jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery Carousel plugin allows users to present their website contents such as videos, images, and text in creative and attractive way. jQuery carousel plugins make it easy for developers to easily use and implement plugins to achieve desire and visually stunning looks for their websites.

In this article we have gathered 18 free best jQuery Carousel plugins that will make your tasks easy and help you to easily present your website contents and images in creative and innovative way. Following jQuery carousel plugins are absolutely free and each of them comes with different features, functionality and several options for customization. I hope you will find these plugins handy, useful and right choice for your next and upcoming projects.

If you like the article you might be interested in our other article on 15 Best jQuery Image Slider Plugins

1. Tiny Circleslider

Tiny Circleslider is a circular slider / carousel. That was built to provide web developers with a cool but subtle alternative to all those standard carousels. Tiny Circleslider can blend in on any webpage. It was built using the javascript jQuery library. It supports iPhone, iPad and Android as well. A interval can be set to slide automatically every given milliseconds. You can fire a callback after every move. It is easy customizable and lightweight with only 130 lines of code. The minified size is only 4 KB.

2. Flexisel

Flexisel is a jQuery carousel plugin that works well on screen sizes down-to-mobile. It has settings for enabling autoplay, defining the animation speed and stopping on hover or not.The standard layout of Flexisel adapts to different screen sizes but also, the plugin provides an option to customize the “number of visible items” for the screen sizes preferred which offers a great experience for users.

3. Cycle 2

Cycle, a pretty old yet very popular jQuery slideshow plugin now has a new, improved version: Cycle2. The plugin is perfect for anyone looking to create a completely customized slideshow as it does not declare any markup or style. And, its functionality is flexible too. Cycle2 supports responsive layouts, has options for everything (global and per slide) and can be extended easily using a full-featured API.

4. Minimit Gallery

Minimit Gallery is a highly customizable, library agnostic plugin that does galleries, slideshows, carousels, slides, practically everything that has multiple states in less than 10kb Using Minimit Gallery you have more time to focus on the ideation and the dynamics of your interface, all the logic functionality instead is managed by the plugin. It’s designed for advanced JavaScript/Jquery programmers because you need to code all the animations and the css of the gallery. It has been tested on IE7+, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

5. CarouFredSel

jQuery.carouFredSel is a plugin that turns any kind of HTML element into an infinite, circular carousel. It can scroll one or multiple items simultaneously, horizontal or vertical, automatically, by pressing buttons or keys on the keyboard.
You can dynamically add and remove items to/from the carousel. It is compatible with most popular (jQuery) lightbox-plugins. The carouFredSel-plugin was built using the jQuery-library. It is licensed under the MIT-license.

6. Slider Kit

Slider Kit is a very flexible jQuery plugin that enables us to create almost any type of slideshows like photo galleries, news sliders, carousels and more. It has support for both horizontal + vertical sliders and items can be navigated via buttons, mousewheel, image click or keyboard. There are lots of options provided like auto-start being on/off, animation types, and navigation being an infinite loop or not, starting position of the slideshow and much more.

7. Tiny Carousel

Tiny Carousel is a lightweight carousel for sliding html based content. It was built using the javascript jQuery library. Tiny Carousel was designed to be a dynamic lightweight utility that gives webdesigners a powerfull way of enhancing a websites user interface.

8. jCoverflip

jCoverflip has been developed to enable fast and granular customization of the look and feel and feature set. It has many features like drag or click functionality to showcase featured content items or demand by the users, ability to showcase both images and content associated with an item, module integration with Drupal or standalone version and many more.

9. jQuery Image Scale Carousel

It is a jQuery plugin which auto-scales the images into appropriate height and width keeping their aspect ratio. The plugin simply converts an array of images to a slider and supports manual browsing with previous-next controls and auto-play. The download package also includes a PHP-based example which creates the “images array” itself by scanning a given directory.

10. Slides js

SlidesJS is a responsive slideshow plug-in for jQuery (1.7.1+) with features like touch and CSS3 transitions.

11. Agile Carousel

Agile Carousel is a jQuery plugin that allows us to create flexible (both in function and design) slideshows. The plugin uses JSON for the data format of the slides. So, they can easily be provided remotely and integration with any other system (like CMSs) will be easier. You can select between “fade” or “slide” as the transition effect, duration of the transitions and intervals between each slide can all be defined.

12. Barouseul

Barousel is a jQuery plugin to easily generate simple carousels where each slide is defined by an image + any type of related content.

13. Circular Content Carousel

This plugin uses slider which holds the content along with their brief description, when users click on content a small box expands next to the content slider, where users can read and see the detail information related to the topic and slider yet navigates.

14. Elastislide

Elastislide is a responsive jQuery carousel plugin that will adapt its size and its behavior in order to work on any screen size. Inserting the carousel’s structure into a container with a fluid width will also make the carousel fluid.

15. Cloud Carousel

Cloud Carousel is a free option with 3D effects. The images rotate in a circular fashion with realistic perspective and reflections are also show.

16. jQuery Infinite Carousel Plugin

The Infinite Carousel is a jQuery plugin that allows you to showcase any number of images and videos in a carousel-like fashion. Unlike some other carousels, the Infinite Carousel displays items in a continuous loop no matter how you navigate. Try out the demos below to see how versatile the Infinite Carousel is.

17. jQuery Liquid Carousel Plugin

Liquid carousel is a jQuery plugin intended for liquid designs. Every time the container of the carousel gets resized, the number of items in the list change to fit the new width.

18. jCarouseul Lite

jCarousel Lite is a jQuery plugin that carries you on a carousel ride filled with images and HTML content. Put simply, you can navigate images and/or HTML in a carousel-style widget. It is super light weight, at about 2 KB in size, yet very flexible and customizable to fit most of our needs.