Surfing through the ocean of JavaScript libraries trying to find the right one may be rather difficult. The reason hides in the popularity of JavaScript which is known to be the most common programming language nowadays. Did you know that there are more JavaScript developers than Python and PHP all together?

Due to this tendency, dozens of libraries are produced every day. And this flow never stops because sometimes it’s easier to create a new library instead of spending time to find the suitable one. This overgrowth can be really scary sometimes.

Here’s a small statistics for understanding the scheme. In May, 1,1 million JavaScript projects were posted on GitHub. In July, 140 thousand new projects were added to repositories. But this growth is not that chaotic as it may seem. Basically, the new projects are connected with the existing powerful technologies and frameworks. However, all this process surely needs some structuring.

Having a lot of experience working with JavaScript, we gathered a small collection of the most useful yet lightweight JS libraries. We had our list in one document and shared it within the company but now we decided that it’s time to share this treasure with other developers.

Of course, you might have met such collections before. There are special projects, gathering libraries, but yet these platforms contain thousands of libraries. So we decided to share our own carefully selected list of micro-sized JavaScript Libraries.

Top 10+4 Lightweight JavaScript Libraries

Qwery

Size: 0,6 kB
Developed by: Dustin Diaz, Jacob Thornton

Query is a classical library that allows you to select elements with CSS1/2/3 queries selectors very quickly. This selector engine is built on the top of querySelectorAll. The hint is using Qwery together with such DOM modules as Bonzo and Bean.

Transparency.js

Size: 0,6 kB
Developed by: Jarno Keskikangas

Trasparency is a template engine for jQuery. It’s function is mapping JSON objects to DOM elements according to id, class or data-blind attributes. It allows to write templates in plain HTML and is compatible with all browsers.

Minivents

Size: 0,2 kB
Developed by: Fabien O'Carroll

This is tiny events library that has only 3 functions: listen to event, stop listening to event and emit event.

Bowser

Size: 1,4 kB
Developed by: Dustin Diaz

This library is made for checking the browser version, HTML, CSS and JavaScript features. We started using it after jQuery browser has been removed in 1.9 version.

Bowser is also a good tool as it works with mobile versions. The very similar tool, which is rather popular - Modernizr.

Store.js

Size: 1,1 kB
Developed by: Marcus Westin

This library allows you to overcome the problem of cookies size limitations on websites. Store.js is a cross-browser storage library for values in the browser and a localStorage wrapper. It’s a perfect tool save the data from being lost.

Smoothie Charts

Size: 2,8 kB
Developed by: Joe Walnes and Drew Noakes

This tool helps you to built charts for real time streaming data. It can be used for creating smooth line graphs in projects like fitness apps or trading websites. The lines are so attractive, that everyone wants to get them on their website.

Pass-Meter

Size: 0,7 kB
Developed by: Chase Hutchins

Pass-meter is the most micro sized library we’ve ever met. This tool is made for rejecting the weak passwords like “12345” or “qwerty”. It might be very handy when you are working on the project for the large enterprise that meets the very strict security rules. And yes, it weights only 0.7 kB!

By the way, it can be used both like a standalone module or like jQuery plugin (version 1.7 and higher).

Javascript-state-machine

Size: 1,3 kB
Developed by: Jake Gordon

What is the purpose of this library? Creating a finite state machine ;) We think that the perfect usage of this tiny library lies in game development but you can use it in any types of project.

Swipe

Size: 1,9 kB
Developed by: Brad Birdsall

If you are working on the development of a mobile app, this small library will be very useful for you. It allows to create very accurate mobile slider for any mobile device. The library contains only few styles but they are generally enough.

Hyperapp

Size: 1,2 kB
Developed by: Jorge Bucaran

This small library is used for building frontend applications. And know what? You don’t have to learn new language to create scalable browser-based application.

Lit-HTML

Size: ~2kB
Developed by: PolymerLabs

HTML template literals in JavaScript. lit-html utilizes some unique properties of HTML elements and JavaScript template literals. So it's helpful to understand them first.

Innerself

Size: 350B
Developed by: stasm

Alternative to React + Redux. A tiny view + state management solution using innerHTML. innerHTML is fast. It's not fast enough if you're a Fortune 500 company or even if your app has more than just a handful of views. But it might be just fast enough for you if you care about code size.

Wade

Size: 1kB
Developed by: kbrsh

Blazing fast 1kb search engine.The algorithm behind the search is fairly simple.

Pell

Size: 1kB
Developed by: Jared Reich

Pell is the simplest and smallest WYSIWYG text editor for web, with no dependencies.

Conclusion

As we said at the very beginning, this list is not the only one and can be expanded with more and more libraries. GBKSOFT tried to select the smallest, lightweight but still useful JavaScript libraries.

After all, we hope that you found some interesting tools to use in your projects!