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 present you with the best ones we’ve found.
As you view the many different booking, appointment and reservations 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 make sure you get properly resourced hosting in place before you launch. 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 booking and reservation plugins:
Setup 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
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 was built upon request by and keeping in mind, YITH and WooCommerce customers. It integrates a regular WooCommerce store with a simple booking system which 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 in 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 admin calendar
- Auto-sync the calendar with services like Booking, Airbnb and Homeway
- 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 in 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 admin calendar
- Auto-sync the calendar with services like Booking, Airbnb and Homeway
This appointment booking engine is a solution from the creators of the most popular WordPress plugin for hotels – MotoPress Hotel Booking.
Extending the lineup of the reservation plugins, The MotoPress WordPress Scheduler plugin enables service-based companies, such as barbershops, beauty salons, consulting and coaching entrepreneurs, and more to accept automated bookings online and always have an appointment scheduling system at hand.
It has all the essentials for creating a backend directory of unlimited employees with individual flexible schedules, tons of tools to customize the service type, duration, and capacity, and unlimited ways to tailor the plugin’s look and functionality to different types of businesses.
Major highlights of the WordPress scheduler plugin by MotoPress:
- Works for solo entrepreneurs as well as a chain of shops/salons.
- Mobile-friendly appointment booking wizard for clients.
- Flexible appointment settings for the staff, employee, service, booking and more menus.
- Clients can book multiple services at one go.
- Group bookings.
- Various types of client notifications.
- A few ready-to-go appointment templates for a school, clinic, and beauty salon.
- Translated into English, Italian, French, German and Spanish.
- Has widgets for Gutenberg, Elementor, and Divi so that you can easily integrate it with these builders and any theme.
- Affordable pricing for unlimited sites.
Pricing:
- Regular License – $49
- Extended License – $199
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 letting 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:
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 flavours, 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.
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
The Booking Calendar plugin allows users to easily schedule appointments directly through your website. It supports multiple calendars and customized booking forms in a unique online booking experience.
Features:
- Multiple calendars
- Appointment form
- Moderation
- Timezone
- Mobile support
- Notification
- Discussion
- Shortcode support
- Availability toggle
- Label
- Day, Week and Month view
- WooCommerce and EDD integration (with add-on)
- Group meetings (with add-on)
- iCal Sync (with add-on)
Pricing
CP Appointment Calendar is a WordPress plugin that allows you to define “available” time slots that the website visitors can book. It’s integrated with PayPal for receiving the booking payments.
It’s pretty useful for booking/management of meetings/appointments for lawyers firms, teachers, doctors, veterinaries, beauticians, etc… and for any kind of activity which is developed with a specific schedule during the day.
The professional version ($25) of the plugin includes the following added functionality:
- Allows to disable the Paypal payments
- You can use it as a widget
- Multi-site compatible
- Includes all future updates and improvements made to this version
- Includes 60 days of technical support
With the free version, you are therefore forced to work with PayPal and accept payments on all bookings.
This is a straightforward plugin that only allows you to enter one service and accept paid bookings for it. If you have multiple services, staff, or locations, then this plugin is not for you.
Its major limitation is that it is inflexible. For example, when a customer wants to order, he needs to enter his name, phone, email, and comments. If you don’t want one or more of these fields, you’re stuck because the plugin doesn’t allow you to remove them. The plugin author accepts requests for customization, however, ideally, you’d be able to do these things yourself through the plugin’s administration interface.
The calendar display isn’t exactly gorgeous either, would have loved to see something more stylish.
This WordPress plugin will enable online booking services for your site. Visitors to your site will be able to check the availability of apartments, houses, hotel rooms, or services you offer. They can also make reservations and appointments with the ability to choose from a multi-day, single day, or by the hour booking. Your clients can even view and register for upcoming events. With integrated Paypal (also Sage and iPay88 payments systems) support your clients can pay online.
With the free version, you cannot accept payments, you’d have to go for one of the premium packages which start at $79 and go all the way up to $149 for the full-featured multi-site version.
Booking Calendar does have a lot of features, at least when we’re talking of the premium versions. I would use it for hospitality solutions such as hotels, guesthouses, hostels, etc. For service providers, BirchPress Scheduler is probably easier to set up and use.
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, trainings, dance, fitness, yoga or pilates appointments
- scheduling learning and educational courses, tutors and helpers
- organisation of special events and free-time activities
- searching and booking of visits to photographers, 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.
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 ($25) 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.
easyReservations is a good plugin with many premium add-ons, however, I don’t like the fact that it creates a totally custom user interface rather than relying on the default WordPress UI. I also found the multitude of tooltips intended to help the user to be more of an annoyance than an aid. There appeared to be some bugs as well with the version I tested. This plugin seems mostly targeted towards the hospitality industry (hotels, guesthouses, hostels etc.).
The Events Calendar Pro (or its free version) is a very well-made plugin, but it’s not really for taking appointments. Rather, it’s for events, and also integrates with several services for ticketing (through add-ons). I just thought I’d mention it if someone was looking for this functionality, so here are the related add-ons: EDD Tickets, Eventbrite Tickets, Shopp Tickets, WooCommerce Tickets & WP E-Commerce Tickets. There are also a couple of other related plugins such as Facebook Events & Community Events.
It seems that this category of plugins for WordPress is not yet very well-defined. It’s common to see users ask for refunds because this or that plugin didn’t fulfil their needs. The main issue seems to lie because it’s not that easy to distinguish what each plugin does and what its target market is.
Do you have any appointment plugins you could wholeheartedly recommend? And do you feel there are some needed features that the current batch of plugins don’t cater for?
Keep reading the article at WP Mayor. The article was originally written by Jean Galea on 2022-03-23 07:00:00.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.