Tables are one of the earliest elements in HTML. There was a time when tables was mainly used for both content and web layouts. Thankfully, table-based layouts are essentially dead with the exclusion of HTML email, and when you need a table these days, it’s for the purpose it was created for, and that is to show tabular data.

Being part of the HTML spec way back, tables generally weren’t suited to mobile designs, or they didn’t offer any advanced functionality out of the box, Tables basically just display your data.

However, you just want tables to be more modern, such as being fully supporting the mobile-centric by proving a responsive layout or by providing additional functionality such as searching, filtering, sorting etc.

In this post, I’m posting a selection of 12 jQuery table plugins to create, extend or enhance your tables.

1. Dynatable.js

Dynatable is a funner, semantic, interactive table plugin usingjQuery, HTML5 and JSON. The purpose of Dynatable is to provide a simple, extensible API which makes viewing and interacting with larger datasets easy. Dynatable provides a framework for implementing the most common elements out of the box, including sorting, searching and filtering.

2. Stacktable.js

The purpose of stacktable.js is to give you an easy way of converting wide tables to a format that will work better on small screens. It creates a copy of the table that is converted into a 2-column key/value format.

3. Sortable

Sortable is an open-source javascript and CSS library which adds sorting functionality to tables. It is tiny (<2kb) and has no dependencies.

4. Tablesaw

This is a jQuery plugin which is to use a responsive table view with maintaining the quality screen resolutions. It’s still a challenge for the developers to maintain a responsive table design with the proper screening resolution.

5. Tablesorter

Tablesorter is a jQuery plugin for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes.

Tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell. This forked version adds lots of new enhancements including: alphanumeric sorting, pager callback functons, multiple widgets providing column styling, ui theme application, sticky headers, column filters and resizer.

6. ResTable

The resTables jQuery plugin allows you to easily make your table responsive. It has been created based on the stacktable.js concept by John Polacek.

7. jTable

jTable is a jQuery plugin that is used to create AJAX based CRUD tables without coding HTML or Javascript.

8. jQuery King Table

Library for administrative tables that are able to build themselves, on the basis of their input data. Supports client and server side pagination; client and server side search; custom filters views; automatic menu to hide and reorder columns and support for custom tools. Client side export feature into: csv, json and xml formats.

9. editTable

jQuery editTable is a very small jQuery Plugin (~1Kb gzipped) that fill the gap left by the missing of a default input field for data tables. jQuery editTable can be used both in ajax and/or HTTP POST contest and let you preset the title and number of columns or just let complete freedom to the user. You can even append custom behaviors to single column cells (ex. jQuery UI Datepicker).

10. jQuery Table Sorter

A simple, customizable and read to use jquery plugin to sort tables

11. Live Search

liveSearch.js is a minimal jQuery table filter plugin which allows to filter rows of an html table based on user input.

12. DataTables

DataTables is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. It is a highly flexible tool, build upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, that adds all of these advanced features to any HTML table.