billboarder
An htmlwidget whose release notes are mostly billboard.js version bumps, quiet since 2021.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of haven and tsibble — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
haven's release cadence has narrowed to compiler and R-devel upkeep.
haven is the tidyverse's bridge to SPSS, Stata and SAS files, wrapping the C ReadStat library. The last several releases are almost entirely maintenance: syncing vendored ReadStat and patching ahead of R-devel changes. The most recent substantive user-facing work landed in 2.5.2 and earlier.
tsibble shipped one release in five and a half years - the data structure is finished
tsibble defines the tidy time-series data structure that fable and feasts are built on. The design churned heavily through 2018 and 2019, settled with the 0.9.0 move onto vctrs in mid-2020, and then went quiet: the next release, 1.2.0, arrived in February 2026 with a summary() method and some tidyselect helpers.
haven is the tidyverse's bridge to SPSS, Stata and SAS files, wrapping the C ReadStat library. The last several releases are almost entirely maintenance: syncing vendored ReadStat and patching ahead of R-devel changes. The most recent substantive user-facing work landed in 2.5.2 and earlier.
Development has shifted from extending the file-format surface to keeping a C dependency compiling against newer toolchains. The deprecation of write_sas() narrowed that surface deliberately, steering users to write_xpt() because the sas7bdat format is undocumented and unsupported upstream.
Expect further ReadStat sync releases triggered by compiler or R-devel breakage rather than new format support or writing features.
tsibble defines the tidy time-series data structure that fable and feasts are built on. The design churned heavily through 2018 and 2019, settled with the 0.9.0 move onto vctrs in mid-2020, and then went quiet: the next release, 1.2.0, arrived in February 2026 with a summary() method and some tidyselect helpers.
This is a package that reached its final shape and stopped. The early releases are a rapid sequence of breaking changes to the key and interval metadata, each one warning that previously stored objects are corrupt; once the interval became a formal vctrs record type there was nothing structural left to change. The five-year gap is the trajectory, not a lapse.
Expect further releases to be small compatibility and convenience additions at long intervals; with the type system settled and windowing delegated to slider, there is no visible pressure for another breaking change.
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 haven or tsibble.
An htmlwidget whose release notes are mostly billboard.js version bumps, quiet since 2021.
bbotk is generalizing from an optimizer toolkit into an evaluation framework.
bayesplot keeps widening its posterior-check catalogue while absorbing each ggplot2 break.
Contribution-driven maintenance on a package whose last structural change was magick support.
pins keeps adding a storage backend per release while retiring its original API
yardstick made fairness metrics a first-class part of tidymodels evaluation
See all haven alternatives → · See all tsibble alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. haven and tsibble 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. haven and tsibble 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 haven alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "haven alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/haven for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top tsibble alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "tsibble alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/tsibble for the full list with editorial commentary on each.