rjdqa
rjdqa keeps refining one screen: the seasonal adjustment quality dashboard
Comparison · Analytics
redist vs wasserportal
A side-by-side editorial comparison of redist and wasserportal — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
redist vs wasserportal: at a glance
What is redist?
redist keeps rewriting the sampler underneath a district-drawing API it has held stable since 4.0.
redist simulates redistricting plans via sequential Monte Carlo, merge-split MCMC and short-burst optimization, and it is the analysis tool behind a good deal of published districting work. The user-facing shape was set by 4.0.1's constraint interface and the split of metrics into the redistmetrics package; since then the changes are in the algorithms. The most consequential recent one replaces the SMC label-counting adjustment with a backward kernel that removes approximation error outright.
What is wasserportal?
A Berlin groundwater scraper grew a full IoT publishing pipeline in two days.
wasserportal scrapes groundwater and surface water monitoring data from Wasserportal Berlin — station metadata, water levels, quality series. For its first four years that was the whole product, with releases tracking the portal's own churn: a new API version in 2023, new three-letter variable codes, and a 2026 fix decoding pages as windows-1252 because the server declares UTF-8 but emits Latin-1. In June 2026 it added a ThingsBoard integration, then extended it to self-hosted instances two days later.
redist vs wasserportal: editorial side-by-side
redist
0.0ANALYTICS
redist keeps rewriting the sampler underneath a district-drawing API it has held stable since 4.0.
◆ Current state
redist simulates redistricting plans via sequential Monte Carlo, merge-split MCMC and short-burst optimization, and it is the analysis tool behind a good deal of published districting work. The user-facing shape was set by 4.0.1's constraint interface and the split of metrics into the redistmetrics package; since then the changes are in the algorithms. The most consequential recent one replaces the SMC label-counting adjustment with a backward kernel that removes approximation error outright.
◆ Where it's heading
The direction is toward exactness and throughput at once — the new kernel is described as both eliminating approximation error and costing far less computation, and successive releases keep adding parallelism, most recently to the flip algorithm. Feature growth has moved into the optimization side, where short-burst gained multiple independent scorers and a Pareto frontier. The release notes are not a reliable ledger: 4.3.1 ships the identical text as 4.3.0.
◆ Prediction
Expect the remaining single-threaded algorithms to gain the chains-style parallelism that flip just received, following the pattern SMC established several releases ago.
wasserportal
0.0ANALYTICS
A Berlin groundwater scraper grew a full IoT publishing pipeline in two days.
◆ Current state
wasserportal scrapes groundwater and surface water monitoring data from Wasserportal Berlin — station metadata, water levels, quality series. For its first four years that was the whole product, with releases tracking the portal's own churn: a new API version in 2023, new three-letter variable codes, and a 2026 fix decoding pages as windows-1252 because the server declares UTF-8 but emits Latin-1. In June 2026 it added a ThingsBoard integration, then extended it to self-hosted instances two days later.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is repositioning from a data-access library into the first half of a monitoring pipeline. 0.6.0 shipped push helpers, device discovery and cleanup, an importable dashboard and a GitHub Actions workflow; 0.7.0 immediately generalised the authentication so it works against self-hosted Community Edition rather than only the Cloud tier, and lifted the push from a five-station demo to the entire groundwater archive. The hardening detail in 0.7.0 — retries on 5xx, warnings when only one of two credentials is set — reads like a maintainer who has run this against a real deployment.
◆ Prediction
The obvious next step is extending the ThingsBoard path to the surface water stations, which the package has flagged as under-supported since 0.1.0. The entries show no other direction under construction.
Alternatives to redist and wasserportal
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 redist or wasserportal.
epikit
epikit narrows to field-epidemiology helpers, handing proportions to a sibling package
SimInf
SimInf 10.0 turns an epidemic simulator into a tool that fits models to real time series
mutagen
A young package porting Stata's egen row-wise helpers to the tidyverse, one function per release
broman
A statistician's personal toolbox, growing one plotting utility at a time
qtl
R/qtl is in pure custodial mode: every recent release answers a compiler, not a user
See all redist alternatives → · See all wasserportal alternatives →
Recent activity from redist and wasserportal
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agowasserportalSelf-hosted ThingsBoard support via JWT login
- 1mo agowasserportalThingsBoard integration turns the scraper into a pipeline ⚡
- 3mo agowasserportalwindows-1252 decoding fixes umlaut handling on Windows
- 6mo agoredistParallel chains for redist_flip()
- 6mo agoredistPatch release reusing the 4.3.0 notes
- 10mo agoredistSMC backward kernel removes label-counting approximation error
- 2y agoredistMulti-objective short-burst search with Pareto frontier
- 3y agoredistredist_ci interface and faster loop-erased random walk
- 3y agowasserportalExport and import functions for scraped datasets
- 3y agowasserportalAdapted to Wasserportal's new API version
- 4y agoredistredist_constr() unifies constraints and admits user-defined ones ⚡
- 4y agowasserportalTemperature parameter naming corrected
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between redist and wasserportal?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. redist and wasserportal 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 redist better than wasserportal?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. redist and wasserportal 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 redist?
Top redist alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "redist alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/redist-r for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to wasserportal?
Top wasserportal alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "wasserportal alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/wasserportal for the full list with editorial commentary on each.