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r-ledger vs spmodel

A side-by-side editorial comparison of r-ledger and spmodel — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.

Shared themes:r-package

r-ledger vs spmodel: at a glance

Featurer-ledgerspmodel
SectorAnalyticsAnalytics
Velocity score0.00.0
Sparks · 30d00
Top themesplain-text-accounting, r-package, beancount, hledgerspatial-statistics, regression-modelling, kriging, r-package
Last editorial update56m ago5h ago
WebsiteVisit →Visit →

What is r-ledger?

ledger adds a Rust toolchain fallback, so beancount imports work whether or not the Python tooling is installed.

An R package that imports plain-text accounting files — ledger, hledger and beancount — into data frames. Releases are sparse and driven almost entirely by changes in the external command-line tools it shells out to: date format shifts, decimal mark handling, binaries being removed from upstream projects. The last two releases show more activity than the several years preceding them.

Read the full r-ledger trajectory →

What is spmodel?

Spatial regression in R, adding block kriging and then tuning the numerics underneath it

spmodel fits spatial linear and generalised linear models, for both point-referenced and areal data, with prediction and diagnostics attached. Block prediction arrived in 0.11.0 and the releases since have refined it. The most recent release changes optimiser behaviour: the default Nelder-Mead relative stopping tolerance tightens from 1e-4 to 1e-6 to reduce convergence on local rather than global maxima.

Read the full spmodel trajectory →

r-ledger vs spmodel: editorial side-by-side

R
r-ledger
ANALYTICS
0.0

ledger adds a Rust toolchain fallback, so beancount imports work whether or not the Python tooling is installed.

◆ Current state

An R package that imports plain-text accounting files — ledger, hledger and beancount — into data frames. Releases are sparse and driven almost entirely by changes in the external command-line tools it shells out to: date format shifts, decimal mark handling, binaries being removed from upstream projects. The last two releases show more activity than the several years preceding them.

◆ Where it's heading

The package's job is absorbing churn in an ecosystem it does not control, and the recent releases show that ecosystem fragmenting and then being backfilled. bean-report disappeared from beancount in 2020 and its toolchains were finally deprecated in v2.0.13; v2.1.1 responds to the arrival of rustledger by adding rledger and bean-query as explicit toolchain choices and making the beancount path fall back to rledger when bean-query is absent. The other steady thread is column parity — code, id and comment columns arriving one at a time across the three register functions, so that whichever toolchain a user has produces comparable output.

◆ Prediction

Expect the remaining deprecated toolchains to be removed outright, and further column-parity work so the rledger path returns the same fields as the established ones.

S
spmodel
ANALYTICS
0.0

Spatial regression in R, adding block kriging and then tuning the numerics underneath it

◆ Current state

spmodel fits spatial linear and generalised linear models, for both point-referenced and areal data, with prediction and diagnostics attached. Block prediction arrived in 0.11.0 and the releases since have refined it. The most recent release changes optimiser behaviour: the default Nelder-Mead relative stopping tolerance tightens from 1e-4 to 1e-6 to reduce convergence on local rather than global maxima.

◆ Where it's heading

Two threads run in parallel. The first is expanding what can be predicted — point predictions, then areal averages over a region via block kriging, then better accuracy and efficiency for that path as the block size default moved from 1000 to 4000 in 0.12.0. The second is numerical trustworthiness, and it is unusually prominent here: a range-constraint option for stability in 0.9.0, a corrected log determinant of the fixed effects in the restricted log likelihood in 0.11.0, a cloud semivariogram that had been doubling the semivariance fixed in 0.11.1, and now a tighter optimiser tolerance. Several of these silently changed results before they were caught.

◆ Prediction

Expect the maintainers to keep publishing explicit reproduction instructions alongside numerical default changes, as 0.13.0 does by documenting the `control = list(reltol = 1e-4)` escape hatch. The entries give no signal of expansion beyond the current model families.

Alternatives to r-ledger and spmodel

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 r-ledger or spmodel.

See all r-ledger alternatives → · See all spmodel alternatives →

Recent activity from r-ledger and spmodel

Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.

  1. 2mo agor-ledgerrustledger supported as a beancount toolchain, with automatic fallback
  2. 2mo agospmodelTighter optimiser tolerance to avoid local maxima
  3. 4mo agor-ledgerbean-report toolchains deprecated; transaction code column imported
  4. 6mo agospmodelEmpirical autocovariance function and better block kriging accuracy
  5. 9mo agospmodelCloud semivariogram doubling fixed; geometry warnings added
  6. 1y agospmodelBlock kriging for areal averages and their uncertainty
  7. 1y agospmodelRobust semivariogram and new covariance types for areal models
  8. 1y agospmodelRange constraint option and redefined covariance type names
  9. 2y agor-ledgerTransaction id column for beancount and hledger; date coercion aligned
  10. 4y agor-ledgerrio moved from Imports to Suggests
  11. 6y agor-ledgerhledger date import fixed for newer hledger versions
  12. 6y agor-ledgerComma decimal marks and commodity prefixes parse correctly

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between r-ledger and spmodel?

Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. r-ledger and spmodel 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 r-ledger better than spmodel?

Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. r-ledger and spmodel 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.

What are the best alternatives to r-ledger?

Top r-ledger alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "r-ledger alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ledger for the full list with editorial commentary on each.

What are the best alternatives to spmodel?

Top spmodel alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "spmodel alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/spmodel for the full list with editorial commentary on each.