Best Slideshow (Content Slider) Plugins for WordPress

UPDATE Feb 2012: We’ve reviewed all the newest sliders for this year, you can now check out our review of best slideshow (content sliders) plugins for WordPress in 2012.

UPDATE Jan 2012: Check out the Sugar Slider, it’s the most awesome slider for WordPress at the moment, the management interface is just amazing! uBillboard is another hot one, more in depth reviews coming soon.

Content sliders, slideshows, rotating images, call them what you want, these effects are here to stay. They are excellent at showcasing your portfolio, or to highlight some of the best content on your site/blog. At the moment the Flash-powered sliders are simply too good to be matched by their JQuery-powered competitors. However one must consider that devices such as the IPad and Iphone do not support Flash. To have the best of both worlds we suggest using a Flash slider with a JQuery slider as fallback in case the device does not support Flash. Let’s take a look at our favourite image sliders:

1. Cu3er (Flash, Commercial)

CU3ER is a 3D image slider that is easy to set up, fully customizable, tailored to provide a unique look and feel, inspiring, and fun to use. It’s a great solution for displaying a website’s featured content or whenever you need to grab your website visitor’s attention.

CU3ER brings creativity to your web design process, makes your slideshows visually and interactively stunning, and delivers a unique 3D user experience. No JQuery/HTML5 slider can do 3D, which is a huge bonus for this slider. Web designers will also find a great range of options to make CU3ER perfectly blend within any website design. A JQuery version of Cu3er is also on the cards, as the developers have recently let us know that they are working on it and close to releasing it, definitely something to look forward to.

Equipped with a great range of new and updated features  grouped together as 2D/3D Transitions, 3D visual enhancements (such as camera and shadows), User Interface and Indicators (e.g. thumbnails, navigation buttons, description boxes, etc.), and a bunch of other available options, CU3ER offers in-depth visual and playback customization that, all together, makes CU3ER a wonderful content-sliding solution.

CU3ER customization is ridiculously easy with cManager a web application designed to make CU3ER development as fast, fun and easy as possible.

What makes it even more attractive for us WordPress users is the new WPCu3er plugin that lets you manage all the content of your slideshow easily without delving into the code.

Want to give CU3ER a shot? Check out the CU3ER demos or grab a copy of the Free license, which is available for personal/non-commercial use.

Get Cub3r

2. Piecemaker (Flash, Open Source)

In some ways Piecemaker is similar to Cu3er (also uses Flash technology and 3D effects), with the advantage that it is an open source plugin. The Piecemaker uses the mighty Tweener engine from Caurina, which makes it support plenty of tween types for the transitions, such as Cubic, Bounce or Elastic. Beside the transition type you can also customize tweening time, tweening delay as well as the movement of the cubes while tweening in terms of position on the z axis and positions to each other. With this you can make the cubes move towards the screen or away from it and let the whole gallery expand while tweening. While it doesn’t have as many features as Cu3er, it should be sufficient for most users, and we can also find a ready made WordPress Piecemaker plugin, helping make management of content so much easier.

Get Piecemaker 2

3. Slide Deck (JQuery, Commercial)

Slide Deck is a multi-featured slider that also has a WordPress plugin to go with it. The plugin works within the easy-to-use WordPress interface and allows you to post a slider live in minutes. Insert your SlideDeck into your posts, on your pages and even in your theme! This slider is easily the most feature of all the sliders we have reviewed, leaving even the mighty Cu3er in its wake when it comes to customisation possibilities, although Cu3er has an upper hand when it comes to attractive effects (especially its 3D functionality). SlideDeck supports features such as touch interaction support on mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad and Android phones; vertical and horizontal slides working together, and much more. There is a free version but you will have to fork out $99 for the unbranded, full-featured version.

Get Slide Deck

4. Wow Slider (JQuery, Open Source)

This slider is an excellent choice if you’re looking for a free slider that does more than the basic transitions. In fact it has some unique transitions, two of them being the Fly and Blast effects, that we haven’t seen on any other JQuery sliders to date. Unfortunately there is no WordPress slide management plugin to go with it yet.

Get Wow Slider

5. Nivo Slider (JQuery, Open Source)

Nivo Slider was one of the first JQuery plugins that got everything right and has rightly earned itself as one of the sliders web developers turn to by default. It is completely open source, uses JQuery and has an array of effects available. Unless you’re really looking for something advanced, Nivo Slider will probably be your best bet. It also has a WordPress plugin to help you out, although it’s not so impressive.

