silx
silx settles into maintenance a release after its PySide6 migration
Comparison · Analytics
haze vs Plotly
A side-by-side editorial comparison of haze and Plotly — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
haze vs Plotly: at a glance
What is haze?
Four dormant years end with a modernization pass and an off-by-one fix in the C++ core
haze does nearest-neighbour smoothing and k-d tree interpolation on brain surface meshes. It sat untouched from April 2022 until July 2026, when a single release modernized it for current R versions and corrected an off-by-one error in the C++ code. It is not on CRAN and never will be — the package exceeds 50MB against CRAN's 5MB ceiling, a constraint its own initial release notes acknowledge.
What is Plotly?
Plotly is turning its cloud into a metered compute platform with an enterprise on-ramp.
Plotly ships on two tracks. Plotly Studio, the desktop AI app-builder, releases every one to two weeks and has spent v0.0.80 through v0.0.86 on credential handling, reasoning transparency, personalization and now the reliability of the agent session engine itself. Plotly Cloud is the louder track: since late May it has added viewer-seat pricing, domain verification, per-app compute modes with credit-metered billing, and customer-owned domains with managed TLS.
haze vs Plotly: editorial side-by-side
haze
2.5ANALYTICS
Four dormant years end with a modernization pass and an off-by-one fix in the C++ core
◆ Current state
haze does nearest-neighbour smoothing and k-d tree interpolation on brain surface meshes. It sat untouched from April 2022 until July 2026, when a single release modernized it for current R versions and corrected an off-by-one error in the C++ code. It is not on CRAN and never will be — the package exceeds 50MB against CRAN's 5MB ceiling, a constraint its own initial release notes acknowledge.
◆ Where it's heading
The July 2026 release arrived 56 minutes after its sibling regfusionr 0.3.0 from the same maintainer, which is the tell: this is a maintainer sweeping a set of related neuroimaging packages back into working order, not independent development on haze itself. haze is the dependency, regfusionr the consumer, and the substantive work sits on the regfusionr side. The off-by-one correction is the only change here that alters results.
◆ Prediction
Expect haze to move only when a downstream dfsp-spirit package needs it to — its cadence is driven by the sibling packages, not by its own roadmap.
Plotly
6.3ANALYTICS
Plotly is turning its cloud into a metered compute platform with an enterprise on-ramp.
◆ Current state
Plotly ships on two tracks. Plotly Studio, the desktop AI app-builder, releases every one to two weeks and has spent v0.0.80 through v0.0.86 on credential handling, reasoning transparency, personalization and now the reliability of the agent session engine itself. Plotly Cloud is the louder track: since late May it has added viewer-seat pricing, domain verification, per-app compute modes with credit-metered billing, and customer-owned domains with managed TLS.
◆ Where it's heading
The Cloud releases are assembling the standard pieces of a hosting business in order — identity first (domain verification, explicitly framed as the step before SSO), then billing (viewer seats, then metered compute credits), and now production-grade serving (custom domains, automatic certificate renewal). Studio is being hardened as the authoring front end that feeds it: Universal Deployment pushed beyond Dash apps, credentials saved once and reused, a Winget channel to widen Windows installs, and in v0.0.86 a rebuilt session engine plus automatic retries so agent runs survive expired tokens. The two tracks converge on one funnel — author in Studio, deploy to Cloud, pay by compute consumed.
◆ Prediction
The Domain Verification entry names SSO as the next step and places it in the Enterprise tier, so single sign-on is the most likely Cloud release next. Studio should hold its one-to-two-week cadence, with the newly added app thumbnails pointing toward more work on browsing and organizing generated apps.
Alternatives to haze and Plotly
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 haze or Plotly.
aniread
aniread stops asking you to know which tracker wrote the file
Rho
Rho's release machinery finally produced a stable build — and it shipped no new product.
Usermaven
Usermaven closed the loop: data comes in from anywhere, and now it goes back out.
OpenCTI
OpenCTI spends a release unblocking queues and hardening upserts
Grafana Mimir
Mimir's feed is a weekly Helm bot, with the 3.2 candidate the only real release in months
Recent activity from haze and Plotly
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 14d agoPlotlyCustom Domains in Plotly Cloud ⚡
- 19d agohazeVersion 0.3.0 -- Fixes and modernization
- 24d agoPlotlyPlotly Studio v0.0.85: Breadcrumbs & minor bug fixes
- 1mo agoPlotlyPlotly Studio v0.0.84: Faster AI, Saved Credentials, and Winget Support
- 1mo agoPlotlyCompute Modes and App Sizing in Plotly Cloud ⚡
- 1mo agoPlotlyPlotly Studio 0.0.83: Dash Update and macOS Fixes
- 2mo agoPlotlyPlotly Studio v0.0.82: Override for credential redaction, stability fixes
- 4y agohazev0.2.0 -- kdtrees
- 4y agohazev0.1.0: Initial release
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between haze and Plotly?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Plotly is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 2.5), 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.
Is haze better than Plotly?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Plotly is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 2.5), with 1 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 haze?
Top haze alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "haze alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/haze for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Plotly?
Top Plotly alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Plotly alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/plotly for the full list with editorial commentary on each.