TidyDensity
A distribution catalogue that grows by one family at a time, and rarely breaks anything.
Comparison · Analytics
benviplot vs hoopr
A side-by-side editorial comparison of benviplot and hoopr — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
benviplot vs hoopr: at a glance
What is benviplot?
A Brazilian housing-data palette package went from internal tooling to public 1.0 in five days.
benviplot supplies color palettes, ggplot2 scales, themes and plot helpers for charts in a consistent house style, oriented around Brazilian urban and rental-market data. The entire public history is compressed into early October 2025: a six-phase release plan took it from removing proprietary data through modernization, testing, vignettes, documentation and CI to a stable 1.0.0. The shipped package carries 36 curated palettes, discrete and continuous scale functions, and a rental price index dataset covering six Brazilian cities.
What is hoopr?
hoopR rebuilds its HTTP layer on httr2 to stop segfaulting on modern systems
hoopR is the sportsdataverse R package for basketball data, wrapping ESPN, NBA Stats, NBA G-League, NCAA and KenPom behind a single set of loaders. Version 3.0.0 replaces httr with httr2 across every one of those backends, drops httr from Imports, and routes all calls through shared internal retry and response helpers. The change is breaking, and it exists because the old stack segfaulted against libcurl 8.x and curl 7.0.0.
benviplot vs hoopr: editorial side-by-side
benviplot
0.0ANALYTICS
A Brazilian housing-data palette package went from internal tooling to public 1.0 in five days.
◆ Current state
benviplot supplies color palettes, ggplot2 scales, themes and plot helpers for charts in a consistent house style, oriented around Brazilian urban and rental-market data. The entire public history is compressed into early October 2025: a six-phase release plan took it from removing proprietary data through modernization, testing, vignettes, documentation and CI to a stable 1.0.0. The shipped package carries 36 curated palettes, discrete and continuous scale functions, and a rental price index dataset covering six Brazilian cities.
◆ Where it's heading
This is an internal tool being packaged for public consumption rather than a product evolving in the open — the phases were about legal separation, test coverage and check compliance, not new capability. Removing the sensitive QuintoAndar dataset and adding a disclaimer establishing independence was phase one, which frames the whole exercise. The one substantive addition along the way was the IQAIW rental index, built from a public source to replace what was removed.
◆ Prediction
With the release plan completed and the package stable, the most likely next work is periodic refreshes of the rental index dataset, which is published on an ongoing basis from 2023 onward. The entries give no indication of planned new palettes or plot functions.
hoopr
0.0ANALYTICS
hoopR rebuilds its HTTP layer on httr2 to stop segfaulting on modern systems
◆ Current state
hoopR is the sportsdataverse R package for basketball data, wrapping ESPN, NBA Stats, NBA G-League, NCAA and KenPom behind a single set of loaders. Version 3.0.0 replaces httr with httr2 across every one of those backends, drops httr from Imports, and routes all calls through shared internal retry and response helpers. The change is breaking, and it exists because the old stack segfaulted against libcurl 8.x and curl 7.0.0.
◆ Where it's heading
The package's history is two distinct eras. Through 2021-2023 it grew by endpoint accretion — ESPN stat functions, G-League coverage, the NBA live and boxscore V3 families, on-court players in play-by-play — expanding what could be pulled. The recent work is consolidation instead: one HTTP pipeline, one messaging library, data served from the shared sportsdataverse-data releases rather than per-package repositories. The centre of gravity has moved from adding endpoints to making the plumbing survive its dependencies.
◆ Prediction
With the HTTP layer unified behind shared helpers, expect the sibling sportsdataverse packages to follow the same httr2 migration, and hoopR's own next releases to resume endpoint work now that requests run through one pipeline.
Alternatives to benviplot and hoopr
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 benviplot or hoopr.
cfbfastr
College football's open data client hit v2 — and now reports how many API calls you have left.
rnpn
The USA phenology data client rebuilt its entire stack and stopped handing users -9999 as a number.
GeneNMF
GeneNMF rebuilt how it derives meta-programs, changing every result it had produced.
rempsyc
Publication-ready psychology tables and plots, tracking APA style as closely as the software allows.
sdsfun
A spatial-statistics utility package exists to be depended on, and is built accordingly.
See all benviplot alternatives → · See all hoopr alternatives →
Recent activity from benviplot and hoopr
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 4mo agohooprhoopR 3.0.0 moves every API backend to httr2 ⚡
- 10mo agobenviplotFirst stable release: 36 palettes, scales and plot helpers
- 10mo agobenviplotpkgdown site and multi-platform CI added
- 10mo agobenviplotIQAIW rental price index added for six Brazilian cities
- 10mo agobenviplotFour vignettes covering palettes, plots and theming
- 10mo agobenviplotTest suite of 196 tests, with pre-release bugs fixed
- 10mo agobenviplotBreaking 'pal' to 'palette' rename and ggplot2 4.0.0 fixes
- 2y agohooprData loaders repoint to sportsdataverse-data; NBA live endpoints
- 4y agohooprESPN stat functions and G-League coverage added
- 4y agohooprCRAN release with documented return shapes
- 4y agohooprhoopR 1.4.4
- 4y agohooprhoopR 1.4.3
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between benviplot and hoopr?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. benviplot and hoopr 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 benviplot better than hoopr?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. benviplot and hoopr 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 benviplot?
Top benviplot alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "benviplot alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/benviplot for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to hoopr?
Top hoopr alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "hoopr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/hoopr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.