This article was published 5 years ago, therefore the contents of this post may be out of date.

JavaScript has been around for 23 years, and it’s one of those languages that never stop evolving as you will see in today’s post that all of the JavaScript libraries and plugins all offer a straightforward and specific function. You won’t see that there are no bloated all-in-one frameworks, just useful, lightweight and problem-solving solutions to help make the web design and development process much easier and quicker for you.

A big shoutout to the creative designers and developers who had produced all these libraries and plugins to help others do their best work.

1. Barba.js

Barba.js

Small JavaScript library for creating fluid transitions between your website’s pages. It takes a plain ol’ static website and with a little configuration turns it into an awesome single page style app. It helps reduce the delay between loading pages, minimizes HTTP requests, and enhances the user experience.

2. Freezeframe

Freeze Frame JavaScript

Tiny JS library that allows you to control animated GIFs’ playback. You can start and pause the GIFs based on user input such as clicks or hover. Under the hood it uses a canvas to draw the individual frames so its pretty performant.

3. Verbal Expressions

Jsverbalexpressions

JavaScript library that helps with writing regular expressions. It provides chainable methods for most RegEx operations, allowing developers to write out more complicated rules without having to build a regular expression using tokens.

4. Spotlight

Spotlight

JavaScript lightbox gallery that is completely plug-and-play. SImply include it into your page via CDN or the JS bundler of your choice, create the gallery markup, and voila – your lightbox works. No additional code, CSS or dependencies.

5. Scene.js

Scene Js

Scene.js is a timeline-based animation library with tons of awesome features. It can be played in both JS and CSS, supports SVG animations, multiple timelines, and comes with preset effects you can use out of the box.

6. Bliss

Bliss Js

This is a cool little library that adds syntactic sugar for Vanilla JS, making the API much more pleasant. Unlike jQuery, it doesn’t affect the vanilla JS API itself, it just improves the syntax, keeping the method functionality untouched.

7. PapaParse

Papaparse

Papa Parse is the fastest in-browser CSV parser for JavaScript. It has many powerful features such as handling large files. working with malformed input, reverse parsing, and much more, all while keeping a friendly, easy to use API.

8. Pixelmatch

Pixel Match

The smallest, simplest and fastest JavaScript library for accurately comparing images pixel by pixel. Originally created to compare screenshots in tests, it works both in node and the browser and has no required dependencies.

9. Await Timeout

Await Timeout

Tiny JavaScript library that provides a Promise-based API for setTimeout and clearTimeout. It makes it very easy to create asynchronous timeouts, which can be controlled via the awesome async / await keywords for clearer code.

10. Filepond

File Pond

A JavaScript library that can upload anything you throw at it. It provides a great user experience for the user, and also does cool stuff under the hood like optimizing images for faster uploads. Only 21 KB gzipped, with adapters available for React, Vue, Angular and jQuery.

11. OverlayScrollbars

Overlay Scrollbars

OverlayScrollbars is a javascript scrollbar plugin which hides native scrollbars, provides custom styleable overlay scrollbars and keeps the native functionality and feeling.

12. Tornis

Tornis

Tornis is a JavaScript library that offers a new way to add event listeners to the browser. Tornis keeps track of viewport position, mouse movements and other data from the page, keeping them organized in a state object. You hook functions to that state, and they run every time the data changes.

13. Mailgo

Mail Go

This is a Tiny library that automatically replaces mailto: links with a nice popover that offers links for opening Gmail or Outlook, a button to copy the email address, and spam protection.

14. Medium Zoom

Medium Zoom

This JavaScript library for creating image zoom lightboxes in the style of Medium. Comes with many powerful features including mouse and key press controls, SD to HD quality on zoom, 60fps animations, and more.

15. Ola

Ola

This is a great charting library for interpolating numbers and datasets. Offers displaying the data in a variety of chart types, all of which can be dynamically updated with super-smooth animations.

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15 Free JavaScript Libraries and Plugins