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Comparison · Infra & APIs
forestploter vs profileCI
A side-by-side editorial comparison of forestploter and profileCI — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
forestploter vs profileCI: at a glance
What is forestploter?
A forest plot package that keeps handing users control of one more graphical detail.
forestploter draws forest plots where the layout is driven by the data frame itself, so text columns and confidence intervals sit in the same grid. The theme function has become the package's centre of gravity: it now controls graphical parameters for titles, legends, axis, arrow labels, footnotes, and reference lines, with multi-column and row-order legend controls added most recently. Two releases shipped nine minutes apart in April 2026 after a two-year gap, deprecating some theme parameters, removing inter-cell gaps, and improving tick breaks.
What is profileCI?
Profile-likelihood confidence intervals for any fitted model, in a feed that publishes out of order.
profileCI computes confidence intervals from the profile log-likelihood for user-supplied fitted models, generalising what confint.glm does for GLMs to any model object exposing a log-likelihood. The releases handle the awkward cases that make profiling fail in practice: infinite limits when the profile never drops below the interval threshold, bounded profiling ranges, and interpolation that breaks down near the limits. Only convex log-likelihoods are supported, so disjoint intervals are out of scope by design.
forestploter vs profileCI: editorial side-by-side
forestploter
0.0INFRA · APIS
A forest plot package that keeps handing users control of one more graphical detail.
◆ Current state
forestploter draws forest plots where the layout is driven by the data frame itself, so text columns and confidence intervals sit in the same grid. The theme function has become the package's centre of gravity: it now controls graphical parameters for titles, legends, axis, arrow labels, footnotes, and reference lines, with multi-column and row-order legend controls added most recently. Two releases shipped nine minutes apart in April 2026 after a two-year gap, deprecating some theme parameters, removing inter-cell gaps, and improving tick breaks.
◆ Where it's heading
The direction has been consistent for four years: whatever a user might want to restyle eventually becomes an argument. Point size stopped being transformed, cell height adjustment was removed as unwanted, legends gained size, column, and fill-order control, and vertical lines learned to extend the full plot height and to draw beneath the whiskers. The one structural move was 1.1.0, which let callers supply their own confidence-interval and summary drawing functions — turning a fixed renderer into an extensible one. Everything since has been the arguments that extensibility did not cover.
◆ Prediction
The latest release deprecates theme parameters rather than adding them, which suggests the next one consolidates the theme surface that has grown for four years rather than extending it further.
profileCI
0.0INFRA · APIS
Profile-likelihood confidence intervals for any fitted model, in a feed that publishes out of order.
◆ Current state
profileCI computes confidence intervals from the profile log-likelihood for user-supplied fitted models, generalising what confint.glm does for GLMs to any model object exposing a log-likelihood. The releases handle the awkward cases that make profiling fail in practice: infinite limits when the profile never drops below the interval threshold, bounded profiling ranges, and interpolation that breaks down near the limits. Only convex log-likelihoods are supported, so disjoint intervals are out of scope by design.
◆ Where it's heading
Work is concentrated on numerical reliability rather than scope: 1.1.1 replaced quadratic with monotonic cubic spline interpolation because the quadratic form could fail, and corrected parameter values stored near the confidence limits. The feed publishes these out of order, with the v1.0.0 entry stamped six months after v1.1.0 and carrying the package's full description rather than a changelog, so release order should be read from the version numbers rather than the dates. The same maintainer's revdbayes has been in pure maintenance across this period, which places profileCI as the more active project.
◆ Prediction
Expect further robustness work at the profiling limits and more logLikFn methods for common model classes, following the nls method added in 1.1.0.
Alternatives to forestploter and profileCI
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 forestploter or profileCI.
WPML
WPML made machine translation the default, and its point releases keep chasing WordPress and page builders.
ggInterval
Interval-valued data plotting, spending 2026 making its function names and examples survive CRAN.
rgm
A microbiome network model that got itself un-archived by deleting the dependency that killed it.
contagionchannels
Three releases in ten days, every one of them a CRAN reviewer's correction rather than a code change.
tidyaudit
Pipeline provenance for tidyverse workflows, recording what changed at each step without keeping the data.
See all forestploter alternatives → · See all profileCI alternatives →
Recent activity from forestploter and profileCI
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 3mo agoforestploterTheme parameters deprecated; cell gaps removed, ticks improved
- 3mo agoforestploterMulti-column legends and full-height vertical lines
- 6mo agoprofileCICubic spline interpolation replaces a quadratic that could fail
- 7mo agoprofileCICRAN 1.0.0 release of profile-likelihood interval computation
- 1y agoprofileCIInfinite limits and bounded profiling ranges handled
- 2y agoforestploterFull graphical control over titles, legends, axis and footnotes
- 2y agoforestploterTick digit calculation improved; automatic cell height removed
- 3y agoforestploterCustom CI and summary drawing functions; boxplots inside the plot
- 3y agoforestploterArbitrary grobs and math symbols can be placed in cells
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between forestploter and profileCI?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Infra & APIs. forestploter and profileCI 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 forestploter better than profileCI?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. forestploter and profileCI 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 forestploter?
Top forestploter alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "forestploter alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/forestploter for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to profileCI?
Top profileCI alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "profileCI alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/profileci for the full list with editorial commentary on each.