On 11 May 2010 lavaan version 0.3-1 was released on CRAN, the original release of lavaan.[3]
On 21 February 2011 lavaan version 0.4-7 was released on CRAN, launching the 0.4 series of releases.[4]
On 8 September 2012 lavaan version 0.5-9 was released on CRAN, launching the 0.5 series of releases.[5]
On 22 May 2018 lavaan version 0.6-1 was released on CRAN, launching the 0.6 series of releases.[6]
On 21 December 2025 lavaan version 0.6-21 was released on CRAN, the most recent release of lavaan.[7]
Comparison with other SEM packages
A variety of open-source, free, and commercial structural equation modeling software packages are available besides lavaan, such as Amos, SAS PROC CALIS, R package sem, OpenMx, LISREL, EQS, and Mplus. The main difference between packages is the presence of a graphical interface for model specification and presentation of results. Each package differs in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. lavaan was shown to be feature equivalent to commercial packages, with a compact scripting capability even for complex models as a key strength, and the ability to mimic Mplus and EQS results as a special feature.[8]
Impact
After 15 years of being developed, lavaan has become one of the standard structural equation modeling software package of choice for many researchers and data scientists across the world; evidenced in its use in studies, part of software reviews, and published books.[8][9][10] It was downloaded more than 4 million times to date.[11]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
