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Comparison · Analytics
rATTAINS vs rempsyc
A side-by-side editorial comparison of rATTAINS and rempsyc — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
rATTAINS vs rempsyc: at a glance
What is rATTAINS?
The R client for EPA water quality data spent two releases undoing its own promises about data shape.
rATTAINS wraps the EPA's ATTAINS API, which holds state water quality assessments and impaired-waters listings. The package reached 1.0.0 by promising stable, consistently rectangled return structures, then walked that promise back in 1.1.0 when it dropped the dependency doing the rectangling. As of 1.2.0 it also requires an API key, because ATTAINS itself began requiring one in May 2026.
What is rempsyc?
Publication-ready psychology tables and plots, tracking APA style as closely as the software allows.
rempsyc produces APA-formatted tables and figures for psychology research — nice_table() for results tables, plus plotting helpers for scatter plots, violin plots, densities and simple slopes. Its releases are CRAN submissions that bundle a long run of development versions, so each entry reads as a digest rather than a single change. The most recent, 0.2.0, added point labelling and per-group correlation statistics to nice_scatter and fixed nice_lm() failing on factor covariates with more than two levels.
rATTAINS vs rempsyc: editorial side-by-side
rATTAINS
0.0ANALYTICS
The R client for EPA water quality data spent two releases undoing its own promises about data shape.
◆ Current state
rATTAINS wraps the EPA's ATTAINS API, which holds state water quality assessments and impaired-waters listings. The package reached 1.0.0 by promising stable, consistently rectangled return structures, then walked that promise back in 1.1.0 when it dropped the dependency doing the rectangling. As of 1.2.0 it also requires an API key, because ATTAINS itself began requiring one in May 2026.
◆ Where it's heading
The direction is toward a thinner, lower-maintenance wrapper. Caching went in 0.1.4 when hoardr was archived, tidyjson and janitor went earlier, tibblify went in 1.1.0, and each removal handed a little more data-shaping responsibility back to the user — the current advice is to pass .unnest = FALSE and rectangle the results with whatever tidying package you prefer. Release cadence is slow and mostly reactive: upstream API terms, archived dependencies, and compatibility with test tooling account for most of the log. The package's centre of gravity is staying installable and honest about what ATTAINS returns rather than smoothing it over.
◆ Prediction
Given the pattern, the next release is likelier to be a compatibility or upstream-driven fix than new endpoint coverage; how the API key requirement affects users in scripted and CI contexts is the obvious open question the entries do not yet answer.
rempsyc
0.0ANALYTICS
Publication-ready psychology tables and plots, tracking APA style as closely as the software allows.
◆ Current state
rempsyc produces APA-formatted tables and figures for psychology research — nice_table() for results tables, plus plotting helpers for scatter plots, violin plots, densities and simple slopes. Its releases are CRAN submissions that bundle a long run of development versions, so each entry reads as a digest rather than a single change. The most recent, 0.2.0, added point labelling and per-group correlation statistics to nice_scatter and fixed nice_lm() failing on factor covariates with more than two levels.
◆ Where it's heading
Two forces drive this package and neither is its own roadmap. The first is APA style: when the 7th edition advised against beta for standardized coefficients, the package switched its output to italic b with an asterisk. The second is the surrounding ecosystem — formatting is aligned to what lavaanExtra and afex produce, contrast handling was delegated to easystats' modelbased, and Excel correlation matrix export was handed entirely to the correlation package to cut maintenance.
◆ Prediction
The pattern of delegating functionality to specialist packages while keeping the formatting layer is well established and likely continues. Because releases bundle many small dev versions, the next one will probably again mix plotting refinements with fixes surfaced by upstream changes.
Alternatives to rATTAINS and rempsyc
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 rATTAINS or rempsyc.
cfbfastr
College football's open data client hit v2 — and now reports how many API calls you have left.
rnpn
The USA phenology data client rebuilt its entire stack and stopped handing users -9999 as a number.
GeneNMF
GeneNMF rebuilt how it derives meta-programs, changing every result it had produced.
sdsfun
A spatial-statistics utility package exists to be depended on, and is built accordingly.
eulerr
The area-proportional Euler diagram package is finished software, and maintained like it.
See all rATTAINS alternatives → · See all rempsyc alternatives →
Recent activity from rATTAINS and rempsyc
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agorATTAINSATTAINS now requires an API key, and the package follows
- 8mo agorATTAINSThe tibblify dependency goes, and with it the stable data shapes ⚡
- 11mo agorempsycPoint labels and per-group correlations added to nice_scatter
- 1y agorATTAINSTest suite updated for vcr v2
- 1y agorempsycExcel correlation export delegated to the correlation package
- 2y agorempsycTable spacing control and a fix for name collision with afex
- 2y agorempsycStandardized coefficients switch to APA 7th edition b* notation
- 2y agorempsycLegend and standardization-check fixes
- 2y agorempsycnice_table starts coercing model objects automatically
- 3y agorATTAINS1.0.0 commits to stable return structures via tibblify
- 3y agorATTAINSCaching removed after hoardr was archived
- 4y agorATTAINSRequests retry on timeout, with offline detection
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between rATTAINS and rempsyc?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. rATTAINS and rempsyc 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 rATTAINS better than rempsyc?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. rATTAINS and rempsyc 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 rATTAINS?
Top rATTAINS alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "rATTAINS alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/rattains for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to rempsyc?
Top rempsyc alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "rempsyc alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/rempsyc for the full list with editorial commentary on each.