8 Best WordPress Booking Plugins (Free + Paid Options)
Last updated on Jul 27, 2023 by Southie Williamson
Are you looking for a WordPress booking plugin to allow appointment scheduling and online reservations on your website?
Manually scheduling bookings takes up a lot of time and isn’t very convenient for customers. That’s why adding a WordPress booking system to your site is a perfect solution if you run a business that uses appointments or reservations.
But, with so many online booking plugins available, it can be hard to know which one to choose. To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of the top booking plugins for WordPress, so you can find the perfect fit for your business.
Let’s jump into it…
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What Is a Booking Plugin in WordPress?
A booking plugin in WordPress is a tool that adds a calendar and/or booking form to your website. That way, visitors can easily choose a date and time, enter their details, and make a reservation or appointment without having to leave your site.
Whether you need a system for vacation rentals, restaurant reservations, hotel bookings, service appointments, or anything else, using a WordPress appointment booking plugin can help increase sales and bookings. Plus, it’ll free up your time to focus on other things.
The plugin makes it easy to display a calendar on your website’s front end and gives you control over date formatting, time zones, recurring events, calendar feeds, event widgets, and many more customizations.
One of the best things about Sugar Calendar is that it seamlessly integrates with other plugins like Zapier, WooCommerce, Stripe, popular form builders like WPForms and Gravity Forms, and more. Easily create a totally customized booking system to collect payments or RSVPs for events.
Sugar Calendar can even sync WordPress events with Google Calendar and Google Maps to streamline your workflow and improve the customer experience. Whether you need to create one-off events or recurring events, Sugar Calendar is the perfect calendar plugin. It’s easy to use, powerful, and flexible.
WPForms is the best form-builder for WordPress and a perfect solution for adding a booking form (or any other form type) to your website. It offers a beginner-friendly drag-and-drop form builder, allowing users to easily customize booking forms by adding required fields like appointment date and time.
Plus, the form plugin comes with more than 400 form templates to simplify the setup process. It also includes anti-spam features and provides multiple customer confirmation options to ensure clients know their submissions were successful.
Use the native Gutenberg block or shortcodes to easily insert your appointment booking form anywhere on your site, including in a widget. WPForms also works perfectly with popular page builders like SeedProd, Divi Builder, and Elementor, making it effortless to add and customize forms with various design settings.
Additionally, WPForms has built-in compatibility with Sugar Calendar and integrates with Zapier for Google Calendar syncs and more. Its user-friendly interface and diverse features cater to all your form-building needs.
Whether you need signup forms, online booking forms, surveys, or contact forms, WPForms is the go-to plugin for quick and easy form creation on your WordPress website.
Pricing: Plans start at $49.50 / year (Lite version available).
BirchPress is a comprehensive booking plugin that caters mainly to small businesses such as spas, salons, and studios. It offers a professional online booking management system for appointment services.
This WordPress scheduling plugin comes with a wide range of features, like the ability to set specific times and durations for services, assign pricing information, collect payments, use a built-in form editor, assign appointments to multiple staff members, automate client and employee notifications, accept group bookings, and more.
You can easily embed booking features on any page or post using shortcodes. And, the plugin has Google Calendar integration as well as iCal, Outlook, Android, and more to make appointment management a breeze. BirchPress also allows you to mark certain dates as unavailable for booking throughout the year with its holiday-blocking feature.
BirchPress is a top booking plugin for online appointment management and is particularly ideal for service-based businesses with multiple employees handling services. Its straightforward features, ability to sync with various payment methods, and developer-friendly customizations make it a powerful tool for businesses that seek flexibility.
WooCommerce is a popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress that offers numerous extensions to expand your online store’s functionality. One of which is WooCommerce Bookings. The plugin allows you to sell bookings based on specific times or dates.
As the official WooCommerce extension, the booking plugin integrates seamlessly with your existing WooCommerce storefront. It’s designed to add booking and scheduling functionality to your eCommerce shop. You can easily create schedules similar to how you would create products. And, it offers integration with various payment gateways for automatic invoicing.
WordPress users can opt for the default modern layout or customize it using CSS. WooCommerce Bookings includes fixed and “blockable” time slots, support for one-on-one appointments or multi-person events, flexible pricing options for groups or special events, localization capabilities, email notifications, and a list or calendar format to display bookings.
Although you can offer bookings for free, WooCommerce Bookings is typically best suited for businesses already using the WooCommerce plugin. It helps you enable payment processing for time-based WooCommerce calendar bookings like classes or rentals.
Booking Calendar is a top-notch, free WordPress booking plugin that’s well-loved for its simplicity. The core version is free and suitable for many small businesses. It provides a calendar view for both website owners and visitors and a user-friendly interface to manage bookings and appointments.
