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Comparison · Infra & APIs
lares vs states
A side-by-side editorial comparison of lares and states — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
lares vs states: at a glance
What is lares?
One analyst's toolbox, still shipping: Meta MMM tooling beside Wordle solvers
lares is Bernardo Lares' personal R sidekick and has never pretended otherwise — the same release adds a marketing-mix diagnostic and a function to keep your screen awake. The serious core is the Robyn/Meta arm: model selection, per-channel performance decomposition, cross-channel budget allocation. Around it sit h2o AutoML wrappers, credential and cache helpers, MP3 tagging, and a family of games.
What is states?
State-panel tooling holding steady since its 2020 data and ergonomics release.
states supplies the Gleditsch & Ward and Correlates of War state lists and the tooling to turn them into country-year or country-month panels, with plot_missing() for coverage checks. The substantive work landed in 2020; the releases since are compatibility fixes against ggplot2, dplyr, readr and testthat. The most recent entry is a single test repair.
lares vs states: editorial side-by-side
lares
0.0INFRA · APIS
One analyst's toolbox, still shipping: Meta MMM tooling beside Wordle solvers
◆ Current state
lares is Bernardo Lares' personal R sidekick and has never pretended otherwise — the same release adds a marketing-mix diagnostic and a function to keep your screen awake. The serious core is the Robyn/Meta arm: model selection, per-channel performance decomposition, cross-channel budget allocation. Around it sit h2o AutoML wrappers, credential and cache helpers, MP3 tagging, and a family of games.
◆ Where it's heading
Over two years the Robyn tooling matured first — robyn_performance() and robyn_modelselector() were rebuilt release after release through 2024 — and recent work has drifted outward into media and API plumbing: encrypted file helpers in 5.3.2, then an iTunes-first metadata path, MP3 tag writing, and a move of holidays() onto the Nager.Date API in 5.4.0. Cadence is roughly quarterly and the package has been quiet for three months.
◆ Prediction
The pattern in nearly every release is that a third-party API moves and lares follows it — Meta's version bumps, Robyn 3.12.0, now Nager.Date. Expect the next release to be another compatibility pass plus whatever utility the author needed that week; nothing in these entries points at a structural change.
states
0.0INFRA · APIS
State-panel tooling holding steady since its 2020 data and ergonomics release.
◆ Current state
states supplies the Gleditsch & Ward and Correlates of War state lists and the tooling to turn them into country-year or country-month panels, with plot_missing() for coverage checks. The substantive work landed in 2020; the releases since are compatibility fixes against ggplot2, dplyr, readr and testthat. The most recent entry is a single test repair.
◆ Where it's heading
The package has reached the point where its own data and API are settled and the release trigger is upstream churn in the tidyverse. What movement there is goes toward making the two state lists interchangeable, with the microstates coding carried from G&W onto the COW data as the clearest example, rather than toward new datasets.
◆ Prediction
The next release is most likely another compatibility pass; a data refresh would be the signal that the package is active again.
Alternatives to lares and states
Other Infra & APIs 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 lares or states.
ggalign
Composable aligned layouts, rebuilt on S7 while ggplot2 4.0 lands underneath.
prioritizr
Conservation planning absorbs the literature's target-setting rules as code.
jSDM
Joint species distribution models in Gibbs-sampled C++, quiet since 2023.
rsofun
An ecosystem model starts tracking carbon isotopes and land-use change.
usmap
Ten years in, US mapping splits its data out and finally adds Puerto Rico.
See all lares alternatives → · See all states alternatives →
Recent activity from lares and states
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 3mo agolaresNager.Date holidays, MP3 tag writing, named h2o models
- 11mo agolaresEncrypted file helpers join the credential tooling
- 0y agostatesplot_missing() test fixed for the next ggplot2
- 1y agolaresggplot2 4.0 readiness and Meta API v21
- 1y agolaresMarginal CPA inverted and multi-model performance fixed
- 1y agolaresCertainty and cluster-spread metrics for model selection
- 1y agolaresCross-channel budget allocation across several models
- 2y agostatesggplot2 and dplyr deprecation cleanup
- 2y agostatesBundled state data stripped to plain data frames
- 5y agostatesMicrostate coding for COW data and state_panel() shortcuts
- 7y agostatesSimpler defaults for state_panel() and plot_missing()
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between lares and states?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. lares and states 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 lares better than states?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. lares and states 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 Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to lares?
Top lares alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "lares alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/lares for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to states?
Top states alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "states alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/states for the full list with editorial commentary on each.