Best WordPress Appointment and Reservation Plugins

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Many businesses need to accept bookings and appointments through their website. Since millions of such websites are based on WordPress, it follows naturally that there is a need for good appointment plugins for WordPress. We, therefore, tested the options on the market and present you with the best WordPress appointment and booking plugins we've found.
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Many businesses need to accept bookings and appointments through their website. Since millions of such websites are based on WordPress, it follows naturally that there is a need for good appointment plugins for WordPress. The typical use case is a private practice (ie. Doctor, Hair Dresser, Fitness Instructor, Massage Therapist, etc…)

We, therefore, went ahead and tested the options on the market and now present you with the best ones we’ve found.

As you view the many different booking, appointment, and reservation plugins below, bear in mind that booking functionality is resource-intensive, no matter which plugin you use. Before adding any significant new functionality to your WordPress site, you need to consider whether your current hosting can handle that strain.

Once you actually have traffic, you don’t want visitors to your site to be confronted with unexplained delays; they will not stick around if a page takes minutes to load, no matter how much they want to book that appointment to get their nails fancied. More importantly, you definitely don’t want the nail salon owner contacting you to ask why her site isn’t working!

The advice we always give is to ensure you get properly resourced hosting in place before launching. We recommend two hosts that we have seen work out well for our readers. The choice between them comes down to money:

If you are on a tight budget, BlueHost has an excellent reputation for well-managed and well-supported shared hosting at a good price.

If, on the other hand, absolute reliability and performance are more important to you than price, WP Engine provides the best possible managed WordPress hosting, I use them for all of my most important sites, the ones that generate money.

Now, let’s dig into a collection of the best WordPress appointment booking and reservation plugins.

Amelia

Amelia is one of the new kids on the block that is here to make a difference. It supports multiple employees with unique working hours and days off, multiple services and service categories (plus extras), custom fields for all booking inquiries, 2-way Google Calendar synchronization, multiple locations, fully integrates with WooCommerce, provides KPI reports through graphs and diagrams and much more.

The focus of Amelia is on appointment bookings, and this becomes evident as you start to use the plugin. It has a great user experience both for you as the service provider, and also for your clients.

As the service providers, you can get an overview of your bookings in various formats; a calendar with monthly, weekly, and daily views, a list, and even a timeline. There are filtering options to then narrow down the overview as needed. It supports PayPal and Stripe payment systems directly, and any other payment system through WooCommerce, and keeps track of all financial records internally.

Pricing:

  • Basic Package – $79
  • Pro Package – $119
  • Developer Package – $249

Bookly

bookly-reservation-booking-plugin

The Bookly plugin is an easy-to-use and easy-to-manage booking tool for service providers who think about their customers. It supports a wide range of services provided by both businesses as well as individual service providers, offering reservations through your website.

It allows you to set up any reservations quickly, pleasantly, and easily. It supports reservations for all types of services, including:

  • beauty, massage, wellness, and healthcare reservations
  • sports, training, dance, fitness, yoga, or pilates appointments
  • scheduling learning and educational courses, tutors and helpers
  • organization of special events and free-time activities
  • searching and booking of visits to photographers, and stylists, placing requests for babysitters, dog-walkers, etc.

Bookly offers interesting solutions to make the booking process as pleasant as possible for customers. The only thing that is required from the client is to complete 5 easy steps. The intuitive interface, as well as clear and attractive design, make this process extremely easy.

Customers have the possibility to find a convenient time for their appointments, select a service provider, book the time slot and even pay for the services. One more thing that will please your clients is the ability to view the available booking time intervals in their own time zone.

BirchPress Scheduler

BirchPress appointment booking and online scheduling

BirchPress Scheduler is a well-coded plugin with an excellent user interface. It lets you book appointments either via the dashboard as an admin or via the front end as a non-registered website user. You can define locations, staff, services as well as clients.

You can of course then create associations between them. For example, a particular member of staff might be available at only one location at specified hours/days. He might also be able to perform a number of services but not all. Each service also has a number of settings including price, duration, and also padding time.

BirchPress Scheduler adds a new item in your dashboard menu named ‘Scheduler’, from which you can easily manage all the functionality of this scheduling and appointment system.

To have a better idea of how the plugin works check out the quick start guide, and don’t forget that you can also try out the plugin via the online demo on the BirchPress website.

A very well-rounded plugin that also has 2 pro flavors, giving you even more functionality.

Pricing:

  • Pro Personal – $99 – 1 site
  • Pro Business – $199 – 1 site
  • Pro Developer – $499 – 5 sites

Each support license is good for 12 months from the date of your purchase. Personal license users receive 25% off their renewal, Business license users receive 35% off their renewal, and Developer license users receive 50% off their renewal. If your license expires, your scheduler and website will still work just fine, but you won’t have access to product updates, new features, or the excellent product support or documentation that BirchPress provides as a service.

The Pro Business and Pro Developer include PayPal integration so you can also accept payments when a client books an appointment. BirchPress Scheduler is especially ideal for companies having multiple services, locations, and staff. It’s perfect for managing this combination.

WordPress Appointment Booking by MotoPress

WooCommerce Appointment by Motopress

WordPress Appointment Booking plugin by MotoPress enables you to add appointment booking functionality to the service website, whether this is a beauty salon, healthcare institution, educational center, fitness or yoga studio, and more.

