What are the differences between Chosen and Select2?

Question

Chosen and Select2 are the two more popular libraries for extending selectboxes.

Both seem to be actively maintained, Chosen is older and supports both jQuery and Pr

Answer 1

First, Let me tell you that Chosen and Select2 are two great plugin and this is my personal experience about Chosen. All what they are saying is true concerning Chosen.

The issue pointed by Pēteris Caune with the select is 2 years old and still there is no official fix. There is simply no good documentation for the API. It has been pointed out (watch issue 671) many time but there is still nothing. It took them almost 2 years to solve this issue where chosen would basically not work if you hid the div with overflow:hidden before showing it (and you have to use a witdh:X% option that you would basically never know if you don't look for the issue).

I'd say that the main problem is the fix speed like said DelvarWorld in issue 92:

My pull request fixes this issue, but like my other one and many of the ones for chosen they are being ignored. This project has too many contributors with too small of a code base.

I first picked Chosen for its MIT licence but I had all theses issues (dropdown cut, not finding the API, looking for hours for the overflow hidden), so I decided to switch to select2 because it has a better documentation, no dropdown cut bug and faster fixes.