PurpleAir
The R client for PurpleAir sensors keeps finding its time-averaging was wrong.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of haze and reliaplotr — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Four dormant years end with a modernization pass and an off-by-one fix in the C++ core
haze does nearest-neighbour smoothing and k-d tree interpolation on brain surface meshes. It sat untouched from April 2022 until July 2026, when a single release modernized it for current R versions and corrected an off-by-one error in the C++ code. It is not on CRAN and never will be — the package exceeds 50MB against CRAN's 5MB ceiling, a constraint its own initial release notes acknowledge.
The Weibull plotting package renamed itself, then handed its charts to AI assistants.
ReliaPlotR draws interactive reliability plots with plotly — probability plots, contour plots, Duane and reliability growth charts, accelerated life testing plots by stress level, mean cumulative function curves for repairable systems, and exposure plots. It was WeibullR.plotly until late 2025, and the rename tracked a real widening of scope rather than just a label change. The current release adds tidy extractors that turn fitted model objects into data frames, and an MCP server exposing five of its fit and plot functions as tools.
haze does nearest-neighbour smoothing and k-d tree interpolation on brain surface meshes. It sat untouched from April 2022 until July 2026, when a single release modernized it for current R versions and corrected an off-by-one error in the C++ code. It is not on CRAN and never will be — the package exceeds 50MB against CRAN's 5MB ceiling, a constraint its own initial release notes acknowledge.
The July 2026 release arrived 56 minutes after its sibling regfusionr 0.3.0 from the same maintainer, which is the tell: this is a maintainer sweeping a set of related neuroimaging packages back into working order, not independent development on haze itself. haze is the dependency, regfusionr the consumer, and the substantive work sits on the regfusionr side. The off-by-one correction is the only change here that alters results.
Expect haze to move only when a downstream dfsp-spirit package needs it to — its cadence is driven by the sibling packages, not by its own roadmap.
ReliaPlotR draws interactive reliability plots with plotly — probability plots, contour plots, Duane and reliability growth charts, accelerated life testing plots by stress level, mean cumulative function curves for repairable systems, and exposure plots. It was WeibullR.plotly until late 2025, and the rename tracked a real widening of scope rather than just a label change. The current release adds tidy extractors that turn fitted model objects into data frames, and an MCP server exposing five of its fit and plot functions as tools.
The package has been following its analysis siblings function for function: as accelerated life testing and repairable systems modelling landed in the wider suite, the matching plot types appeared here, and when the growth-analysis package shipped an MCP server, this one followed two weeks later. The tidy extractors point the same way — a plotting package that can also return parameter estimates, goodness-of-fit metrics, and confidence bounds as tidy frames is one designed to be consumed programmatically, by a pipeline or an assistant, not only read on screen. Overlaying multiple model fits on a single plot has been a recurring request answered across several releases.
Expect the tidy extractor and MCP tool surfaces to keep expanding together, since each new plot type in the suite now implies both a chart and a machine-readable version of what it shows.
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 haze or reliaplotr.
The R client for PurpleAir sensors keeps finding its time-averaging was wrong.
A board game graphics package runs one of the most disciplined deprecation cycles in R.
The explainable-ensemble-tree package now measures whether its own explanations are faithful.
The discrete-data FDR package is being pared into one piece of a larger multiple-testing suite.
A scientific-text analysis package moved from counting citations to classifying argument structure.
The teaching arm of an R reliability suite keeps pace with whatever its analysis siblings ship.
See all haze alternatives → · See all reliaplotr alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. haze 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. haze 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 haze alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "haze alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/haze for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top reliaplotr alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "reliaplotr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/reliaplotr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.