By using this reservation tool, it is simple to offer an unlimited number of services and customize them. For instance, by adding buffer times or changing the duration. Personal flexible working calendars of your staff can include lock-out hours, breaks, days off, and vacation time. The plugin has everything you need for group scheduling, submission of several services at one go, and receiving payments online/after arrival. It supports PayPal, Stripe, and a wire transfer.

Plugin users may view the bookings in a centralized calendar and define user roles. The capability for employees to sync schedules with Google Calendar helps them stay informed about new appointments without logging into the website.

The reservation process is easy. An appointment booking wizard is embedded for the clients to take a few scheduling steps on one page. The integration with page builders (Gutenberg, Elementor, and Divi) is added. This plugin comes packed with different widgets to build other website sections.

Simply Schedule Appointments

The Simply Schedule Appointments plugin is an excellent tool for those who prefer a simple straightforward option, such as SSA. But don’t let that fool you into thinking their functionality is limited. They offer a wide range of powerful features, including two-way Google Calendar Sync, accepting payments with PayPal and Stripe, and many advanced scheduling options such as Group bookings, Team scheduling, and more.

With its deep integration within the WordPress environment, Simply Schedule Appointments stands out from the picks. Integrations with Elementor, Gravity Forms, Formidable Forms, WP Fusion, etc., sets it apart from the rest. 

Their support team is very receptive as well. They’re happy to answer any questions you may have and let you know right off the bat whether this would be a good fit for your website.

Key features:

  • Unlimited Booking Calendars, Notifications, and Appointments
  • Google Calendar Sync to help balance your schedule
  • Email and SMS confirmations, follow-ups, and reminders
  • Zoom and Google Meet integrations for video conferencing meetings
  • Deep WordPress integrations with other loved plugins such as Elementor, Gravity Forms, The Events Calendar, etc.

Pricing:

  • Plus – $99
  • Professional – $199
  • Business – $299

Booknetic

Booknetic is an appointment booking plugin developed for a variety of appointment-based businesses. The plugin comes with a long list of solutions that allow you to fully automate and modify your booking processes.

Due to the integration with WooCommerce, business owners can sell their products as well as provide appointment services on their websites. A customer relations management system is also included in the plugin.

Users can register with their Google or Facebook accounts. When a new client registers on your system, their information is saved in the customer dashboard automatically. For a customized view of your bookings, you can adjust colors and booking steps from the admin panel.

In addition, Booknetic supports PayPal, Stripe, WooCommerce, and Mollie payment gateways allowing you to receive payments and deposits online. There are also additional taxes and service elements that help to facilitate the appointment booking process.

Key features:

  • Booking widget with complete customization
  • Email, SMS, and WhatsApp notifications of booked appointments
  • A booking panel with multiple levels of categories is available
  • A calendar that can be used to review personnel schedules
  • Google Calendar Sync Continue with Google and Facebook accounts
  • Integration with Zoom for online meetings
  • Features include coupons, gift cards, and holidays
  • Payments on a recurring basis and the ability to invite folks in for a single scheduling session

Booknetic’s pricing starts at $79 for their Regular plan which includes 6 months of support. They also have a $489 Extended license as a SaaS plan.

WooCommerce Appointments

woocommerce-appointment-booking-plugin

Set up appointable products for WooCommerce with the WordPress Appointment Booking Plugin. It is perfectly integrated into WooCommerce, WordPress as well as Google Calendar.

It’s one of the best appointment scheduling software you can get right now. You can request payments or just confirmations, and it even allows you to receive payments for appointments. You’ll be able to keep a perfectly organized calendar and reduce no-shows with advanced notifications and reminders.

It is very easy to add a new appointment manually for a customer. Besides adding a new appointment in your website admin, you can also add a new appointment to your Google calendar and it will be automatically synced. All email templates are also integrated with the WooCommerce notification system and can be edited the same way as default WooCommerce email notifications, while templates can also be edited in your child themes.

For a better overview of your appointments, you can view and edit your appointments inside a flexible calendar, and manage it in a weekly or daily view while being synced with staff as well as Google calendar. In addition, not only can you accept payments/deposits for your appointments, but you can also receive appointment requests. This way, you don’t accept payments for your appointments upfront and have better control over the schedule.

Pricing

  • $89 – Single Site
  • $129.00 – Up to 5 sites
  • $299.00 – Up to 25 sites

WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin by Tyche Softwares

The WooCommerce Booking and Appointment plugin by Tyche Softwares transform your WooCommerce shop into a full-fledged booking platform. It lets you capture the booking date and time for each service,

It’s fully integrated with WooCommerce and can be used to create and manage all types of booking services. Whether you want to sell tickets, tours, hotel bookings, appointments or more, this plugin can do it for you.

Some of the many benefits of this plugin include the flexible labels that allow you to name your bookings as you want, the choice of a booking calendar in your language, the option to sell vacation rentals and volume discount rentals, and even the ability to accept bookings over the phone or by email.

If you have any calendar applications, you can simply sync these with your bookings, and if there are any dates on which you want to block bookings, you can do that too using the global and product-specific “exclude days” rules.

YITH Booking & Appointment for WooCommerce

YITH Booking & Appointment for WooCommerce was built upon request by and keeping in mind, YITH and WooCommerce customers. It integrates a regular WooCommerce store with a simple booking system that can be used by both customers and vendors.

It can be used for estate agencies, travel agencies, hairdressers, doctors, business consultants, and anyone else who may benefit from integrating a booking system into their WordPress site.

It creates a dynamic booking system where the price is processed in real-time according to your customers’ requests. This allows you to arrange your bookings by date, period or season, number of people involved, and much more.