Get Nivo Slider

6. Avia Slider (JQuery, Commercial)

Avia slider is a nice JQuery slider, similar to Nivo slider, but with some more effects added on. It is a commercial plugin but costs only $12 from CodeCanyon.

Get Avia Slider

7. O’Slider (JQuery, Commercial)

The o’Slider plug-in has a lot of features of a regular slider. Some of them are auto play, stop on hover, show/hide navigation, bullets list or thumbnails for a navigation, captions and in-line content. But the main cause for creation of the plug-in was to give websites’ users amazing live-background experience, which is something unique amongst the sliders we reviewed. You can use as many background layers as you want and the effect truly is original and very effective.

Get o’Slider

Anything Slider (JQuery, Open Source)

Anything slider is a slider developed by Chris Coyier at CSS-Tricks.com. It’s a versatile plugin, well-coded and customisable. The good thing is that Jacob Dubail has recently released a WP AnythingSlider plugin that makes it really easy for us WordPress users to integrate this slider into WordPress sites.

Get Anything Slider

8. Coin Slider (JQuery, Open Source)

The Coin Slider is a no-frills open source JQuery slider which has all the transition effects you’d expect, but none of the extra fancy stuff. Code is clean and it’s compatible with all the browsers, it is a solid performer that can be relied upon when you don’t need any fancy transitions but just want to put up a quick attractive slider that just works out of the box. You can also find a WP plugin with decent functionality.

Get Coin Slider

9. JawDropper Slider (JQuery, Commercial)

JawDropper Slider has an impressive number of transition effects to choose from, although none of them are really ‘jaw-dropping’. If it’s your kinda thing, it has a ‘light beam’ transition which is unique to this slider. Costs $5 from CodeCanyon.

Get JawDropper Slider

10. Meteor Slides (JQuery, Open Source)

Meteor Slides is a WordPress plugin that uses Custom Post Types for creating your slideshows. Categories are used as slideshow containers, while the posts themselves are different slides in your slideshow. It is a very convenient and free solution that uses the JQuery Cycle plugin and packs in a number of nice transitions.

Get Meteor Slides

10. Royal Slider (JQuery, Commercial)

RoyalSlider for WordPress is a cross-device jQuery content slider with touch-based navigation and a fluid layout. It has an amazing user-friendly admin area where you can manage slides, change slider settings, customize interface and add blocks-captions using a custom WYSIWIG editor. It has been tested for use on multiple devices including Macs, PCs, iPads, iPhones, Android devices and Blackberrys. It’s even been tested on the Amazon Kindle. Definitely one of the best sliders you can get your hands on.

Get Royal Slider

Need Some Inspiration?

Check out this post on WebDesignerDepot to observe some nifty uses of content sliders around the web.

Conclusion

Choosing a slider from the options above depends very much on your requirements and constraints. Here are some typical scenarios to help you out.

Scenario 1: Need a free solution, for general use:

1. Piecemaker 2
2. Wow Slider
3. Nivo Slider
4. Flex Slider

Scenario 2: Need a free solution with WP admin, for general use:

1. Piecemaker 2
2. Meteor Slides
3. Nivo Slider
4. Coin Slider

Scenario 3: Need a free solution and compatibility with Apple mobile devices:

1. Flex Slider
2. Wow Slider
3. Nivo Slider
4. Coin Slider

Scenario 4: Can afford a commercial plugin, need WP admin, general use:

1. Royal Slider
2. Cu3er
3. SlideDeck
4. Piecemaker 3

Scenario 5: Can afford a commercial plugin, for use on Apple mobile devices:

1. Royal Slider
2. SlideDeck
3. Wow Slider
4. Avia Slider

Scenario 6: Can afford a commercial plugin, need WP admin, for use on Apple mobile devices:

1. Royal Slider
2. SlideDeck
3. Nivo Slider

Know any other great plugins? Let us know!

Updates:

• Check out www.slidervilla.com for some other excellent sliders you can use, thanks to Sanjeev for finding this site.
• If you want an awesome responsive slider check out FlexSlider, doesn’t have a WordPress plugin yet, but is fairly easy to integrate anyway. If you need help we offer WordPress customisation services.
  

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