This week WordPress Wednesday is for those who wanting to have an Excel-style table in your WordPress site. As having a tables, you can compare features for various products easily. It is an excellent way to create easy to read lists of your data with multiple columns and rows.

How to decide which WordPress Table Plugin the best?

There are countless free and paid WordPress table plugins on the market. It can be not very clear for beginners to select the best Excel-style table plugin for their WordPress blog or site just because they get surprised by the number of options.

The easiest way to cut through the chaos and evaluate your plugin needs is to compare your requirements with the features of the handy table plugins below.

These Table plugins have features like responsive design, styling options, import/export functionalities, media support, drag and drop builders, filters, sorting and pagination.

This WordPress Wednesday I’ve got four free WordPress Table plugins, that you can go through each plugin and its features and decide which is the best table plugin for your website. Most of the following four plugin do also have a paid option as well if you wanting to support the plugin author financially.

1. TablePress

TablePress is one of the best plugins when it comes to WordPress table plugins. It is easy to install, offers the most straightforward settings to configure, and even a beginner can create a table on the back-end.

After you set up a table you’ll notice that a shortcode been generated for you to place it in a post or page. All of the table data can be inserted and edited in a spreadsheet format within your dashboard. It does not matter which type of data you would like to include as TablePress has supports for almost everything.

You think that TablePress should be tagged as a premium plugin, but it is actually can be found free in the WordPress plugin directory. There are a few extensions that are provided on the TablePress website.

Some extensions include:

• Responsive tables
• Row filtering
• Table row ordering
• A single cell content shortcode
• Automatic URL conversion

The core plugin is available for free, and you can technically get all of the extensions for free as well, but the developer has some of them labelled as premium. He asks that you donate a certain amount of money before downloading these extensions, which makes sense since this type of development and management takes lots of time.

Features that make TablePress one of the best table plugins for WordPress

• The TablePress plugin is free. This includes the core plugin and extensions. But be kind and donate as much you like to the developer to support him.
• The plugin includes an extensive collection of extensions
• Each created table can be placed on a post or page with the help of a simple shortcode.
• You can also import or export table data with CSV and Excel files.

Price: Free

2. Data Tables Generator by Supsystic

Data Tables Generator, and it’s an outstanding plugin for designing and managing visually stunning tables on your site. The free plugin is available for download also you have the option to upgrade for extra features.

What’s great is that the free version, for instance, offers support for unlimited rows, data formatting and merging cells. Your table’s can also complete calculations and can be sorted.

The free plan is quite robust; plenty of companies will need to get some of the premium features like the front-end export to PDF, Excel and CSV. Also you get more exporting and importing options, along with a mass migration tool for numerous large tables. Other features you find in the premium version include a print button, table history, diagrams and a roles restriction option.

Features that make Data Tables Generator one of the best table plugins for WordPress

• The plugin comes in two versions, the free option has plenty of tools, and the premium version is affordable.
• The back-end builder is simple enough to use.
• You can integrate with WooCommerce.
• Visual charts are supported in the plugin for those who wants to make things like pie or bar charts.
• Both versions support unlimited rows and columns.
• You can look at a live preview of your tables before publishing them.
• Front-end and back-end exporting are supported through CSV, Excel, and more.

Price: Free or the upgrade to the pro version starts at $39.00 for one website.

3. Ninja Tables

If you are looking for a powerful table plugin without the huge cost, you should consider trying out Ninja Tables. You will find a free version through the WordPress Plugin Library and it is somewhat impressive just how different features included in the free option.

Ninja Tables is SEO friendly and it lets you generate a table using single line cells and a fixed layout. Also you can create a bordered table, striped rows, and even a more compact table.

Overall, the table builder you find over on the back-end is virtually the exact duplicate of what you ae going to find on the front-end. Like many other WordPress plugins, this plugin is simple to install, and you can swiftly add new colours, insert columns and provide filters to your readers.

Some of the features you find in the paid version includes support for unlimited tables and customisation tools. So if you decide to keep the free version of Ninja Tables you might find that you can be cut off if you make too many tables . Within the premium version of Ninja Tables is has a link to Google Sheets, set conditions to your tables and highlight specific columns/rows/cells according to previously set logics and create a WooCommerce product table for those users who run an online store.

Features that makes Ninja Tables one of the best table plugins for WordPress:

• It has both free and premium versions.
• You have many customisation tools for making your tables stand out. For instance, settings for adjusting the colours on your rows and columns.
• There’s an option to connect to Google Sheets.
• It is supports media uploads, that means you can insert items like video and pictures right into your tables.
• Table sorting is done with a drag and drop builder.
• The plugin exports/imports CSV.
• Connect WooCommerce to it and turn it into a Product showcase table easily.
• You place a shortcode in a post or page to show your tables.

Price: Free but also you can also sign up for the premium version, which costs $49.00 for one site, the Agency License gets you customer support for up to 20 sites and that is only $99.00 or the unlimited site and lifetime license at a whopping $599.00.

4. wpDataTables

The wpDataTables plugin is a free version of the primary core solution. It is a basic version that works for those who only need to make a table on occasion quickly, or you don’t need all of the features you find in the premium version.

With this free version of the plugin, you can import data from files like Excel, CSV and JSON. You can create your own rows and columns from scratch. This version of the plugin is still a useful plugin for those who only generate tables for some of their blog posts.

You can find the full version of wpDataTables sells for $55 on CodeCanyon.

Here are some of the restrictions from the free version to see if you need to upgrade to the premium plugin:

• The free version limits all tables to 150 rows.
• With this plugin you can’t import using a Google Spreadsheet.
• Using this free plugin will not get access to premium support or receive server-side processing, and you can’t create a table manually.
• You cannot make a MySQL-query based table or edit like you would in Excel or on the frontend of your site.

Some of the things from the premium version of the plugin includes multiple database support, responsive tables, support for heaps of data, editable tables and advanced filters.

Features that make wpDataTables one of the best table plugins for WordPress:

• wpDataTables plugin comes free and premium plugins.
• Smaller tables are simple to make in the free version of this plugin.
• Table on the frontend looks like to what you are working with on the back-end.
• Each table you can create can be placed on your website with the use of a shortcode.
• The premium version also has responsive tables that look wonderful on mobile devices.
• You can create huge tables with the premium version.
• The plugin has some great add-ons. Such as a Report Builder tool that lets you generate Excel or Word docs inside of WordPress.

Price: Free or you can find the full version of wpDataTables starting price is for $59.00 per year on their own website.