Here are some of its great features, among many others:

  • Create unlimited bookable products
  • Configure All Day bookings or et monthly, daily, hourly, and per-minute booking products
  • Let users set the duration of the booking.
  • Automatically approve all new bookings or review them before confirmation
  • Allow users to cancel their booking until a specified term before the start date of the booking
  • Set the booking location (using Google API: towns and cities worldwide will be available)
  • Increase or decrease the booking cost based on the following factors:
    • pre-set time frames (e.g. high season and off-season)
    • number of people in the booking
    • duration of the booking
  • Set the first and last date available for the booking
  • Provide info about check-in and check-out
  • Ask for the type of people during the booking process
  • Offer additional services either for free or for an extra cost
  • Add the map pointing to the location of the bookable product on the product detail page
  • Create custom search forms
  • Create a booking manually from the WordPress backend
  • Export bookings in CSV or ICS
  • Integrate Google Calendar to be synchronized with the admin calendar
  • Auto-sync the calendar with services like Booking, Airbnb and HomeAway
  • Create unlimited bookable products
  • Configure All Day bookings or et monthly, daily, hourly, and per-minute booking products
  • Let users set the duration of the booking.
  • Automatically approve all new bookings or review them before confirmation
  • Allow users to cancel their booking until a specified term before the start date of the booking
  • Set the booking location (using Google API: towns and cities worldwide will be available)
  • Increase or decrease the booking cost based on the following factors:
    • pre-set time frames (e.g. high season and off-season)
    • number of people in the booking
    • duration of the booking
  • Set the first and last date available for the booking
  • Provide info about check-in and check-out
  • Ask for the type of people during the booking process
  • Offer additional services either for free or for an extra cost
  • Add the map pointing to the location of the bookable product on the product detail page
  • Create custom search forms
  • Create a booking manually from the WordPress backend
  • Export bookings in CSV or ICS
  • Integrate Google Calendar to be synchronized with the admin calendar
  • Auto-sync the calendar with services like Booking, Airbnb and HomeAway

WooCommerce Bookings

WooCommerce Bookings

This is the official bookings extension from Woo themselves. It allows you to sell your time or date based bookings, adding a new product type to your WooCommerce site. Perfect for those wanting to offer appointments, services or rentals.

Feature highlights:

  • Create booking slots
  • Multi-person bookings
  • Customer email notifications
  • Have bookings made either right away, or sent to you for approval.
  • Filter and update bookings, as well as booking availability, directly from your WordPress admin.
  • Create bookings manually via the WordPress admin, mirroring the frontend bookings form your customers see.
  • There is huge flexibility in defining costs per booking, resource, block, people, or duration.
  • Define when your booking is available to your customers.
  • Resources” per bookable product for added flexibility. Resources can also be created globally to apply to multiple bookable products.
  • Define global availability rules for all bookable products.
  • Integration with the Product Add-ons extension lets you add extras for each booking.
  • Send custom email notifications to people who have booked a product.
  • View bookings in either list or calendar format.

Pricing:

  • Single-Site – $249

Other Plugins

I also found and tested a few other plugins, however, I didn’t include them with the major ones above for one reason or another.

WP Simple Booking Calendar – I really like this one. It promises to do just one thing and does it well. Basically, it lets you create a clean calendar as a widget or in a post/page, and set the availability of whatever it is you are selling. Users cannot book themselves through the plugin, rather, this is just for displaying availability. The pro version lets you create multiple calendars.

Appointy – While it works fine once you get it set up, this is really an interface between WordPress and Appointy.com (a third party) rather than a native WordPress plugin.

This category of WordPress booking plugins has come a long way since it started out. While it was previously hard to find a solution that worked just the way you wanted it to, today there seems to be more flexibility available, so you’re bound to find something that meets your needs.

Do you have any appointment plugins you could wholeheartedly recommend? And do you feel there are some needed features that the current solutions don’t cater for?

Jean Galea

Jean Galea is an investor, entrepreneur, and blogger. He is the founder of WP Mayor, the plugins WP RSS Aggregator and Spotlight, as well as the Mastermind.fm podcast. His personal blog can be found at jeangalea.com.

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114 Responses

  1. Hello,
    Nice article with a nice list! Some of my customers are enjoying the plugin for WordPress “VikAppointments”. It has a very complete managing area for appointments, calendars, employees, working days and hours, Google sync and much more. Highly recommended!
    Available with a PRO and Free version in the WordPress repository.

  2. I must say, compared to the other options out there, it was by the far the best in terms of what it can do, simplicity and easiness to use out-of-the-box. The price at $19 was by far better than any other options out there.

  3. Hey everyone. Has anyone tried Gappointments? It’s built as a Gravity Forms addon, and because I use Gravity Forms a lot, it caught my eye. It looks promising, but I haven’t bought it.

  4. Hi, Please help! I’m looking for a WP plugin to book appointments for a surf school, for private sessions (1-3 people’s details with one person paying) and group lessons (6 people’s details, all paying separately) with a payment system preferably worldpay. The Group sessions have a maximum of 6 people in the group which can be booked by 6 different individual students, so I need the option of having 6 peoples personal details. The plugin needs to keep track of number of places sold & left available in the group with text message reminders and the option to pay deposit or full amount. I would also like an option for a client profile login with a CRM where we can upload video footage to their profile. Is there a plugin that does all that, or would I require a couple of plugins? If I need more than one, which plugins work well with each other? Would be amazing to have access via an App for on the go to access all this information too. And I’d like it to be clean, fresh and minimalistic looking, customised on my site. Please help. I’ve read so many of these threads and am totally lost.

