OHPL
A 2017 chemometrics method frozen in place, visited only when CRAN changes its documentation rules.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of ggcorrplot and MVMR — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
ggcorrplot came back after four years and found its significance markers had been lying
ggcorrplot draws correlation matrices in ggplot2 with optional significance marking and hierarchical reordering. It sat untouched from late 2022 until mid-2026, then shipped 0.2.0 and 0.3.0 sixteen days apart. Between them they added the display options users had been requesting since 2016 and repaired a set of bugs where hc.order = TRUE silently changed which cells were marked significant.
MVMR spent 2026 discovering its own estimators had been returning the wrong numbers
MVMR implements multivariable Mendelian randomization — conditional instrument strength, pleiotropy tests and heterogeneity-robust effect estimation from GWAS summary data. The package has been releasing steadily through 2026, and the substantive releases are all corrections rather than features. Two core routines were found to be computing the wrong quantity outright: qhet_mvmr() built weights from the minimised objective value instead of the minimiser, and strhet_mvmr() never minimised the Q-statistic at all.
ggcorrplot draws correlation matrices in ggplot2 with optional significance marking and hierarchical reordering. It sat untouched from late 2022 until mid-2026, then shipped 0.2.0 and 0.3.0 sixteen days apart. Between them they added the display options users had been requesting since 2016 and repaired a set of bugs where hc.order = TRUE silently changed which cells were marked significant.
Both releases chase the same target: parity with the older corrplot package inside a ggplot2 object. Significance stars appended to coefficient labels, circle scaling, decimal control, then boxed cells and glyphs sized by absolute correlation — these are corrplot's visual vocabulary reimplemented where they can be composed with other ggplot2 layers. The bug fixes point the other way, at foundations: p-values matched to cells by name rather than row position, clustering computed on the unrounded matrix, tl.col actually applied.
With the corrplot look largely reproduced and the correctness backlog cleared, the remaining gap is the mixed upper/lower display corrplot supports; that is the natural next argument if the current release pace holds.
MVMR implements multivariable Mendelian randomization — conditional instrument strength, pleiotropy tests and heterogeneity-robust effect estimation from GWAS summary data. The package has been releasing steadily through 2026, and the substantive releases are all corrections rather than features. Two core routines were found to be computing the wrong quantity outright: qhet_mvmr() built weights from the minimised objective value instead of the minimiser, and strhet_mvmr() never minimised the Q-statistic at all.
This is a sustained audit, not a maintenance drift. Each release since February has fixed a specific analytical defect — omitted intercepts in the exposure-on-genotype regressions, a division by zero when a gencov list held exactly two variants, covariance matrices computed wrongly for matrix inputs, a spurious covariance warning — and several explicitly warn that reported values will differ from previous versions. The strhet_mvmr() rewrite to iteratively reweighted least squares also removes a combinatorial grid that could exhaust memory past three exposures, so the function is now usable as well as correct.
The corrections have been walking through the package function by function, and the ones with published fixes so far are the heterogeneity and covariance routines; the remaining untouched estimators are the natural next stop if the audit continues at this pace.
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 ggcorrplot or MVMR.
A 2017 chemometrics method frozen in place, visited only when CRAN changes its documentation rules.
A fast dplyr stand-in that keeps finding new places to skip work entirely.
Belgium's invasive-species indicator toolkit is in steady refinement, one plotting edge case at a time.
The ICES stock assessment client took upload away in 2024 and spent two years giving it back.
A discrete global grid generator grew cell traversal and became a usable spatial index.
Community ecology's standard toolkit is retiring the functions a generation of scripts was built on.
See all ggcorrplot alternatives → · See all MVMR alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r — within Analytics. ggcorrplot is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. 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. ggcorrplot is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
Top ggcorrplot alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggcorrplot alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggcorrplot for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top MVMR alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "MVMR alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mvmr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.