mrbayes
mrbayes spent 2026 auditing its own Bayesian MR estimators for coding errors.
Comparison · Analytics
ggsci vs vegan
A side-by-side editorial comparison of ggsci and vegan — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
ggsci vs vegan: at a glance
What is ggsci?
ggsci quietly became a palette mirror, then taught itself to generate colors on demand
ggsci ships ready-made ggplot2 color scales, originally journal and sci-fi palettes and now overwhelmingly terminal themes — the iTerm collection has grown past 400 entries and picks up 30 to 70 more with each sync. The one structural change in the recent run is gephi_palettes(), which generates distinct categorical colors for an arbitrary number of levels rather than serving a fixed list. Release cadence is steady, roughly every six to eight weeks.
What is vegan?
Community ecology's standard toolkit is retiring the functions a generation of scripts was built on.
vegan is the reference R package for ordination and diversity analysis in community ecology. The 2.7 line redesigned constrained ordination graphics from scratch, made adonis defunct in favor of adonis2, and moved permutation tests for partial RDA and db-RDA onto residualized predictors. The current 2.7-5 release is stabilization — parallel processing on Windows, ggvegan compatibility for tidy scores, and arrow label placement.
ggsci vs vegan: editorial side-by-side
ggsci
2.5ANALYTICS
ggsci quietly became a palette mirror, then taught itself to generate colors on demand
◆ Current state
ggsci ships ready-made ggplot2 color scales, originally journal and sci-fi palettes and now overwhelmingly terminal themes — the iTerm collection has grown past 400 entries and picks up 30 to 70 more with each sync. The one structural change in the recent run is gephi_palettes(), which generates distinct categorical colors for an arbitrary number of levels rather than serving a fixed list. Release cadence is steady, roughly every six to eight weeks.
◆ Where it's heading
Two threads run in parallel. The larger one is curation: ggsci has effectively become a distribution channel for upstream color work, adding design-system palettes (Primer, Atlassian, Bootstrap, Tailwind) and re-syncing iTerm as that project changes, including correcting existing color values when upstream moves. The smaller and more interesting one is generation — the Gephi engine sidesteps the ceiling every fixed palette has, which is what happens when a plot needs more categories than any curated set provides.
◆ Prediction
Given how much of the release notes each cycle is a mechanical upstream sync, the plausible next step is automating those syncs rather than adding another vendor palette by hand; the Gephi generator is the more likely place any genuinely new capability appears.
vegan
0.0ANALYTICS
Community ecology's standard toolkit is retiring the functions a generation of scripts was built on.
◆ Current state
vegan is the reference R package for ordination and diversity analysis in community ecology. The 2.7 line redesigned constrained ordination graphics from scratch, made adonis defunct in favor of adonis2, and moved permutation tests for partial RDA and db-RDA onto residualized predictors. The current 2.7-5 release is stabilization — parallel processing on Windows, ggvegan compatibility for tidy scores, and arrow label placement.
◆ Where it's heading
Two long deprecation programs are converging. Plotting is being pushed out of the package: lattice functions are deprecated in favor of ggplot2 equivalents now living in ggvegan, a separate CRAN package, while vegan's own base graphics were rebuilt around independently configurable score types and pipe-based construction. Meanwhile the statistical core is being made internally consistent — add1 and drop1 no longer use different internal models, and summary is no longer an accepted route to ordination scores.
◆ Prediction
Expect the remaining lattice functions to go defunct and more plotting responsibility to shift to ggvegan, leaving vegan as the statistical engine with a thin base graphics layer.
Alternatives to ggsci and vegan
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 ggsci or vegan.
lineup2
lineup2 ships once every few years, and 2026's release is a logo and a core-count tweak.
stringi
stringi has spent two years on build hardening since its Unicode 15.1 reset.
OHPL
A 2017 chemometrics method frozen in place, visited only when CRAN changes its documentation rules.
fastplyr
A fast dplyr stand-in that keeps finding new places to skip work entirely.
trias
Belgium's invasive-species indicator toolkit is in steady refinement, one plotting edge case at a time.
Recent activity from ggsci and vegan
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 15d agoggsciggsci 5.2.0
- 1mo agoggsciggsci 5.1.0
- 2mo agoveganParallel processing stabilized, especially on Windows
- 4mo agoggsciggsci 5.0.0 generates categorical colors instead of serving a fixed list ⚡
- 4mo agoggsciggsci 4.3.0
- 5mo agoveganLattice plotting deprecated as ggvegan reaches CRAN
- 8mo agoggsciggsci 4.2.0
- 9mo agoggsciggsci 4.1.0
- 10mo agoveganPartial RDA permutation tests adopt residualized predictors
- 1y agoveganOrdination graphics rebuilt and adonis made defunct ⚡
- 1y agoveganRelease chasing undefined behavior in a C function
- 1y agoveganpca, ca and pco added for unconstrained ordination
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between ggsci and vegan?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. ggsci 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.
Is ggsci better than vegan?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. ggsci 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.
What are the best alternatives to ggsci?
Top ggsci alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggsci alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggsci for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to vegan?
Top vegan alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "vegan alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/vegan-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.