I would take a look at http://listjs.com/. Datatables can be... difficult.
Also, datatables has a large user base which means you can find many examples of it on stackoverflow or other such sites. Lists.js on the other hand has limited examples on their site and even fewer in the wild.
I'm not an everyday programmer and needed all the help I could get. Also, considering I'm not a developer, I found datatables quite easy to use.
Your comment prompted me to take another look at DataTables. So far I'm impressed. I think it will simplify my code and help clean up some long standing bugs, mainly by replacing some of my CSS visibility hacks with filter callbacks.