simlandr
Potential landscape tooling settling onto standard R generics after two rounds of renaming.
Comparison · Analytics
gghighlight vs reliagrowr
A side-by-side editorial comparison of gghighlight and reliagrowr — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
gghighlight vs reliagrowr: at a glance
What is gghighlight?
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().
What is reliagrowr?
A reliability growth package put its models behind an MCP server for AI assistants to call.
ReliaGrowR fits reliability growth models to failure data — Crow-AMSAA and Duane, with maximum likelihood estimation, confidence bounds, prediction, and reliability demonstration test planning. The last year widened it well past growth curves into repairable systems: parametric non-homogeneous Poisson process fitting with automatic change point detection, non-parametric mean cumulative function estimation, and system exposure calculation. The most recent release adds goodness-of-fit statistics and exposes the package's functions as Model Context Protocol tools.
gghighlight vs reliagrowr: editorial side-by-side
gghighlight
0.0ANALYTICS
A single-purpose ggplot2 extension that has spent six years tracking ggplot2 instead of growing.
◆ Current state
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().
◆ Where it's heading
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.
◆ Prediction
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.
reliagrowr
0.0ANALYTICS
A reliability growth package put its models behind an MCP server for AI assistants to call.
◆ Current state
ReliaGrowR fits reliability growth models to failure data — Crow-AMSAA and Duane, with maximum likelihood estimation, confidence bounds, prediction, and reliability demonstration test planning. The last year widened it well past growth curves into repairable systems: parametric non-homogeneous Poisson process fitting with automatic change point detection, non-parametric mean cumulative function estimation, and system exposure calculation. The most recent release adds goodness-of-fit statistics and exposes the package's functions as Model Context Protocol tools.
◆ Where it's heading
Two arcs run in parallel. The statistical one is a steady march from plotting a growth curve to modelling recurrent failures properly — segmented NHPP models that detect their own change points, Nelson-Aalen estimation, Cramér-von Mises and Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistics for judging the fits. The interface one is newer and more unusual: the package now ships an MCP server, and its sibling plotting package followed with one two weeks later, so this is a deliberate direction across the maintainer's reliability suite rather than a single experiment. Naming and S3 conventions were cleaned up early, which is what made a uniform tool surface plausible later.
◆ Prediction
Given the sibling packages moved to MCP within weeks of each other, the remaining tools in the suite are the obvious next candidates; on the statistical side, goodness-of-fit having just arrived suggests model comparison and selection helpers are the natural follow-on.
Alternatives to gghighlight and reliagrowr
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 gghighlight or reliagrowr.
lavaanExtra
SEM reporting helpers converging on APA output, one CRAN resubmission at a time.
ibis.iSDM
A raster-to-terra migration is the only readable change in a feed of merge notes.
anyflights
A nycflights13 generator whose recent work is all about the data being right.
vinereg
Conditional density and log-likelihood fill out a vine copula regression package.
stringx
A drop-in string API for base R, kept alive by upstream check failures.
See all gghighlight alternatives → · See all reliagrowr alternatives →
Recent activity from gghighlight and reliagrowr
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2mo agoreliagrowrReliability growth models exposed as MCP tools ⚡
- 4mo agoreliagrowrRepairable systems analysis arrives: NHPP, MCF, exposure
- 4mo agoreliagrowrMaximum likelihood fitting and failure simulation
- 8mo agoreliagrowrReliaGrowR 0.3.2
- 9mo agoreliagrowrMore plotting and printing options for RGA and Duane models
- 10mo agoreliagrowrS3 methods replace the ad hoc plotting functions
- 1y agogghighlightggplot2 v4.0 support; geom-specific functions removed
- 2y agogghighlightTest expectations updated for upcoming ggplot2
- 3y agogghighlightline_label_type adds geomtextpath and second-axis labelling
- 4y agogghighlightDeprecated dplyr::across() usage removed
- 5y agogghighlightExplicit NULL in unhighlighted_params preserved; aesthetic name clash fixed
- 5y agogghighlightDiscrete-scale labels and n() predicates
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between gghighlight and reliagrowr?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. gghighlight and reliagrowr 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 gghighlight better than reliagrowr?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. gghighlight and reliagrowr 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 gghighlight?
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.
What are the best alternatives to reliagrowr?
Top reliagrowr alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "reliagrowr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/reliagrowr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.