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Comparison · Infra & APIs
crandep vs hereR
A side-by-side editorial comparison of crandep and hereR — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
crandep vs hereR: at a glance
What is crandep?
Half CRAN dependency scraper, half extreme-value modelling kit — and the scraper half keeps finding bugs.
crandep does two jobs that rarely share a package: it harvests the CRAN dependency network, and it fits power-law and extreme-value mixture models to the resulting degree distributions. The 2024 releases were all model work — profile posteriors, wrappers, a constrained variant, a TZP-power-law mixture between the two- and three-component models. The 2025 releases are entirely the other half, fixing what the harvester was silently getting wrong.
What is hereR?
An R client for HERE's location APIs, shaped almost entirely by what the vendor exposes next.
hereR wraps HERE's routing, isoline, traffic, weather and geocoding endpoints for R, returning sf objects. Development is steady and reactive: each release either adopts a transport mode, parameter or API version HERE has newly made available, or corrects a rate limit that was producing 429 errors in practice. The current release adds speed-limit control and five more isoline transport modes.
crandep vs hereR: editorial side-by-side
crandep
0.0INFRA · APIS
Half CRAN dependency scraper, half extreme-value modelling kit — and the scraper half keeps finding bugs.
◆ Current state
crandep does two jobs that rarely share a package: it harvests the CRAN dependency network, and it fits power-law and extreme-value mixture models to the resulting degree distributions. The 2024 releases were all model work — profile posteriors, wrappers, a constrained variant, a TZP-power-law mixture between the two- and three-component models. The 2025 releases are entirely the other half, fixing what the harvester was silently getting wrong.
◆ Where it's heading
The modelling side has settled into a family of mixtures with matching wrapper and profile-posterior functions, and has not gained a new component since mid-2024. Attention has shifted to data quality in the scraper, where two consecutive releases dealt with the same class of problem: rows that should not exist because of trailing commas in CRAN's own metadata, and rows that should exist but did not because orphan packages have no edges. For a package whose science is degree distributions, missing isolated nodes is a modelling error, not a formatting one.
◆ Prediction
Expect further hardening against CRAN metadata quirks in the harvesting functions; the mixture-model side looks feature-complete and is likely to stay quiet unless a new component model is published.
hereR
0.0INFRA · APIS
An R client for HERE's location APIs, shaped almost entirely by what the vendor exposes next.
◆ Current state
hereR wraps HERE's routing, isoline, traffic, weather and geocoding endpoints for R, returning sf objects. Development is steady and reactive: each release either adopts a transport mode, parameter or API version HERE has newly made available, or corrects a rate limit that was producing 429 errors in practice. The current release adds speed-limit control and five more isoline transport modes.
◆ Where it's heading
Two threads run through the whole history. One is coverage — new modes, tolls and currency, arrival times, speed limits — arriving in the package shortly after they appear in HERE's API. The other is defensive operational tuning, with request rates repeatedly lowered below HERE's documented limits because the documented limits do not hold up. 1.0.0 was the one moment the package had to move rather than choose, migrating traffic to v7 and weather to v3 and breaking three functions' output in the process.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next release to enable whatever HERE exposes next in routing or isolines, and to keep adjusting request rates empirically; the package's own design appears settled.
Alternatives to crandep and hereR
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 crandep or hereR.
NGINX
nginx returns to feature work with PROXY v2 upstream writes, and quietly adds JSON to core.
ESPHome
ESPHome closes the 2026.8 cycle, but the release body is a bare link to the real notes.
vcfR
A genomics workhorse whose visible release feed stops dead in mid-2020.
dialr
The R phone-number package stopped only parsing numbers and started asking them where they are.
ggVennDiagram
A Venn diagram package whose public release notes say almost nothing — including about its copyright cleanup.
See all crandep alternatives → · See all hereR alternatives →
Recent activity from crandep and hereR
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1y agocrandepDependency harvest split in two so orphan packages stop disappearing
- 1y agocrandepTrailing commas in CRAN metadata no longer produce empty-name rows
- 1y agohereRSpeed limits and five more isoline transport modes
- 1y agohereRPedestrian consumption model dropped; route request rate lowered
- 2y agocrandepConstrained two-component mixture with continuity at the threshold
- 2y agocrandepArgument names normalised to x_max; MCMC wrapper defaults set
- 2y agocrandepTZP-power-law mixture fills the gap between the 2- and 3-component models
- 2y agocrandepProfile posteriors and chained MCMC wrappers for the mixture models
- 2y agohereRTraffic v7 and Weather v3 migration breaks three functions
- 3y agohereRResubmission after CRAN archival over an undeliverable email
- 4y agohereRToll costs and currency selection arrive in routing
- 4y agohereRArrival-time routing enabled; failed requests report their endpoint
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between crandep and hereR?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Infra & APIs. crandep and hereR 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 crandep better than hereR?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. crandep and hereR 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 crandep?
Top crandep alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "crandep alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/crandep for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to hereR?
Top hereR alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "hereR alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/herer for the full list with editorial commentary on each.