Standard graphics and grid-based graphics

The existence of these two different graphics environments brings these questions to most users' minds—which package to use and under which circumstances? For simple and basic plots, where the data simply needs to be represented in a standard plot type (such as a scatter plot, histogram, or boxplot) without any additional manipulation, then all the plotting environments are fairly equivalent. In fact, it would probably be possible to produce the same type of plot with graphics as well as with lattice or ggplot2. Nevertheless, in general, the default graphic output of ggplot2 or lattice will be most likely superior compared to graphics since both these packages are designed considering the principles of human perception deeply and to make the evaluation of data contained in plots easier.

When more complex data should be analyzed, then the grid-based packages, lattice and ggplot2, present a more sophisticated support in the analysis of multivariate data. On the other hand, these tools require greater effort to become proficient because of their flexibility and advanced functionalities. In both cases, lattice and ggplot2, the package provides a full set of tools for data visualization, so you will not need to use grid directly in most cases, but you will be able to do all your work directly with one of those packages.