CrestaProject

FREE Crest Posts Widget is a simple but powerful WordPress Widget which displays your posts with thumbnail and many other options like the ability to show the date, the number of comments, to change the length of the excerpt, change the size of thumbnails and much more.
Some features:
<ul>
<li>Easy to use interface</li>
<li>Change post title heading tag</li>
<li>Display the date</li>
<li>Display the comments count</li>
<li>Choose thumbnail size</li>
<li>Choose excerpt lenght</li>
<li>Order posts by date, title, comment count and random</li>
<li>Filter posts by category</li>
</ul>

Plugin Homepage 
http://crestaproject.com/downloads/cresta-post-widget/

Cresta Post Widget FREE

Widget for show all posts or filter by category. Many options available including show thumbnail, excerpt, date and comments count.

pjgalbraith

An advanced version of the WordPress Recent Posts widget allowing increased customization.
Features Include:
<ul>
<li>Display post thumbnails, with customizable size.</li>
<li>Display post excerpt, author, comment count, and more. </li>
<li>Provides options to trim the number of characters in the title and excerpt.</li>
<li>Override the post order to order by; date modified, title, post ID, random, comment count etc.</li>
<li>Exclude or include specific posts, authors, tags, or categories.</li>
<li>Also includes a simple template parser so you can override the default output making custom styling easy.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Documentation</h3>
See documentation at http://www.pjgalbraith.com/2011/08/recent-posts-plus/

Cresta Post Widget FREE vs Recent Posts Plus