What Is HTML5 Drag And Drop
HTML5 drag-and-drop is an extremely powerful feature. It’s supported by most modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE10, etc.) and it can be used to create some pretty interesting user interactions.
In HTML5, drag and drop is an API method that can be used to simplify moving or copying a piece of data and/or a file within a webpage (e.g images, videos, text, links, etc.).
In the past, if you wanted to add a drag and drop feature to your site or application, you would need to use a third-party plugin. With HTML5, all of the functionality is natively built in. If this functionality is what you need, it’s now extremely easy to add dragging and dropping of elements onto the page (or even between pages) to your web applications. Now that’s awesome!
The 10 Best Drag and Drop JavaScript Libraries
A drag-and-drop library adds interactive functionality to web applications through mouse, touch, or keyboard input. You can implement these libraries to create sortable lists, moveable elements, file uploaders, and visual editors without building complex event handlers from scratch.
The HTML5 Drag and Drop API provides native browser support, but most developers prefer specialized libraries that handle cross-browser compatibility, touch events, and advanced features such as auto-scrolling and snap detection. These libraries reduce development time and deliver consistent user experiences across devices.
This collection ranks the 10 best options based on three metrics: GitHub stars reflecting community adoption, active maintenance status showing reliability, and traffic data from CSSScript.com indicating real-world developer interest. Each library offers distinct features for different project requirements. I hope you like it.
Originally Published Aug 03 2018, updated Dec 17, 2025
1. Lightweight JS Sorting Library with Native HTML5 Drag and Drop – SortableJS
Sortable is a lightweight and simple JavaScript library that makes a list of items sortable by using the native HTML5 drag and drop API. Works with all the modern browsers and touch devices.
Features:
- Supports touch devices and modern browsers (including IE9)
- Can drag from one list to another or within the same list
- CSS animation when moving items
- Supports drag handles and selectable text (better than voidberg’s html5sortable)
- Smart auto-scrolling
- Advanced swap detection
- Smooth animations
- Multi-drag support
- Support for CSS transforms
- Built using native HTML5 drag and drop API
- Supports any frameworks like React, Vue, Angular, etc
- Supports any CSS library, e.g. Bootstrap
- Simple API
- Support for plugins
- Typescript definitions at @types/sortablejs
2. Pure JavaScript Drag and Drop Library – dragula.js
dragula.js is a simple, dependency-free, touch-enabled JavaScript library that provides drag and drop functionality on DOM elements.
Features:
- Super easy to set up
- No bloated dependencies
- Figures out sort order on its own
- A shadow where the item would be dropped offers visual feedback
- Touch events
- Seamlessly handles clicks without any configuration