I have a ranking table which changes every second. I want to animate the table rows smoothly (not necessarily every second; maybe every 5 seconds).

A quick search revealed this jQuery plugin, based on this animated table sort. For my purposes, it looks a bit too much like a sports ranking, and the code is outdated and unmaintained.

Are there alternative plugins/libraries to animate changing ranking tables?

There is an interesting post on stackoverflow on your same subject: Using jquery, how to I animate adding a new list item to a list?

Of course it should be changed a little bit, because maybe you want to add more than one item to the list.

But what you can do is to refresh it every X seconds, and for each of the list item add the item in an animated way.