Customers can select specific days and available time slots from the calendar view. Both you and your customers receive email notifications, and you can approve or deny bookings. The plugin includes features to block out times, offer flexible availability, or set timeframes to accept double bookings before deciding which appointments to keep.
One highlight of the Booking Calendar plugin is its seamless integration with various third-party sites and calendar apps like Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com. It also supports multiple languages, allowing you to cater to customers from different countries.
If you need a simple hotel booking plugin or an efficient, free way to manage appointments, Booking Calendar is a great choice. It’s useful for integrating data from other travel booking websites, but you’ll need to upgrade to a premium version to collect booking payments.
Amelia is an appointment booking plugin that’s newer to the WordPress scene. It’s primarily tailored to enterprise-level businesses. However, the free version still offers features that can work well for many small businesses.
Amelia includes a front-end booking wizard, an intuitive admin area with a user-friendly interface, and flexible appointment management. It also offers email or real-time SMS notifications to keep everyone informed about upcoming appointments.
One of Amelia’s benefits is its sleek design and performance optimization features, like page preloading. It has a mobile-first design to ensure an intuitive booking experience for customers, and the plugin offers a high level of customization to fit your brand.
The free version doesn’t include a calendar to show upcoming events to customers. This makes it more suited to businesses that only need to book service-based appointments. For larger businesses, premium plans offer more functionality. Set up recurring appointments, group services, coupons, and integration with popular payment gateways (WooCommerce Paypal, and Stripe). It also supports multiple business locations and provides an employee database to manage internal scheduling.
All in all, Amelia can work well for small businesses that need a simple appointment solution with an easy setup, like a salon or gym. But, the real strength of this WordPress booking plugin lies in the premium version. It can provide a booking solution for businesses that need lots of functionality for staff scheduling, bookings at multiple locations, and more.
WP Simple Booking Calendar is another free booking plugin for WordPress that allows you to create a calendar easily. You can add it to your post or page using a shortcode and manage reservations from the backend easily.
The plugin only allows users to book entire days and doesn’t accept online payments, which makes it primarily popular for accommodations and other property rentals. It streamlines the process of renting out property to customers through your website. Visitors can easily check availability and make bookings hassle-free.
For straightforward needs, the free version of WP Simple Booking Calendar is usually sufficient. However, you can upgrade to the premium version to create unlimited calendars, sync the WordPress calendar plugin with popular platforms like Airbnb, Booking.com, and HomeAway, and access more customization features.
If you’re a business owner who runs a rental website for vacation homes, sporting equipment, office space, or other rent-per-day property, WP Simple Booking Calendar is an easy, simple solution for adding an availability calendar to your WordPress site.
Bookly is a freemium booking plugin for WordPress. It allows you to automate the online booking process by accepting reservations on your website and managing your services calendar in a user-friendly interface. It also includes a dashboard to see important appointment-related data at a glance.
Bookly offers several key features including unlimited, customizable booking forms, the ability to group services by category, SMS and email notifications, and a calendar display by day, week, or month. This scheduling plugin also supports multiple service providers (staff) who can charge different rates and set their own availability.
The free version of Bookly doesn’t support online payments, but you can upgrade to access payment gateway integration. Bookly is a good choice for small businesses seeking a simple, reliable WordPress booking plugin. But, it’s particularly suited to businesses with multiple employees who set their own prices and appointment availability, like trainers at a gym or medical providers in a larger office.
Pricing: Free (Pro addon starts at $89 for 1 site).
We think Sugar Calendar is the best WordPress booking plugin for adding an event calendar to WordPress, taking reservations, booking appointments, and more. Its native integration with Stripe, WooCommerce, WPForms, Google Calendars, Google Maps, and other plugins makes it an excellent event management and booking plugin for WordPress.
That said, if you’re primarily looking to add booking and appointment forms to your website, we recommend WPForms. We love that it has hundreds of pre-built templates, an easy drag-and-drop builder, custom fields, and integration with popular plugins and platforms. It’s a versatile option that gives you everything you need to create registration forms, appointment forms, and more.
Since Sugar Calendar and WPForms have built-in integration with each other, combing the two plugins will really give you a full-service calendar and appointment booking system. Show public events with custom registration and payment collection forms, schedule customer appointments, request and schedule internal meetings or events, and more.
No matter which booking plugin your choose, make sure to set up Google Analytics for your site and track form submissions. That way, you know how many customers booked online and what visitors do on your website. Then, you can make data-driven decisions to increase bookings and conversions. Luckily, ExactMetrics makes it easy to set up advanced tracking in only a few clicks.
