lifecycle
lifecycle gave the tidyverse the word superseded, then spent years tuning who gets warned
Comparison · Infra & APIs
bench vs pkgdown
A side-by-side editorial comparison of bench and pkgdown — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
bench vs pkgdown: at a glance
What is bench?
bench has settled into slow, careful upkeep of R's benchmarking workhorse.
bench provides high-precision timing and memory profiling for R expressions, and is the measurement tool much of the tidyverse reaches for. Releases arrive roughly yearly and are dominated by small API corrections, CRAN compliance work, and keeping pace with tidyverse minimum-R requirements.
What is pkgdown?
pkgdown now generates llms.txt and a markdown copy of every documentation page
pkgdown builds the documentation sites for most R packages. The 2.1 line was about format and appearance - Quarto vignettes, a light and dark switch, self-hosted assets instead of CDN fetches. The 2.2 line changed audience: build_llm_docs() emits an llms.txt at the site root and a markdown version of every page, on by default.
bench vs pkgdown: editorial side-by-side
bench
0.0INFRA · APIS
bench has settled into slow, careful upkeep of R's benchmarking workhorse.
◆ Current state
bench provides high-precision timing and memory profiling for R expressions, and is the measurement tool much of the tidyverse reaches for. Releases arrive roughly yearly and are dominated by small API corrections, CRAN compliance work, and keeping pace with tidyverse minimum-R requirements.
◆ Where it's heading
The measurement surface has been effectively frozen since 1.1.0 added process-level memory tracking. Everything since trims rough edges — quieter progress output, consistent .grid handling, modern ggplot2 internals — rather than extending what the package can measure.
◆ Prediction
Expect continued maintenance releases driven by CRAN checks and ggplot2 or tidyverse deprecations, not new measurement capabilities.
pkgdown
0.0INFRA · APIS
pkgdown now generates llms.txt and a markdown copy of every documentation page
◆ Current state
pkgdown builds the documentation sites for most R packages. The 2.1 line was about format and appearance - Quarto vignettes, a light and dark switch, self-hosted assets instead of CDN fetches. The 2.2 line changed audience: build_llm_docs() emits an llms.txt at the site root and a markdown version of every page, on by default.
◆ Where it's heading
Two audiences are now being served from one build. Human-facing work continues in small increments - dark-mode plot filtering, new translations, a local http server so search works in preview - while the new machine-facing output is opt-out rather than opt-in. The default matters more than the feature: thousands of package sites will start emitting llms.txt without their maintainers choosing to.
◆ Prediction
Expect the markdown output to gain the same configuration surface the HTML has, and the llms.txt contents to get more selective as maintainers discover what ends up in it; a way to exclude individual pages is the obvious next request.
Alternatives to bench and pkgdown
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 bench or pkgdown.
waldo
waldo keeps shedding dependencies while teaching its diff engine new object systems
usethis
usethis swaps in the Air formatter and stops assuming RStudio is the editor
knitr
knitr adds OpenTelemetry tracing, turning document builds into observable pipelines
lintr
lintr makes the native pipe the default rule and clears out a decade of deprecations
covr
covr's coverage tooling has been stable to the point of dormancy since 2022
See all bench alternatives → · See all pkgdown alternatives →
Recent activity from bench and pkgdown
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agopkgdownLocal preview served over http so search works
- 9mo agopkgdownbuild_llm_docs() emits llms.txt and markdown for every page ⚡
- 1y agopkgdownMenu items accept class and id attributes
- 1y agopkgdownROR IDs, Codeberg support, bslib navbar variables
- 1y agobenchbench 1.1.4 quiets press() and raises the R floor to 4.0
- 1y agopkgdownKeyboard shortcut for search; clean_cache() added
- 2y agopkgdownQuarto vignettes, light/dark switch, self-hosted assets
- 3y agobenchbench 1.1.3 fixes tibble truncation and CRAN warnings
- 4y agobenchbench 1.1.2 relicenses to MIT under a new maintainer
- 6y agobenchbench 1.1.1 always includes memory columns in mark() output
- 6y agobenchbench 1.1.0 adds process-level memory tracking beyond the GC heap
- 6y agobenchbench 1.0.4 fixes examples on R without memory profiling
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between bench and pkgdown?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. bench and pkgdown 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 bench better than pkgdown?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. bench and pkgdown 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 Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to bench?
Top bench alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "bench alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/bench-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to pkgdown?
Top pkgdown alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "pkgdown alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/pkgdown for the full list with editorial commentary on each.