fillpattern
Pattern fills for ggplot2, hardened against the ways users write sizes
A side-by-side editorial comparison of ggstats and quantmod — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
ggstats keeps widening what a coefficient or Likert plot can be
ggstats extends ggplot2 with statistical plotting: model coefficient plots, Likert and diverging bar charts, proportion geometries and the helpers that make them behave. Recent releases have added an experimental gglikert_side(), left and right total columns for gglikert(), and survey-object support across the Likert family. Development is steady and CRAN-paced, with releases every two to three months.
The R finance workhorse spends its releases absorbing what data vendors break
quantmod pulls market data into R and charts it, and has been in maintenance for years. The last six releases are dominated by upstream breakage: Yahoo Finance crumb authentication, a batch-size ceiling dropping from 199 to 99 symbols, GDPR consent failures, repeated URL changes at FRED and OANDA. Genuine additions are rare and small — a ClOp() return function, an intraday endpoint, better ambiguous-column detection.
ggstats extends ggplot2 with statistical plotting: model coefficient plots, Likert and diverging bar charts, proportion geometries and the helpers that make them behave. Recent releases have added an experimental gglikert_side(), left and right total columns for gglikert(), and survey-object support across the Likert family. Development is steady and CRAN-paced, with releases every two to three months.
Two long-running threads. The coefficient side has been consolidating — ggcoef_multinom() and ggcoef_multicomponents() soft-deprecated in favour of a unified ggcoef_model() with group_by, plus new ggcoef_dodged() and ggcoef_faceted() variants. The Likert side keeps expanding outward instead, absorbing survey objects, total columns and side-by-side layouts. Underneath both is a steady tax of ggplot2 and vctrs compatibility work, including tracking the geom_errorbarh() deprecation in ggplot2 4.0.0.
Expect gglikert_side() to lose its experimental status once its interface settles, and the deprecated multinomial entry points to be removed in a future release now that ggcoef_model() covers their cases.
quantmod pulls market data into R and charts it, and has been in maintenance for years. The last six releases are dominated by upstream breakage: Yahoo Finance crumb authentication, a batch-size ceiling dropping from 199 to 99 symbols, GDPR consent failures, repeated URL changes at FRED and OANDA. Genuine additions are rare and small — a ClOp() return function, an intraday endpoint, better ambiguous-column detection.
The pattern is a package whose cadence is set by other people's API changes rather than its own roadmap. Releases arrive when a data source breaks, and the changelog reads as a list of reports from users who hit the failure first. The FRED API key requirement in the latest release is the same story again — a free source adding registration, and quantmod adding an argument and a nudge to comply. Deprecation work on as.zoo.data.frame has been running since at least 0.4.27 without completing.
Nothing in these entries points to a planned feature; the next release will most likely be triggered by whichever vendor endpoint changes first.
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 ggstats or quantmod.
Pattern fills for ggplot2, hardened against the ways users write sizes
gcube's recent releases are all packaging metadata, not simulation code
The R port of Quinlan's Cubist gets reproducibility fixes, not new modelling
ecodive rebuilt itself into a broad diversity-metric library, breaking as it went
State-space data simulation for R, filled in one function at a time
rollama turns a local-LLM wrapper into an instrument for reproducible annotation
See all ggstats alternatives → · See all quantmod alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. ggstats and quantmod 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.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. ggstats and quantmod 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.
Top ggstats alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggstats alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggstats for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top quantmod alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "quantmod alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/quantmod for the full list with editorial commentary on each.