  5. i will introduce a cost effective and must needed WooCommerce Rental plugin to you in the field of rental and booking system of WooCommerce. The name of this plugin is WooCommerce Rental And Booking . WooCommerce Rental And Booking Plugin (RnB) is the most appreciated rental and Booking plugin for last one year.

  6. I’d like to add the free Ultimate Appointment Booking & Scheduling plugin to this list. Just had a big update with lots of new features. It’s easy to use and customize. The custom fields are great and there are lots of notification and follow-up options. Great support too!

  7. Hi,

    This is a good list of WordPress appointment plugins. I also would like to share one – BookingRobin.

    It is powerful and highly configurable. Check it out.

  8. I’ve used easyreservations for the past 2+ years on cavedale.co.uk to rent out our holiday cottage and it does the job perfectly but I have to agree with your comments about it being a little buggy.

    I’m on the lookout for something with the same level of filters that integrates with woocommerce and WC Vendors.

  9. Does anyone knows a plugin for wordpress where i can do this ?

    Limit the total amount of appointments based on user role in wordpress.

    For example:
    User Role A – All users in this role, are able to book maximum 1 appointment a week. But they are still able to schedule their appointment for the next week and so on.. but they are limited to schedule only 1 appointment each week.

    User Rol B – All users in this role, are able to book maximum 2 appointments a week. But they are still able to schedule their next two appointments for the next week and so on.. but they are limited to schedule only book 2 appointments in each week.

    User Role C – All users in this role, are able to book maximum 3 appointments a week. But they are still able to schedule their next two appointments for the next week and so on.. but they are limited to schedule only book 3 appointments in each week.

    Thank you,
    Best regards,
    Taylor

  10. WooCommerce is my go-to to minimize conflicts, but I tried WooCommerce Bookings and had issues with it from the start. Luckily, when their support team couldn’t figure out what was happening, they gave me a full refund without a hassle.

    WC Appointments from BizzThemes ended up having all the features we were looking for. When there was a compatibility issue with our theme, they took a look and helped us figure it out. I’ve reached out to support a couple times and they’ve always responded right away with helpful answers.

    If you provide appointments across timezones, WC Appointments is the only option currently. I’ve been really happy with it.

    1. Hi. I am new at this and I’m looking for plugin where I can assign multiple staff and that they can login also and determine different prices for different staff (I need this for hair salon). I found WooCommerce Appointments plugin most useful. Do you think that this is the best choice or you can recommend some other plugin?
      TNX

  11. Hi Jean,

    Thanks for the fantastic review of the available modules around the place. I’ve read through your comments and taken a look at several of the modules to see if they fit my use case and it seems to be a toss up between Bookly and WooCommerce Appointments.

    My client runs a cleaning business that services multiple cities with a variety of cleaners that can be booked to deliver the work. Ideally, I want to assign a cleaner to a given service area (i.e. by towns that they can work at and the type of cleaning they do – i.e. carpet cleaning, curtain cleaning, etc.) and as the client selects their location and places their order, the job can get allocated to a given cleaner based on their availability at the time of the appointment.

    The Bookly plugin seems to come closest to this use case but seems to insist on displaying the vendor that can be selected to deliver the service – which is not what I’m after in this case.

    I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts (or anyone else’s for that matter) on the best fit for this use case.

    Thanks, Ross

    1. So if there are 2 cleaners who work at the same time schedule & the same location. Which of the 2 cleaners should the booking system pick? this is not so logical. You need to make the client pick, I guess. Or you need to make different calendars & set each cleaner as a default (which is possible with bookly)

      1. Hi Rob, the logic would be that several cleaners may be able to service multiple areas as one dimension. The second dimension would be their availability. The third dimension would be the skill/capability of the cleaner. So for example, if the client is selecting “Carpet Cleaning” at 11:00am on Tuesday in Location 1 as their requested booking, I wouldn’t want them to have to decide which cleaner they will get, they simply request the booking and the system tells them if someone is available to fulfil their request – if so, they commit the booking and pay.

        Behind the scenes, I see it working like a Taxi system. So if the company runs 10 cleaners, 5 of them do “Carpet Cleaning” and of those 5, 3 are able to service that geographic location, and all happen to be available at 11:00am on Tuesday, the job should go out to all of them and whoever “accepts it” first confirms the booking and is locked in to do that job. The alternative is, a dispatcher/scheduler is the one who makes the decision and also sees the 3 available people and assigns the job request to one of them, therein committing the booking.

        I researched a few and it seems like Bookly was also the closest match for this but when I put this scenario to several providers, they all claimed they could achieve it.

        1. Hi
          I’m very interested in this discussion.
          Did you find finally this plugin?
          How do you handle the payment? Do you use an application to split the payment between you and the cleaner?

  12. Hi,

    I am looking for a Room Booking System. We have multiple Conference Rooms in the building that are shared by multiple companies (around 100+ Employees collectively). It needs to be secure, web based, with multiple address books (1 for each company). Also needs to have built-in multi-way Notifications, as people book the Rooms, or change Schedules, etc, they all get Notified immediately via Email, etc. Google Calendar would be a nice to have but not required. No Payment System needed, as it is an Internal System.

    Checked the web, but didn’t find anything. Nearly all plugins are for Appointment and Events.

    Does anyone know of a plugin? or do I need to hire a Developer for Custom work?

