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Comparison · Analytics
ApexCharts vs excluder
A side-by-side editorial comparison of ApexCharts and excluder — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
ApexCharts vs excluder: at a glance
What is ApexCharts?
Licensing settled, ApexCharts is back to changing what a chart can take as input.
ApexCharts is deep into a fast v6 line, shipping roughly weekly. The licensing arc that dominated 6.5 through 6.7 — trial watermarks, the first premium-gated chart type, then entitlement checks — has settled, and the last three releases are library work again. 6.9.0 is the largest of them: a histogram type that bins raw samples, a morph engine that conserves marks across chart types, and the end of the library's dependency-free packaging.
What is excluder?
A Qualtrics data-cleaning package that has been in maintenance mode since its CRAN acceptance.
excluder marks, checks, and excludes online-survey rows that fail quality criteria — duplicate responses, suspicious IP or geolocation, screen resolution, completion duration, preview rows. The mark_*/check_*/exclude_* verb trio and the column-renaming helpers are the whole public surface. Recent releases are dependency chasing and test robustness rather than new exclusion criteria.
ApexCharts vs excluder: editorial side-by-side
ApexCharts
10.0ANALYTICS
Licensing settled, ApexCharts is back to changing what a chart can take as input.
◆ Current state
ApexCharts is deep into a fast v6 line, shipping roughly weekly. The licensing arc that dominated 6.5 through 6.7 — trial watermarks, the first premium-gated chart type, then entitlement checks — has settled, and the last three releases are library work again. 6.9.0 is the largest of them: a histogram type that bins raw samples, a morph engine that conserves marks across chart types, and the end of the library's dependency-free packaging.
◆ Where it's heading
The through-line now is input and arrangement rather than catalogue size. Charts increasingly accept the measurements a team actually has instead of pre-aggregated values, and the seams that let you hand a chart its own layout — plotOptions.unit.positions, the pluggable layout hook — are being filled in with kits rather than hard-coded options. The premium boundary has stopped moving; the free catalogue keeps growing around it.
◆ Prediction
Expect the raw-observation pattern to reach another chart type now that the bar pathway handles binning, and expect the remaining pluggable seams to get companion kits the way positions just did.
excluder
0.0ANALYTICS
A Qualtrics data-cleaning package that has been in maintenance mode since its CRAN acceptance.
◆ Current state
excluder marks, checks, and excludes online-survey rows that fail quality criteria — duplicate responses, suspicious IP or geolocation, screen resolution, completion duration, preview rows. The mark_*/check_*/exclude_* verb trio and the column-renaming helpers are the whole public surface. Recent releases are dependency chasing and test robustness rather than new exclusion criteria.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is stable and its maintenance load comes from things it does not control: the {iptools} package leaving CRAN, {tidyselect} deprecating the .data pronoun, IP-geolocation tests breaking when the underlying address data shifts. Much of that work is about staying installable, not about better exclusions. Note that several of these entries were backfilled into the feed within the same two-minute window and are not in version order.
◆ Prediction
The next release will most likely be another dependency or CRAN-check response rather than a new exclusion criterion, following the pattern of the last three.
Alternatives to ApexCharts and excluder
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 ApexCharts or excluder.
RStudio
RStudio ships through release branches, and the notes are commit messages
dbt Core
dbt Fusion's second beta is adapter work: ClickHouse gets materializations, indexes, and catalogs
Fulcrum
Fulcrum is betting its whole map stack on Esri, with a hard Google Maps cutoff on September 1.
Holistics
Holistics keeps fencing in the AI layer it spent the summer building.
Dovetail
Dovetail spent July opening doors to other tools and August making its own rooms easier to enter.
See all ApexCharts alternatives → · See all excluder alternatives →
Recent activity from ApexCharts and excluder
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2d agoApexChartsUnit charts get a 39-shape companion kit
- 3d agoApexChartsHistogram bins raw samples; charts morph between types ⚡
- 10d agoApexChartsPer-data-point label offsets land as functions
- 10d agoApexChartsPie and donut slice clicks work again after a 6.7.0 regression
- 17d agoApexChartsSunburst charts arrive; premium features now need an entitled plan ⚡
- 23d agoApexChartsUnit chart is the first premium-gated chart type ⚡
- 1y agoexcluderInternet-dependent tests and examples made conditional
- 2y agoexcluderqualtrics_fetch2 dataset and tidyselect deprecation fixes
- 3y agoexcluderCRAN acceptance and graceful IP-lookup failure
- 3y agoexcluderdplyr 1.0.8 across()/is.na() compatibility fix
- 3y agoexcluderuse_labels(), rename_columns(), and orientation-agnostic resolution
- 3y agoexcluderSwaps iptools for ipaddress
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between ApexCharts and excluder?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. ApexCharts is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 10.0 vs 0.0), with 3 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.
Is ApexCharts better than excluder?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. ApexCharts is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 10.0 vs 0.0), with 3 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.
What are the best alternatives to ApexCharts?
Top ApexCharts alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ApexCharts alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/apexcharts for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to excluder?
Top excluder alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "excluder alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/excluder for the full list with editorial commentary on each.