While WordPress offers a basic table block, it lacks advanced styling, formatting, filtering, sorting, and customisation options. To effectively display data, such as showcasing and comparing features and pricing, user-friendly and easily readable website tables are essential, which can be done through handy WordPress plugins. We look at the four most popular plugins below.
TablePress
TablePress is a popular plugin that is loved by many, due to its ability to create complex tables easily, and has the highest review rate of all four plugins discussed in this article.
This plugin allows you to input table data as you would in a spreadsheet, and allows you to import and export tables, further helping you to create tables with ease. Additionally, you can easily embed tables anywhere on your WordPress website by using the shortcode that is automatically created with each table.
However, although a free plan is available, a paid plan is required for most features, including making your tables device responsive – a factor that is non-negotiable for any website.
Paid plan users can benefit from features such as sorting and filtering, pagination, and matching your branding using the customisation features.
TablePress benefits from good user reviews on their support, tutorials and guides, however, surprisingly, this plugin builder does appear to be more clunky compared to its counterparts, especially WP Table Builder.
WP Table Builder
WP Table Builder is an effective tool that allows you to create responsive tables, with both free and paid plans available. Utilising the drag-and-drop builder, admins can see their edits in real time, and if you don’t want to start from scratch, you can utilise any of their 25 pre-built templates.
There are numerous customisation features available, including adding star ratings, padding and border options, images, sticky headers, icons and custom HTML. Another feature we liked the look of was the progress bar option, which is handy to users and website visitors.
This plugin is focused towards helping beginners to create simple tables with the ability to add more elements when required.
Ninja Tables
Similar to WP Table Builder, Ninja Tables utilise a drag-and-drop builder to help admins to create custom tables simply and quickly. This plugin is tailored more towards e-commerce businesses, allowing you to create WooCommerce product tables that require large amounts of data.
There are various elements that you can add to tables, such as lists, icons, images and star ratings, in addition to the functionality of merging and splitting cells. One feature that we really like is adding a ribbon to cells – ideal for drawing users attention to your best selling products or packages.
There is also the option to use their sister product, Ninja Charts, to create charts from your data.
WP Data Tables
WP Data Tables is ideal for advanced customisation, focused on giving a WordPress pro all of the tools that they need to create data heavy tables with many customisation features. Using the visual editor, WP Data Tables allows you to customise the appearance of your data, including selecting fonts, which other plugins do not offer.
Additionally, this plugin gives you the ability to create graphs and charts from your data, meaning you can easily visualise large amounts of data, as well as the capability to organise tables into folders, highlight rows and columns dependent on specific conditions, and calculate sums and metrics.
The plugin also includes standard features such as star ratings, shortcode and page builder embedding, and colour selection.
Unsurprisingly, this plugin only comes with a paid plan, but for the amount of customisation included, it may be well worth the investment.
Comparison
| TablePress | WP Table Builder | Ninja Tables | WP Data Tables | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free Plan Available | Y | Y | Y | N |
| Paid Plan From (£) | £77 | £36 | £35 | £49 |
| Device Responsive | Paid Plan Only | Y | Y | Y |
| Drag & Drop | N | Y | Y | N |
| Customise Colours | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Customise Fonts | N | N | N | Y |
| Import/Export Tables | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Beginner Friendly | Y | Y | Y | N |
Outlook
WordPress offers a variety of solutions for table management, from simple tables for blog posts to robust tools for complex data sets. This ensures that, regardless of technical level or the complexity of data, users can find a suitable method to organise and display information.