  13. I am a chiropractic and using Bonnt.com for my practices, and its working fantastic so for and having a lot of features at affordable price, their multiple locations is perfect for us. My staff and patients love it.

  14. You have done amazing listing for reservation wordpress plugins. And In this list i would like you to add one more WordPress plugin for reservation – All in One Reservation. which is powerful plugin for reservation management system. It has all the necessary features and functions needed for a reservation management plugin.

  15. hiya,
    i want to ask,
    i want a calendar plugin for ballroom reservetion (for wedding)
    it consist rent day and night session.
    so 1 day the user can rent the day and the night.

    can anyone help me?
    thank you

  16. hello everyone can anyone help me ..i want appointment plugin for my site which i am gonna build ..my site will be for example doctors appointment and there will be many doctors who will register to my site and i want each doctor to have his own appointment page and the doctor can make changes himself to the callendar and all the people contacting the doctor the doctor should recieve all the records automatically..please help

  17. Hi, Thanks for this list.
    I’m looking for a plugin that will:
    Display calendar, let folks book appointments + e-commerce
    Allow for multiple staff
    Allow for booking duration to be set by staff
    Allow for 2 way google sync with each staff members google calendar
    Allow for recurring appointments
    Allow for bookings to be paid for in advance and booked (ie 10 bookings over 10 weeks)
    Allow for discounts for advanced block bookings
    Supports single and multiple sessions per booking
    Preferably WooCommerce if additional payment gateway/eCommerce is required.

    Thanks in advance for any advice you have 🙂

  18. How about a room reservation plug-in like this one for Drupal? [link removed]

    I have contacted a lot of WP appointment plug-in designers and no one does it. They call these “swim lane” calendars with the room tabs. It is a great plug-in. We need it for college classrooms and conference rooms that schedule by the hour. We want it to be a WP plug-in, rather than another service. Any suggestions? tks.

  19. Great article, Jean. Any way you can comment on which of the plugins above support “subscription” booking, i.e. recurring payments? Our customers pay $XX a month for the ability to book 3 short slots with our staff. They can also pay $ZZ to buy a single appointment. Which of the products above support subscriptions? Thanks!

  20. Hi,

    very interesting and complete review but you missed the best one!! ( LOL )

    We also have developed Salon Booking Plugin an appointment booking system focused on a precise market niche of the Barber Shops, Hairdressing Salons, Beauticians and all that kind of professionals that use to provide their services upon an appointment.

  21. Thanks! Booking Ultra Pro, I found this as a cheaper feature rich “gateway” plugin for WP, anyone used this?

  22. What would you recommend for a cleaning service? I’m looking at creating time slots for customers which allow them to select recurring dates (every 2 weeks) for a discount. Is there a plugin like that or something similar?

  23. Hello,

    What would you recommend for a law firm? We would like the ability to have clients book meetings with us online. We would set the times that were available. We would also like this to sync with Google Calendar?

  24. Great list!

    I quite like Aweber, because it lets me customise my booking page and better engage my customers. But very recently, on a colleague’s recommendation, I have started using 10to8.

    And this Online Booking system is perfect for my business.
    The booking page was easy to embed onto my website, emails and facebook page. Plus I integrated it with my Google calendar, Paypal and MailChimp, to maximise efficiency.

    1. 10to8 only integrates with Stripe, and not PayPal according to their website and demo.
      How did you manage to integrate payments with PayPal?

  25. Does anyone else have a problem with time-limited updates? I know it’s very common but it really bugs me when you shell out for a “pro” version with a “lifetime” licence then find you don’t get any bug fixes after a year (whereas you do with the free version, of course). It seems a dangerously insecure practice, or else a hidden cost.

    1. If it’s a lifetime license then there should not be any license renewal fees. Most plugins are sold on a yearly license basis, as this gives the developers the possibility to continue developing the plugin on the long term. In general most online businesses are moving towards the SAAS model with monthly recurring payments so I expect that we’ll see more of that within the area of WordPress plugins in the coming months and years.

  26. Excellent summary. But I’ve purchased two of these and each time had to ask for a refund.

    I really need something that will synchronise with a calendars and avoid making clashing appointments (with some padding). Otherwise, every time a staff member schedules a meeting or something they also have to remember to manually schedule the same thing as an exception in their appointment availability. Bookly almost does this but it doesn’t work at the time of writing.

  27. Hi, great article. I am looking for something that I can use to make an appointment for an online video chat with a prospect. What I want is for them to see my availability, choose a 30 minute or one hour slot, and then it will alert them to be ready on Skype at that time or something else, maybe WebRTC? Or maybe there is an app so that they can use their phone for the call, or we can all have apps on our phone and teleconference.

  28. Hi all, great topic!
    Any ideas for a plugin that works between users? Practically I have 2 different user groups: sellers and customers. I need that: sellers show their availability on the calendar, and customers book appointments. All managed by users on frontend.

  29. Hi all,

    Any of ye come across a solution for booking multiple sessions at once across multiple dates and times ?

    Specifically I am looking to create a system where I can offer a class for say €50, but if you sign up for 4 you’d get them for €125. And the customer can pick the times and dates you can use them.

    I have been trying to figure it out on WooCommerce Bookings & WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing, but so far I after days of research and sending some questions to the plugin makers I am still unsure if one can do this, not to mind how.

  30. We have just released WooCommerce Appointments plugin, which easily trumps your listed appointment plugins. Feel free to compare features on the link I posted and demo it yourself.

