STACAS
Single-cell batch correction that learned to use cell labels, then spent three releases chasing Seurat.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of benviplot and labelled — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
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.
The bridge between Stata/SPSS labelled data and tidy R keeps widening, one integration at a time.
labelled manages variable labels, value labels and user-defined missing values on data imported from Stata, SPSS and SAS, filling the gap between those formats' metadata and R's native types. Recent releases have pushed outward from the core label accessors: survey design objects from the survey package are now supported throughout, look_for() results can be rendered as formatted gt tables, and dictionary data frames convert in both directions. Error messaging moved wholesale to cli in 2.14.0.
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.
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.
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.
labelled manages variable labels, value labels and user-defined missing values on data imported from Stata, SPSS and SAS, filling the gap between those formats' metadata and R's native types. Recent releases have pushed outward from the core label accessors: survey design objects from the survey package are now supported throughout, look_for() results can be rendered as formatted gt tables, and dictionary data frames convert in both directions. Error messaging moved wholesale to cli in 2.14.0.
The arc is toward being usable wherever labelled data ends up, not just where it is loaded. Each recent release either extends support to another object type — survey designs, packed columns, plain vectors, tibbles with list columns — or adds a conversion path between labels and some other representation. The look_for() search function has become a second centre of gravity alongside the label accessors, accumulating its own output formats and long-format conversions.
The pattern of adding compatibility with one more object type or output format per release is stable and likely continues. Nothing in these entries indicates a change to the underlying haven_labelled representation the package is built on.
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 labelled.
Single-cell batch correction that learned to use cell labels, then spent three releases chasing Seurat.
A debugger for ggplot2's internals, hardening its grip as the internals it traces keep moving.
A univariate density estimator that added zero-inflated data and reopened its C++ API to do it.
Stationary vine copulas for time series, released in lockstep with the rest of Nagler's vine stack.
A single-purpose ggplot2 extension that has spent six years tracking ggplot2 instead of growing.
A Star Trek data package that became a Memory Alpha web client and has been patching scrapers ever since.
See all benviplot alternatives → · See all labelled alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. benviplot and labelled 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.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. benviplot and labelled 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.
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.
Top labelled alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "labelled alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/labelled for the full list with editorial commentary on each.