Jan Štětina

This plugins adds two widgets: Classified Recent Posts and Classified Recent Comments. They differ from the default widgets only in one thing – each listed link contains HTML <code>class</code> attribute describing which post it is related to. For recent comments the whole <code>li</code> tag also contains this attribute.
Listed classes are similar to the output from <code>get_post_class</code> (see <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_post_class" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress Codex</a>), each class has a prefix to prevent problems with CSS styling
<ul>
<li><code>crpw-</code> for Custom Recent Posts Widget</li>
<li><code>crcw-</code> for Custom Recent Comments Widgets</li>
</ul>
You can use this for example to highlight links to posts from chosen categories or witch chosen tags (or a particular post) via CSS.

HTML Classified Recent Posts & Comments Widgets

Default WordPress widgets with "class" attributes identifying posts added to links.

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/

HTML Classified Recent Posts & Comments Widgets vs Recent Posts Plus