    Some of the best features:

    – Two way Google Caledar sync
    – Staff management and login
    – Busy filter (strip off 30-50% of available slots)

  31. does anyone have one that is for business consultation bookings so very straightforward but must integrate with 365?

  32. Does anyone know of any scheduler plugins that allow the user to:
    1. Select multiple time slots on a given day.

    2. Select automatically repeated appointments for the same date/time each week (e.g. A standing appointment for Wednesdays at 2:00pm)

  33. I’ve tried all of the above, but ultimately found 10to8 to be the most delightful experience for my users and the easiest to manage. It’s free and handles multiple staff, rooms, payments, customer reminders. It’s very easy to set up too:

  34. I wanted to suggest adding our booking system Planyo to your list:

    This is a plugin connected to . The integration with WP is seamless, no iframes are used. The biggest advantages of Planyo are: a strong support for languages (6 in the backend and 27 in the frontend) and extreme flexibility (has a large number of integrations and can be used for even most demanding booking scenarios)

    @creative024: of course planyo will support separate pricing for these customer types.

  35. I am looking for a WP booking plugin that will allow me to have separate pricing for Adults, Kids Senior Citizens does anyone know of one that will work.

  36. For MindBody, there is a new WordPress plug.
    Allows clients to create new accounts, sign in for more info and join classes.
    It’s pretty awesome.

  37. Great list. I’ve been using Bookly, but I’ve never tried others in your list. Brich press seems to be promising, so I have to try it as well. 😀

  38. Can anyone, please, let me know if any of these are like Doodle? If not, suggestions?

    I need a poll-type scheduler, that checks the availability of multiple users. I’m looking to schedule a meeting once a month based on when everyone is available.

    Thank you in advance.

  39. I am making a WordPress website and need to sell day tours. Buyers need to choose the date of the day tour (3 tours), time (each has a few times per day), and number of guests (children, adult has unique price). I want them to checkout with Paypal. Can your website help?

  40. Hello, does anybody know which ones allows a certain role (lets say an instructor role) to handle their calendars in the frontend instead of backend. I want an instructor to simply being able to register and then edit his own calendar. Since two days I try to figure out – but this seems to be a hardly needed feature for some reason – at least for me it is a pain to figure out…

  41. Do you know how I would go about limiting bookings to registered users? Is this something that any of the calendar plugins offer or would I have to build a user registration process and then put the calendar booking inside it?

  42. Unfortunately, BirchPress will not fit this particular client’s needs. They need to have the ability to schedule appointments that vary in length from 3 minutes up to 18 minutes. I talked to their support staff and they do not offer that as an option. Everything else looked great, but that was a deal-breaker. I am actually not going with any of the others, either. Found Full Slate and they fit everything on the client’s list, as well as ridiculously amazing customer service and response time (including weekends!!). Thanks for the great resource!

  43. Wow! Thank you for the quick reply! So, no other reviews? Specifically more recent? I think I have narrowed down to BirchPress, AppointmentPlus (software), and SQUARE (used to be BookFresh)

    1. I prefer native WordPress plugins so I’d go for BirchPress. Is there anything that concerns you with that plugin?

  44. Great comprehensive list here. Looks like it is a few years old now, but still great resources. Have you reviewed any of these recently? Or even some of the newer ones? I have spent hours (HOURS) researching. So hard to find the best fit. I don’t care how much it costs, I just want the best one.
    So far I have looked at: BirchPress, Appointments+, as well as ApointmentPlus (different, newer software, not plugin), Bookly, Appointzilla (meh), and the newer SQUARE software. Overwhelmed with the options. Help?

  45. I’m looking for a solution that would allow me to sell multiple appointment sessions for a discounted cost. It would be ideal if I could sell a package of 3 appointments, then it would allow the client to book all 3 appointments. I want to give a discount for multiple sessions purchased. For example one session purchased alone costs $100, but you could purchase 3 sessions for $200. Has anyone ran across and plugins that would allow something like that or do you have any ideas on how to accomplish that? I’ve only found solutions that allow you to book and pay for one appointment at a time.

    1. Did you ever find a solution for this Ronda? I been looking for the same solution now for nigh on three days now and its driving me nuts. It should be simple to find.

  46. A new booking plugin was recently released, it’s called Team Booking and it has the feature to fully manage availability through Google Calendar:

    1. I’ve tried it and it’s shitty (missing lot of basic features and returning lot of errors). I’ve been using bookly and it’s working like a charmp so far (despite the lack of full 2 ways compatibility with google calendar)

  47. It would have been good to see your thoughts on ResRes (restaurant reservation plugin). The free version is great as free plugins go, but the premium version is a lot better than things like Open Table or Food Press. It just needs more words spread about it.

  48. As everyone says this is unbelievably the biggest pain in the ass search ever for a WP plugin. I was very hopeful the Gravity Forms had a compatible plug-in but it doesn’t. In the end this is not for me but a client so were going to go with BirchPress.

    Thanks for the post and will return to leave feedback when I can.

    P.S. I looked at appointzilla already thank you.

    P.S.S. this is the hugest gap in the WP plugin arena. Someone should really jump on it. 🙂

    1. What did you end up with @kris jolls? If BirchPress how was it?

      My client found Booking System Pro by Code Canyon. Have you tried that? Definitely would love to integrate with Gravity Forms as you indicated. And 100% agree with your P.S.S.

      Chris Lema did a great write-up on WooCommerce Bookings but based on the comments, if you don’t already have a WooTheme or love WooCommerce it is not attractive to go that route. He also mentions the SaaS solution, BookFresh.

