The Difference Between facet_wrap() and facet_grid() in R

The facet_grid() and facet_wrap() functions from the ggplot2 package can both be used to produce a grid of plots.

Here’s the main difference between the two functions:

• The facet_grid() function will produce a grid of plots for each combination of variables that you specify, even if some plots are empty.
• The facet_wrap() function will only produce plots for the combinations of variables that have values, which means it won’t produce any empty plots.

The following two examples illustrate the difference between these two functions, using the following data frame:

#create data frame
df frame(team=c('A', 'A', 'A', 'A', 'B', 'B', 'B', 'B'),
                 position=c('G', 'G', 'F', 'F', 'G', 'G', 'G', 'G'),
                 points=c(8, 14, 20, 22, 25, 29, 30, 31),
                 assists=c(10, 5, 5, 3, 8, 6, 9, 12))

#view data frame
df

  team position points assists
1    A        G      8      10
2    A        G     14       5
3    A        F     20       5
4    A        F     22       3
5    B        G     25       8
6    B        G     29       6
7    B        G     30       9
8    B        G     31      12

Example 1: Use facet_grid() Function

The following code shows how to use facet_grid() to create a grid that displays a scatterplot of assists vs. points for each combination of team and position:

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(df, aes(assists, points)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_grid(position~team)

Notice that a scatterplot is produced for every combination of team and position, even though no values exist in the original data frame for a team value of B and a position value of F:

This is how facet_grid() works: It will produce a plot for every combination of the variables that you specify, even if some plots are empty.

Example 2: Use facet_wrap() Function

The following code shows how to use facet_wrap() to create a grid that displays a scatterplot of assists vs. points for each combination of team and position that exists:

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(df, aes(assists, points)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_wrap(position~team)

Notice that a scatterplot is only produced for the combinations of team and position that exist in the original data frame.

This means that no plot is created for the combination of team B and position F because no values exist in the original data frame for this particular combination.

This is how facet_wrap() works: It will never produce an empty plot.

Note: Refer to the ggplot2 documentation for a complete guide to the facet_grid() and facet_wrap() functions.

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in ggplot2:

How to Change Font Size in ggplot2
How to Remove a Legend in ggplot2
How to Rotate Axis Labels in ggplot2