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fastplyr vs r-ledger

A side-by-side editorial comparison of fastplyr and r-ledger — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.

Shared themes:r-package

fastplyr vs r-ledger: at a glance

Featurefastplyrr-ledger
SectorAnalyticsAnalytics
Velocity score0.00.0
Sparks · 30d00
Top themesdataframe-performance, dplyr-alternative, query-optimization, cran-policyplain-text-accounting, r-package, beancount, hledger
Last editorial update2h ago44m ago
WebsiteVisit →Visit →

What is fastplyr?

A fast dplyr stand-in that keeps finding new places to skip work entirely.

fastplyr reimplements the dplyr verbs on a faster backend, exposing f_summarise, f_mutate, f_reframe and a set of group metadata helpers alongside optimized joins and quantiles. The most recent release removes non-API C functions and raises the floor to R 4.5.0, a steep requirement that follows the C++17 requirement introduced a release earlier. The verb surface itself has been stable since 0.9.0.

Read the full fastplyr trajectory →

What is r-ledger?

ledger adds a Rust toolchain fallback, so beancount imports work whether or not the Python tooling is installed.

An R package that imports plain-text accounting files — ledger, hledger and beancount — into data frames. Releases are sparse and driven almost entirely by changes in the external command-line tools it shells out to: date format shifts, decimal mark handling, binaries being removed from upstream projects. The last two releases show more activity than the several years preceding them.

Read the full r-ledger trajectory →

fastplyr vs r-ledger: editorial side-by-side

F
fastplyr
ANALYTICS
0.0

A fast dplyr stand-in that keeps finding new places to skip work entirely.

◆ Current state

fastplyr reimplements the dplyr verbs on a faster backend, exposing f_summarise, f_mutate, f_reframe and a set of group metadata helpers alongside optimized joins and quantiles. The most recent release removes non-API C functions and raises the floor to R 4.5.0, a steep requirement that follows the C++17 requirement introduced a release earlier. The verb surface itself has been stable since 0.9.0.

◆ Where it's heading

The optimization strategy has shifted from making individual functions fast to reasoning about expressions before evaluating them — 0.9.9 began marking simple operators as group-unaware so expressions built only from them are evaluated across the whole data frame rather than per group. That is a structural bet: the package increasingly inspects what you wrote to decide how much work is actually needed. Running alongside it is a steady tightening of build requirements, with C++17, R 4.5.0 and CRAN's C API rules all landing within a year.

◆ Prediction

Expect the group-unaware classification to widen to more functions, since each addition compounds across every grouped expression, and expect the dependency floors to keep rising as the package tracks CRAN's compiled-code policy.

R
r-ledger
ANALYTICS
0.0

ledger adds a Rust toolchain fallback, so beancount imports work whether or not the Python tooling is installed.

◆ Current state

An R package that imports plain-text accounting files — ledger, hledger and beancount — into data frames. Releases are sparse and driven almost entirely by changes in the external command-line tools it shells out to: date format shifts, decimal mark handling, binaries being removed from upstream projects. The last two releases show more activity than the several years preceding them.

◆ Where it's heading

The package's job is absorbing churn in an ecosystem it does not control, and the recent releases show that ecosystem fragmenting and then being backfilled. bean-report disappeared from beancount in 2020 and its toolchains were finally deprecated in v2.0.13; v2.1.1 responds to the arrival of rustledger by adding rledger and bean-query as explicit toolchain choices and making the beancount path fall back to rledger when bean-query is absent. The other steady thread is column parity — code, id and comment columns arriving one at a time across the three register functions, so that whichever toolchain a user has produces comparable output.

◆ Prediction

Expect the remaining deprecated toolchains to be removed outright, and further column-parity work so the rledger path returns the same fields as the established ones.

Alternatives to fastplyr and r-ledger

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 fastplyr or r-ledger.

See all fastplyr alternatives → · See all r-ledger alternatives →

Recent activity from fastplyr and r-ledger

Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.

  1. 2mo agor-ledgerrustledger supported as a beancount toolchain, with automatic fallback
  2. 4mo agofastplyrNon-API C functions dropped, R 4.5.0 now required
  3. 4mo agor-ledgerbean-report toolchains deprecated; transaction code column imported
  4. 8mo agofastplyrIn-place sorting arrives with a C++17 requirement
  5. 10mo agofastplyrGroup-unaware expressions evaluated on the whole frame
  6. 1y agofastplyrf_mutate and f_reframe complete the verb set
  7. 1y agofastplyrDynamic argument evaluation and f_pull
  8. 1y agofastplyrf_fill added and grouped joins repaired
  9. 2y agor-ledgerTransaction id column for beancount and hledger; date coercion aligned
  10. 4y agor-ledgerrio moved from Imports to Suggests
  11. 6y agor-ledgerhledger date import fixed for newer hledger versions
  12. 6y agor-ledgerComma decimal marks and commodity prefixes parse correctly

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between fastplyr and r-ledger?

Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. fastplyr and r-ledger 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 fastplyr better than r-ledger?

Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. fastplyr and r-ledger 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 fastplyr?

Top fastplyr alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "fastplyr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/fastplyr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.

What are the best alternatives to r-ledger?

Top r-ledger alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "r-ledger alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ledger for the full list with editorial commentary on each.