      1. I want to add that in a separate discussion in a WordPress community on Facebook, initiated by Jon Brown kindly posting your article there; Corrine is using Acuity Scheduling to do nutrition counseling. This is her site: Acuity Scheduling is not WordPress specific, it also integrates with Drupal, SquareSpace and a few others. The sync is with Google not the iCal sync that BirchPress offers. Payment through Paypal, Strip or Authorize.net $228/year for Premium or $120/year for Professional. Would love to know others opinions of this. Corrine said: “I don’t really like the method for purchasing packages of appointments but it seems to offer most everything else. The support is also pretty good and it’s inexpensive”

      2. This appears to be a useful review of BookFresh, the SaaS solution that I mentioned Chris Lema liked at one point. The latest update on this review is June 2014 and it has been bought by Square so there may be improvements in the future. Thorough history of the company and detailed points. Comments through June would indicate rather scary customer service.

  49. What a frustrating search! Thanks for this post.

    Birchpress, to get any features is $150/yr – which sucks considering it isn’t that great to begin with.

    Appointment+ is way over-priced for what you get. Sure it is $19 to buy but then $19/month for updates which come out monthly (ironic). It isn’t worth $240/year!!

    Has anyone tried ??
    I’m looking at it for a client who just has services to offer.

    1. Hi MItch,

      I would suggest you to try out Appointzilla. We were among the first to develop Appointment Booking Plugin for WordPress. Here is the link:

      Disclosure: I am founder of Appointzilla

  50. Does anyone know of a reservation/booking plugin that would be suitable for a wedding/event product hire site? Ideally it needs a feature where you set the date require at the start and then all the products would indicate if available for that date and then be able to be added to the cart. All the ones I’ve found so far require you to select the date for every item which is just a time consuming hassle for customers when they want to add say 50 different products.

    I got my hopes up with the new Woocommerce Bookings Extension however it doesn’t have that feature built in.
    One feature that it does come with that we would need is the booking confirmation control so the customer can submit to you for approval and then bookings that require approval won’t be invoiced until you confirm the booking.

  51. I actually need a simple booking calender where i can define “slots” during a day. For example “Morning” and “Afternoon”, sure the slots could also be from 06:00 – 14:00 and from 14:00 to 22:00. So far nothing special, the tricky part and where i fail to find a suitable plugin is that i want for example to be able to book the 06:00 – 14:00 slot at 09:00 on the same day.

    I want to be able to let the members of my association book a boat available during two time slots a day. And if its available to book it even if the slots start time has passed.

    It does not have to be free but since this is a non profit association we cannot handle montly fees.

    1. HI anders83,

      My name is Ankit and I am founder of Appointzilla.com . As the name suggests , it is an appointment booking plugin for WordPress.

      We have currently developed a class booking version of Appointzilla which might be suitable for your need. It will allow you selectively open up booking slots and accept bookings at any time of the day.

      Would you like to try it out? We are currently looking for beta users and would love to have you on board 🙂

  52. Thank you very much for this Jean. I have a client who searched around himself, found and liked Checkfront.

    I wonder what you think of it.

    I am building the WordPress site his reservations system will go on. This is a single service provider. The price of the service varies by what the client requests. The system should show what slots are available and take payments. It should be easy to interact with. Each reservation is for just one person (it could be a family or group but he only needs the record of the one person signing up).

    It is not built specifically for WordPress but it has a WordPress plug-in. 1200 bookings a year for $49/month is adequate for him.

    They are not a payment processor but their payment options are far wider than the plug-ins you list here.

    Birchwood looks pretty good, I liked the iCal integration, except for the limited payment options. I prefer not to use WooCommerce.

    1. I need to give you the update that Checkfront responded to me by phone saying that their service is NOT suited to my needs. They wanted to warn me because they have gotten service providers similar to the type addressed in this article and after doing the “trial” Checkfront offers, they were not happy.

  53. Any suggestions for an appointments calendar that works for multiple “vendors”? I have a site set-up that enables anyone living in our town to sell items online (using Matt Gates Vendors plugin). Many of the artisans also offer classes. What I need is a plugin that allows for the vendors to schedule their own events and be paid directly if they charge for their class, just as the Matt Gates Vendors plugin does for products. Anyone know of something that can accomplish this?

  54. Really, most of these developers have no clue about the realities in various industries. I’m looking for a scheduling software that allows me to offer the same services at 2 different locations and a skype “location” (obviously, i’m not at all locations simultaneously), and one that accepts payment from a variety of sources. On top of that, I would like to not enter the services and their metadata more than once.

    We started with Birchpress but while the Business Pro is good, it certainly lacks polish and payment flexibility, making me question its price tag.

    We then tried playing with Appointments+ and other plugins from that group. Oy, the Marketpress plugin does not play well with Appointments+ — my clients would have to stand on their heads, spin around, and rub their noses in order to book their multiple appointments and make their payment. On top of that, the Appointments+ plugin is very buggy. The statements in the support forum, “We’ll have our lead developer look into that,” from a year ago (for some of the bugs) just do not give me warm fuzzies.

    What is a microbusiness to do?

  55. Hi,

    This article is really helpful, thanks for sharing. I am looking forward to read more articles in future. Keep writing!!! cheers.

  56. Hello there!

    So we have a site which we plan on developing in wordpress which create one calendar instance for each service provider. It’s like ZOCDOC but for another industry…

    It’s a single wordpress installation and so far we only see that WPBOOKINGCALENDAR is capable of providing this functionality. What are your thoughts? Would be most helpful!

