Nick Adams

Revault Media

This easy to use WordPress plugin is designed to add a new feature for theme developers. Used on many of my own websites as well as those of my clients, the plugin allows me to quickly add a collection of popular posts to any theme element.
The plugin can easily be used by website owners as a WordPress Widget, adding lists of posts to the Sidebar of a WordPress website.
<h4>About the plugin</h4>
More advanced users can also call the functionality of the plugin from a WordPress shortcode by adding the code <code>[thisismyurl_easy_popular_posts]</code> to any Post or Page within WordPress.
Finally, theme authors may also take advantage of the plugin by calling the functionality directly from theme files with the code <code>thisismyurl_easy_popular_posts();</code>.
This plugin was originally authored by Christopher Ross.
Questions about this plugin can be posted to the WordPress.org forums at https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-popular-posts/, or to the Issues tab at the GitHub https://github.com/thisismyurl/easy-popular-posts repository for the plugin.
This plugin is currently available in:
<ul>
<li>English</li>
<li>French</li>
<li>German</li>
</ul>
<h3>Updates</h3>
Updates to this plugin will be posted to the GitHub repository for testing prior to updates on WordPress.org, if you’d like to help make this plugin better please consider taking part in regular code reviews of releases at the GitHub repository.
<h3>Donations</h3>
Open source software such as this free WordPress plugin only work through the hard work of community members, volunteering their time or resources to make the software freely available. If you would like to show your support for this software, please consider donating towards the development effort.
If you can’t contribute to the plugin in any other way, please consider translating it to your local language.

Easy Popular Posts

An easy to use WordPress function to add popular posts to any theme.

LordPretender

Similar to the original native one, this plugin let you define the range of stats to retrieve. 
Also you will be able to add the category name of the post.
Finally, this widget will only display posts (and not pages too). 
This plugin read the top 100 of posts/pages and keep only the X first POSTS (X = number defined in the widget parameters). So, you can have less posts than requested.
Jetpack is required to work. 
A wordpress account and your blog must be linked.
You can find a demo here : http://www.spoils.fr/ 
The widget is named “Articles populaires” on the sidebar.

Jetpack Popular Posts

Using Jetpack stats, this widget will display the most popular posts.

Easy Popular Posts vs Jetpack Popular Posts