graysea

Recent & Featured Posts Widget adds a list of recent posts or posts of your choosing with thumbnail images, post titles, dates, times, and excerpts.
Features:
<ul>
<li>Excerpt Length. Change the number of words in the post excerpt.</li>
<li>Excerpt Display. Show the excerpt as a dropdown when someone hovers over a section or display the excerpt directly on the page.</li>
<li>CSS Modification. Modify certain CSS values including image width, text position, and border.</li>
<li>Featured Posts. Don’t want to show recent posts? Enter a list of post IDs. The number of posts shown will depend on the total number of IDs.</li>
<li>Thumbnail Images. Choose to show featured image, or the oldest image attached to a post is shown by default.</li>
<li>Images of your Choosing. Enter a list of image IDs to replace the default images. Images are shown in the order listed.</li>
<li>Date and Time. Show or hide the post date and/or time. Choose a separator that goes between date and time.</li>
<li>Include Sticky Posts. If you include sticky posts, an extra post is added. I.e. if the ‘Number of posts to show’ is 5 and you select ‘Include Sticky Posts’, 6 posts will be shown.</li>
<li>Rectangular or Circular Image.</li>
</ul>

Recent & Featured Posts Widget

Display recent posts or manually selected posts with thumbnail images. Show the excerpt directly on the page or as a dropdown.

sumitsurai

This plugin allows you to create unlimited custom groups of featured posts. 
Admin can create unlimited groups and assign the posts under one or multiple groups. 
The widget section allows the admin to show these groups of featured posts. The widget section is hugely customizable to enter HTML and CSS to give the featured posts blocks the desired look. 
Please refer to the help section for more details.

Featured Posts with Multiple Custom Groups (FPMCG)

This plugin allows you to create unlimited custom groups of featured posts.

Recent & Featured Posts Widget vs Featured Posts with Multiple Custom Groups (FPMCG)