10 Best Emoji Pickers In JavaScript (2026 Update)
A study shows that over 31 million tweets and half a million Facebook posts use emoticons and emojis to express emotion and to substitute body language and tone of voice in plain text.
Emojipedia's statistics reveal that:
| In total there are 3,953 emojis in the Unicode Standard as of September 9 2025. This includes sequences for gender or skin tone, flags, and the components that are used to create keycap, flag, and other sequences. |
Understanding how to use emojis can be quite challenging. Emojis can bring some life to a dull text message and make your post on social media more interesting. But it can be confusing figuring out how they even work.
There are thousands of emojis, not just one but two or more various designs per emoji. There is a diverse range of categories and each category has dozens of options.
It's no surprise that many of us struggle to make sense of things when it comes to using emojis effectively. There are now many apps available for using emojis but these are often for computer or desktop.
The Best Emoji Picker
How about if you want to use emoji in your web project? You most certainly need something web-based as you want people to be able to use them on their webpages and web applications and not just on a mobile device.
In this post, you will find out a list of the 10 best JavaScript based Emoji Pickers that enable the user to quickly and easily choose the perfect emoji from a well-designed picker interface. Enjoy.
Originally Published Aug 26 2020, updated Jan 01 2026
Table of contents:
Best jQuery Emoji Picker Plugins
Fast Emoji Picker For Text Fields - jQuery emoji-picker.js
Instantly add Emoji support to input fields on your website.
Easy Emoji Picker For Textarea - jQuery emojiarea.js
emojiarea.js is a lightweight and easy-to-use jQuery emoji picker plugin which enables the user to quickly insert emoji (as background, unicode, and image) to a textarea element.
WYSIWYG Emoji Converter / Picker Plugin For jQuery - EmojiOne Area
A jQuery plugin for converting any html element into a simple WYSIWYG editor that supports emojis based on Emojione icons.
Easy jQuery Emoji Picker For Text Fields
A customizable, simple-to-use, jQuery powered emoji picker for text fields that support Apple Emoji, Android Emoji and Twitter Emoji.
Customizable Emoji Picker For Input And Textarea - jQuery inputEmoji
A jQuery plugin which provides a simple way to insert emojis into textarea and/or input elements.
Click the picker button next to the text field and select an emoji from the popup window. Done.
Best Vanilla JS Emoji Picker Plugins
Convenient Emoji Picker In Vanilla JavaScript – Picmo
A pure JS emoji picker where the users can quickly search and select emoji from a categorized emoji picker popup.
It also provides a Recent Used tab that shows the recently picked emoji. Supports both native emoji and Tweemoji library.
Customizable JavaScript Emoji Picker – vanillaEmojiPicker.js
fgEmojiPicker.js is a customizable, nice-looking emoji picker implemented in vanilla JavaScript and JSON.
Features:
- You can attach the emoji picker to any element.
- All emoji are defined in a JSON file.
- You can add/remove emoji by editing the JSON.
Tiny Emoji Picker In Pure JavaScript – EmojiButtonList.js
A super tiny (2.5kb minified) JavaScript library to create an emoji picker button, which allows you to pick emoji from the popup when clicked.
Minimal Emoji Picker With Vanilla JavaScript – Emoji Popover
A super tiny yet highly customizable emoji picker component written in vanilla JavaScript.
You can select emoji from a popover attached to the input field you specify.
Emoji Picker With Autocomplete In JavaScript
A simple, convenient emoji picker written in pure JavaScript (ES6) that enables you to select emoji images from an autocomplete dropdown panel while typing emoji keywords.
Conclusion:
We have prepared a list of 10 JavaScript emoji pickers that we think could be valuable in your work. Each of them offers different approaches and different solutions to balancing speed with accuracy and are open-source libraries so that you can peek under the hood to see how it all works.
More Resources:
Looking for more jQuery plugins or JavaScript libraries to create an awesome emoji picker on the web & mobile? See jQuery Emoji Picker and JavaScript Emoji Picker sections for more details.
