quiet for three years, then jumped to 2.0.
Package citation for R documents, quietly growing to meet Quarto.
Accessible government spreadsheets in R, rebuilt on openxlsx2 and renamed along the way.
See all authentik alternatives → · See all Rmonize alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. authentik is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 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. authentik is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 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 authentik alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "authentik alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/authentik for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top Rmonize alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Rmonize alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/rmonize for the full list with editorial commentary on each.