simlandr
Potential landscape tooling settling onto standard R generics after two rounds of renaming.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of eulerr and gghighlight — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
The area-proportional Euler diagram package is finished software, and maintained like it.
eulerr generates area-proportional Euler and Venn diagrams by numerically optimizing shape positions and sizes to match set relationships, with the fitting done in C++. The last feature release was 7.0.0 in December 2022, which made the optimization's loss function user-selectable. Everything since has been maintenance: documentation URL corrections, a strip-layout fix when grouping, an Armadillo deprecation, and an R CMD check warning about an unignored config file.
A single-purpose ggplot2 extension that has spent six years tracking ggplot2 instead of growing.
gghighlight adds one verb to ggplot2: highlight the series matching a predicate and grey out the rest, with unhighlighted_params controlling how the shadowed layer renders and calculate_per_facet deciding whether the predicate evaluates within facets. The API settled at 0.2.0; the 0.5.0 release supports ggplot2 v4.0 including its ink and paper theme elements, and finally deletes gghighlight_point() and gghighlight_line().
eulerr generates area-proportional Euler and Venn diagrams by numerically optimizing shape positions and sizes to match set relationships, with the fitting done in C++. The last feature release was 7.0.0 in December 2022, which made the optimization's loss function user-selectable. Everything since has been maintenance: documentation URL corrections, a strip-layout fix when grouping, an Armadillo deprecation, and an R CMD check warning about an unignored config file.
This is a mature package whose problem is solved, and the release pattern reflects that — three of the last four releases changed nothing a user would see. What activity remains is tracking its dependencies rather than its own roadmap: keeping up with Armadillo's deprecations and R CMD check policy is the whole of recent work. The two September 2025 releases an hour apart are a fix and its follow-up, not a development cycle restarting.
The pattern points to continued upkeep triggered by upstream C++ and CRAN check changes rather than new capability. If anything does move, the configurable loss function added in 7.0.0 is the surface with room left in it.
gghighlight adds one verb to ggplot2: highlight the series matching a predicate and grey out the rest, with unhighlighted_params controlling how the shadowed layer renders and calculate_per_facet deciding whether the predicate evaluates within facets. The API settled at 0.2.0; the 0.5.0 release supports ggplot2 v4.0 including its ink and paper theme elements, and finally deletes gghighlight_point() and gghighlight_line().
Two threads run through the history. One is a slow deprecation, from soft-deprecating the geom-specific functions at 0.1.0, to defunct at 0.3.0, to removed at 0.5.0 — a five-year removal cycle. The other is compatibility work: purrr 1.0.0, dplyr's across() deprecation, ggplot2 3.4.0, then 4.0. Genuine feature additions are rare and small, with line_label_type at 0.4.0 the last one. Note that 0.3.2's notes restate 0.3.1's n() item, so adjacent tags here overlap rather than each describing distinct work.
The next release most likely absorbs further ggplot2 4.x changes, given that is what triggered the last three. Nothing in the entries points to a new highlighting capability.
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 eulerr or gghighlight.
Potential landscape tooling settling onto standard R generics after two rounds of renaming.
SEM reporting helpers converging on APA output, one CRAN resubmission at a time.
A raster-to-terra migration is the only readable change in a feed of merge notes.
A nycflights13 generator whose recent work is all about the data being right.
Conditional density and log-likelihood fill out a vine copula regression package.
A drop-in string API for base R, kept alive by upstream check failures.
See all eulerr alternatives → · See all gghighlight alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. eulerr and gghighlight 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. eulerr and gghighlight 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 eulerr alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "eulerr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/eulerr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top gghighlight alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "gghighlight alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/gghighlight for the full list with editorial commentary on each.