Differences between Isotope and Masonry jQuery plugins

Question

I recently discovered the Masonry and Isotope JQuery plugins. They seem to be functionally almost identical and both appear to have the same author. The only obvious difference I can see is the license.

What are the main differences between these two in terms of functionality? Why would you use one over the other?

Solution 1

An excerpt from the interview with the author:

To some people Isotope would look very similar to the work you had previously done with Masonry; can you explain the main differences between the two?

Isotope has several features that Masonry lacks. Masonry essentially does one thing, placing item elements in a cascading arrangement. Isotope has Masonry’s layout logic built in, but in addition, it also has several other layout modes that can be used to dynamically position elements. You can even develop your own custom layout mode.

As I’ve mentioned, it has filtering and sorting functionality built in. Filtering items is as easy as passing in a jQuery selector:

$('#container').isotope({ filter: '.my-selector' });

Isotope takes advantage of the best browser features out there. Instead of using typical left/top styles positioning, Isotope takes a progressive enhancement approach and uses CSS transforms if supported by the browser. This provides for top-notch performance for top-notch browsers. With hardware acceleration kicking in, animations look silky smooth on WebKit browsers, and even less-powerful devices using iOS. CSS transforms perform better with CSS transitions, which I’ll discuss later.

Another difference is license as @AminAriana pointed out. Masonry is under the MIT license, but Isotope is only free for personal use.

You can buy (25$) Isotope commercial license on this page.

Solution 2

PrimosK pretty much answared you question, but I just wanted to chime in ...

Isotope is an awesome jQuery plugin. I've successfully used it on multiple sites.

One of the things I like most about Isotope is how customizable it is. It's well documented and it can do almost anything you can think of like extending it with infinite scroll and use custom layout modes.