tepelstreel

The Featured Category Widget is mainly designed because there were people for whom the Featured Post Widget was not enough. They wanted to put a category of their blog in the highlight. 
If there is a post thumbnail, it will be displayed above the headline of the post. If there is no thumbnail, the first picture of the post is taken. You can set the size for the thumbnail or just take the standard from your options. Decide yourself, whether you want to show the excerpt, saved with your post or just the first three sentences or the first twenty words of the post. Style the widget individually, ready.
The Featured Category was tested up to WP 4.5. It should work with versions down to 2.9 but was never tested on those.

Featured Category Widget

The Featured Category Widget is basically a Featured Post Widget for a category.

The Advanced Featured Post Widget does, what the <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-feature-widget" rel="ugc">Featured Post Widget</a> is doing also; it’s a customizable multi-widget, that displays a single post in the widget area. You can decide, whether or not the post thumbnail is displayed, whether the post title is above or beneath the thumbnail and a couple of more things. And of course, you can style the widget individually.
So far that is the same as my Featured Post Widget does also. Not every theme has the possibility to hide certain sidebars on different pages. That’s where the advanced of our plugin comes in. In the AFPW you can determine, where exactly the widget is showing and in the settings you can customize the links of your widget(s).

Advanced Featured Post Widget

With the Advanced Featured Post Widget you can put a certain post (or post type) in the focus and style it differently.

Featured Category Widget vs Advanced Featured Post Widget