gdthemes

A very simple popular posts widget which displays posts by comment count (with featured image).
This is a very simple plugin which displays your posts by comment count when activated at your desired sidebar. 
It comes with a setting whether you’d like to display your post’s featured image or not and also be to adjust the width and height of it.
No CSS styling has been done and it is up to you to customize it.
Please write a review or rate if you like it! 🙂
<h3>Upgrade</h3>
<ol>
<li>Use the plugin updater in WordPress or…</li>
<li>Delete the previous <code>my-popular-posts-widget</code> folder from the <code>/wp-content/plugins/</code> directory</li>
<li>Upload the new <code>my-popular-posts-widget</code> folder to the <code>/wp-content/plugins/</code> directory</li>
</ol>
<h3>Usage</h3>
<ol>
<li>Just install and activate.</li>
</ol>

My Popular Posts Widget

A very simple popular posts widget which displays posts by comment count (with featured image).

Bill Erickson

This is a helper plugin to allow you to build WordPress queries using WordPress.com stats.
This plugin uses the WordPress.com stats (packaged in Jetpack) to find out your most popular posts. You must be running Jetpack for this plugin to work. I recommend running Jetpack for at least 30 days to get useful data.
It asks for the 100 most popular posts over the past 30 days. This includes both posts and pages, since their stats don’t let you filter based on post type. I filter this list down to just posts and then store its ranking as post meta (‘be_stats’).
You can <a href="https://gist.github.com/billerickson/4997202" rel="nofollow ugc">write custom queries</a> to list popular posts, or use the <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/display-posts-shortcode/" rel="ugc">Display Posts Shortcode plugin</a> to do it for you. Examples using the shortcode plugin:
[display-posts orderby=”popular”] – Lists the 10 most popular posts 
[display-posts orderby=”popular” posts_per_page=”4″] – Lists the 4 most popular posts 
[display-posts orderby=”popular” posts_per_page=”4″ tag=”basic”] – Lists the 4 most popular posts tagged “basic”
<h3>For Developers</h3>
There are a few filters available to you for customization. Refer to the plugin’s code for more information.
be_stats_args – arguments passed to WordPress.com Stats API. 
Default: array( ‘days’ => 30, ‘limit’ => 100 ) 
Example: http://www.billerickson.net/code/customize-be-stats-arguments/
be_stats_update – Conditional for determining if stats data should be saved 
Default: ‘post’ == get_post_type() 
Example: http://www.billerickson.net/code/be-stats-change-ranking-conditions/

BE Stats

Keeps track of your most popular posts for display in site

My Popular Posts Widget vs BE Stats