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Comparison · Infra & APIs

q2 vs surveytidy

A side-by-side editorial comparison of q2 and surveytidy — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.

q2 vs surveytidy: at a glance

Featureq2surveytidy
SectorInfra & APIsInfra & APIs
Velocity score6.30.0
Sparks · 30d10
Top themespublishing, rust-rewrite, static-site-generator, quarto-paritysurvey-statistics, tidyverse, dplyr-verbs, metadata-tracking
Last editorial update57m ago2h ago
WebsiteVisit →Visit →

What is q2?

Quarto's Rust rewrite ships daily, and the parity grind has resumed after its one leap ahead.

q2 is the Rust reimplementation of Quarto, shipping a tagged release most days and still labelled experimental and not production-ready. The releases in this window are dominated by Quarto 1 parity work — tabsets, table-of-contents fidelity, highlight themes, path resolution, draft banners — plus a Hub web client that now carries its own accessibility and design-token workstream. Release notes are raw commit logs behind a fixed install header, so what actually changed sits well down the body.

Read the full q2 trajectory →

What is surveytidy?

surveytidy taught every dplyr verb to operate on a whole collection of surveys at once.

surveytidy is the tidyverse-facing half of a two-package survey stack, wrapping survey design objects from surveycore so filter, mutate, select and the rest work on them while carrying variable labels, value labels and a transformation log alongside the data. The May release extended that verb surface to survey_collection, the abstraction surveycore uses to hold several surveys as one object, so a pipeline written once dispatches across every member.

Read the full surveytidy trajectory →

q2 vs surveytidy: editorial side-by-side

Q
q2
INFRA · APIS
6.3

Quarto's Rust rewrite ships daily, and the parity grind has resumed after its one leap ahead.

◆ Current state

q2 is the Rust reimplementation of Quarto, shipping a tagged release most days and still labelled experimental and not production-ready. The releases in this window are dominated by Quarto 1 parity work — tabsets, table-of-contents fidelity, highlight themes, path resolution, draft banners — plus a Hub web client that now carries its own accessibility and design-token workstream. Release notes are raw commit logs behind a fixed install header, so what actually changed sits well down the body.

◆ Where it's heading

Two things are being built at once. The compiler is closing a long checklist of Quarto 1 behaviours, and the pattern is consistent: investigate, settle the design in a plan, land in numbered phases, close the plan. The second is the Hub — a live-share preview, an MCP server, a web editor and now a WCAG-compliant token system — which is where the project is building something Quarto 1 never had. Recent tags have gone back to parity after v0.22.0's push, and the engine-claims refactor in v0.24.0 suggests third-party engine support is being prepared underneath.

◆ Prediction

The engine-claims work replaced a static source-type model with a claim-based one and added user-facing engine load and claim failure reporting, so the next visible step is likely an engine extension surface that authors can actually target. The experimental label and 0.x versioning give no indication that a stable release is close.

S
surveytidy
INFRA · APIS
0.0

surveytidy taught every dplyr verb to operate on a whole collection of surveys at once.

◆ Current state

surveytidy is the tidyverse-facing half of a two-package survey stack, wrapping survey design objects from surveycore so filter, mutate, select and the rest work on them while carrying variable labels, value labels and a transformation log alongside the data. The May release extended that verb surface to survey_collection, the abstraction surveycore uses to hold several surveys as one object, so a pipeline written once dispatches across every member.

◆ Where it's heading

The package is being built in two layers that arrive in order: vector-level transformations first, structural dispatch second. The make_* family in 0.4.0 handles the recoding that survey work actually consists of — labelled to factor, multi-level to dichotomous, scale reversal, valence flipping — with value labels propagating automatically. Collection support then applies data-masking, tidyselect, grouping, slicing and collapsing verbs per survey, with joins explicitly refused and a typed message reporting which surveys were skipped. Metadata fidelity is the recurring bug source: labels surviving across(), stale labels left behind by recoding, the transformation log keeping up with what the verbs did.

◆ Prediction

Joins are the one verb family that errors on collections, with users directed to join before constructing the collection, so that restriction is the clearest outstanding gap. The re-export of surveycore's collection constructors suggests the package is positioning itself as the single import users need, which points toward more re-exports as surveycore's stable API settles.

Alternatives to q2 and surveytidy

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 q2 or surveytidy.

See all q2 alternatives → · See all surveytidy alternatives →

Recent activity from q2 and surveytidy

Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.

  1. 18h agoq2WCAG 2.2 compliance and shared design tokens for the Hub client
  2. 1d agoq2Q1 highlight themes translate at runtime; tabset headings leave the TOC
  3. 2d agoq2Light/dark themes with a color-mode toggle; panel-tabset support
  4. 5d agoq2llms.txt site output and a live-share collaborative preview
  5. 6d agoq2TOC entries carry inline markup; draft banner restored
  6. 7d agoq2Adds alias redirect stubs and diagnostic suppression
  7. 2mo agosurveytidymutate() syncs metadata for across() recodes
  8. 3mo agosurveytidydplyr and tidyr verbs dispatch across survey collections
  9. 5mo agosurveytidyFive label-aware recoding functions for use inside mutate()

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between q2 and surveytidy?

They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. q2 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.

Is q2 better than surveytidy?

Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. q2 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.

What are the best alternatives to q2?

Top q2 alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "q2 alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/q2 for the full list with editorial commentary on each.

What are the best alternatives to surveytidy?

Top surveytidy alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "surveytidy alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/surveytidy for the full list with editorial commentary on each.