    Thanks

    1. Please check:

      You can also find a review for it here:

      It can be used for rental sites too. If there is any specific requirement that does not match, let me know.

  57. The mindbody application looks the best for many service providers of classes according to instructor and times – starts at $75/month and only allows credit cards it seems to me. We don’t want to use paypal due to the added cost per transaction.

  58. I’m pulling my hair out trying to find a plugin that would allow certain user roles (i.e., service providers) their own calendars to display their availability for services defined by an administrator, while also allowing other users to browse available time slots and book with them. The closest (I think) I’ve been able to find is CP Appointment Calendar…because I’m very hesitant to purchase a plugin that I cannot trial in its entirety first. Does anyone have any insight into another that I might be able to get working for my use case? Thanks much.

    1. Did you ever find a better solution? Did you go with CP appointment calendar? I’m looking for similar functionality.

  59. Thanking you for the time you are devoting to read this email, I have the pleasure to contact you to propose a system of economic management Booking on-line

    If your web agency was looking for a booking system for Hotel B & B Farm, for your clients, here is an easy, inexpensive technology based on wordpress.

    The system includes a graphical “responsive” and a system of online booking with payment plypal, multilingual, with the possibility of post offers discounted prices lists and customizable without any commissions and so much more.

    To better examine our proposal, you can also view browsing the page from his smartphone.

  60. Thanks for breakdown Jean. Do you know if any of the event booking plug-ins provide a means of integrating qualifier questions/forms? I want to allow users to book appointments, but only if they the answers to a series of custom form questions meet specific criteria. Been looking for months for something that will allow this with no luck. I have Formidable Forms but have not yet figured a way to integrate it with many of the event plugins like this. Thanks in advance for any info.

  61. I don’t know if it bothers anyone else, but it really bothers me that BirchPress Scheduler lifted their Form Builder under Admin > Scheduler > Settings straight from the Form Builder of Gravity Forms. For a plugin that’s charging up to $499 for a Pro version, you’d think that the developers could have come up with their own version.

    1. Redondo, the guys at BirchPress are perfectly entitled to do so under the GPL licence. Whether they could have coded something up themselves which would be better is another discussion altogether.

  62. Thanks, how does these compare to the recently released Woocommerce Booking plugin by Ashok? =) Would you update the list?

    1. You can check out our review of Woocommerce Booking, it’s a great plugin for those who are using Woocommerce.

  63. What a fantastic review and at a glance of all the possible booking/events plugins! Ideally, I would love a plugin that can do 2 or 3 things:

    1. Allow people to book an appointment with me, and a calender to show when I am free or unavailable.

    2. For me to set up events and for people to confirm if they are attending, down to paying to RSVP and for them to download printable tickets, maps, freebies, etc.

    3. I show several vacation deals that people can book by dates.

  64. You could have a look at the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin for appointment scheduling. It is developed to work only with the WooCommerce platform. It is the only Appointment plugin out there that is fully integrated with WooCommerce. Check out it’s features at:

    You could also checkout on Jean’s review of the plugin at:

    1. Hi, I am wanting to know if WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin would allow me to collect the name of each attendee. My application is for class bookings which parents would book on behalf of their children and I really must be able to know each child’s name, especially as it is unlikely that parents will be bringing tickets along to each class. Would I have to use Gravity Forms?
      Thanks

      1. Hi Tania,

        Currently it is not possible to collect names of the people attending each class. We are currently working on an addon that will allow to do that.

        I’ve also replied to your email on this.

        Yes, you can use gravity forms along with our plugin to achieve that too.

        :Ashok

  65. Excellent overview, particularly the way you refer to how those plugin integrate with the default WordPress UI. I too think plugins should rely on the default UI, so this post was extra helpful. Thanks! Haven’t picked one so far, but most likely will try WP Simple Booking Calendar.

  66. Excellent summary Jean. I didn’t realise there were so many booking plugins available!

    Hopefully some of them will integrate with WooCommerce soon to make these folks happy.

  67. I took a look at Appointments + once. It seemed like a good plugin, but their official demo… looked like crap. I ended up looking elsewhere.

    1. I ended up going with Appointments+ and I must say, compared to the other options out there, it was by the far the best in terms of what it can do, simplicity and easiness to use out-of-the-box. The price at $19 was by far better than any other options out there. My only complaint, which is rather minor, is that the only payment integration is PayPal, as I use and prefer Stripe.

  68. Excellent list. Some I have looked at, others I had no idea even existed. The main problem I find is that many of these booking systems (at least for the travel and hospitality industry) are coded by ehem… coders who have little or no knowledge of the industry requirements. So yes, in most cases, while some of these plugins can actually “fill in the gap” for a while, from the looks of things a serious business would need to have a custom development done. Certainly none of these plugins justify the several hundreds, which some times run into thousands of dollars that they are asking for.

    1. I agree with that Marcel, but I have a feeling that this niche will become a hot one this year 🙂

  69. This is definitely the best gathering together of all the current WordPress booking options and people are going to find this useful for years to come. Thank you Jean, amazing work.

    Of course, this article should just be a starting point – anyone seriously searching for a booking option needs to do their own deep research because, sadly, a lot of plugins that look great turn out to have a lot of problems. In particular, search for support forums (it they don’t make them publicly viewable, why?) and, most important, search for actual, real-world examples of real businesses using the plugin you are interested in.

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