Retool
Retool is retiring standalone Assist while folding the same capability into the app builder.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of forestploter and mod_auth_openidc — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
A forest plot package that keeps handing users control of one more graphical detail.
forestploter draws forest plots where the layout is driven by the data frame itself, so text columns and confidence intervals sit in the same grid. The theme function has become the package's centre of gravity: it now controls graphical parameters for titles, legends, axis, arrow labels, footnotes, and reference lines, with multi-column and row-order legend controls added most recently. Two releases shipped nine minutes apart in April 2026 after a two-year gap, deprecating some theme parameters, removing inter-cell gaps, and improving tick breaks.
mod_auth_openidc audited itself, found eight holes, and broke every session on the way out
The Apache OIDC module is in the middle of the most consequential ten days in this window: 2.4.20 on August 1 rebuilt session and cookie encryption around PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 key stretching and invalidated every existing session, 2.4.20.1 on August 9 disclosed eight security issues found in an internal audit, and 2.4.20.2 the next morning walked back part of the fallout. The audit findings are not peripheral — the most serious lets a client inject headers that a protected backend trusts as authenticated identity claims on paths the module answers without authenticating. The 2.4.19.x line before it had already shipped an out-of-bounds read and write in the state-cookie parser.
forestploter draws forest plots where the layout is driven by the data frame itself, so text columns and confidence intervals sit in the same grid. The theme function has become the package's centre of gravity: it now controls graphical parameters for titles, legends, axis, arrow labels, footnotes, and reference lines, with multi-column and row-order legend controls added most recently. Two releases shipped nine minutes apart in April 2026 after a two-year gap, deprecating some theme parameters, removing inter-cell gaps, and improving tick breaks.
The direction has been consistent for four years: whatever a user might want to restyle eventually becomes an argument. Point size stopped being transformed, cell height adjustment was removed as unwanted, legends gained size, column, and fill-order control, and vertical lines learned to extend the full plot height and to draw beneath the whiskers. The one structural move was 1.1.0, which let callers supply their own confidence-interval and summary drawing functions — turning a fixed renderer into an extensible one. Everything since has been the arguments that extensibility did not cover.
The latest release deprecates theme parameters rather than adding them, which suggests the next one consolidates the theme surface that has grown for four years rather than extending it further.
The Apache OIDC module is in the middle of the most consequential ten days in this window: 2.4.20 on August 1 rebuilt session and cookie encryption around PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 key stretching and invalidated every existing session, 2.4.20.1 on August 9 disclosed eight security issues found in an internal audit, and 2.4.20.2 the next morning walked back part of the fallout. The audit findings are not peripheral — the most serious lets a client inject headers that a protected backend trusts as authenticated identity claims on paths the module answers without authenticating. The 2.4.19.x line before it had already shipped an out-of-bounds read and write in the state-cookie parser.
The project has shifted from feature work to hardening its own attack surface, and it is doing so on its own initiative rather than in response to external reports. That posture has a cost operators are absorbing directly: two backwards-incompatible session format changes in six months, both of which log every user out on upgrade. The 2.4.20.2 release also shows the hardening overshooting and being corrected — unconditional secret masking made debugging impossible, so an opt-in escape hatch was added with a startup warning attached, and a derived-object cache tier added only weeks earlier was removed outright.
Expect the 2.4.20.x line to keep absorbing follow-up fixes from the same audit, and any further hardening to arrive with an explicit opt-out after the masking reversal showed operators cannot troubleshoot a protocol exchange they cannot read.
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 forestploter or mod_auth_openidc.
Retool is retiring standalone Assist while folding the same capability into the app builder.
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See all forestploter alternatives → · See all mod_auth_openidc alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. mod_auth_openidc is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 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.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. mod_auth_openidc is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
Top forestploter alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "forestploter alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/forestploter for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top mod_auth_openidc alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "mod_auth_openidc alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mod-auth-openidc for the full list with editorial commentary on each.