Going to the chiropractic often requires a reservation. So does a visit to your favorite Thai restaurant or signing up for a personal training session at your local gym. In the past, the customer would have to look up a phone number, speak to someone on the phone, then jot down that date and time on a piece of paper. Those days are long gone, and it’s incredible to see the types of features constantly being added to online booking tools.
Try a free demo
If you happen to run a business that requires appointments and reservations, it’s important to find the best fit. That’s why we want to outline the utmost best WordPress booking plugins to choose from.
What Should You Look For in a WordPress Booking Plugin?
You may initially think that a booking engine is a simple calendar with a form, but it depends on the type of business being run. For instance, a gym might have multiple personal trainers. Each of these employees needs their own schedules listed on the website. On the other hand, a dental office may need to show specific times and reveal the different types of services offered.
Therefore, it’s important to look closely at the features of each WordPress booking plugin. This way, you’ll have all of the functionality you need and some flexibility to grow your business stronger.
Here are some of the features we’ve found most helpful in our research:
- A customizable calendar that can be placed anywhere on your website.
- Mobile-friendly interfaces for users to book appointments on smaller devices.
- Options for accepting payments for appointments. It’s also nice to have some way to remove payment processing.
- Support for multiple “agents” or “service providers.” This would be where each of your workers has their own profile and calendar, like for personal trainers or multiple doctors in one office.
- Areas for customers to view and edit their bookings online.
- A filterable and searchable booking management module on the back-end of your WordPress website.
- Features for customizing your schedule, such as removing holidays and setting some free time in-between appointments.
- Email confirmations and reminders for both the admins and the users.
- Customizable fields and drop-down menus for when you offer a wide variety of services or unique offerings.
And that’s only a small sampling of the primary features you should expect from your booking plugin. Some of the settings and features may not apply to your business, so make sure you test the ones that look appealing and use our in-depth reviews below to ensure you’re getting the best value.
For instance, some smaller companies may only need a simple, free calendar for accepting non-paying appointments. However, bigger brands will need a wider range of features with beautiful templates and high-powered communication tools.
An In-Depth Look at the Best WordPress Booking Plugins in 2021
We’ve researched, tested, and broken down every respectable WordPress booking plugin to show the best features, along with features that might make you lean towards one over another. Now it’s time to dive in!
- WooCommerce Bookings
- WooCommerce Appointments
- Bookly
- Booked
- Bookings for WooCommerce
- Booking Calendar
- Amelia
- Yith Bookings for Woocommerce
1. WooCommerce Bookings
In the world of WordPress eCommerce, the WooCommerce plugin is king. One of the main reasons for this is because the core version is free–but you also have access to dozens of extensions for accepting payments in different ways. For instance, the WooCommerce Bookings extension lets you sell bookings based on times or dates. You still have the option to accept bookings free of charge, but the main reason you would go with a WooCommerce extension like this is to activate the payment processing aspect.
I would argue that WooCommerce Bookings is best for companies that already utilize the WooCommerce plugin. However, it’s also a nice, clean extension for newcomers out there. It allows for WordPress users to either stick with the simple, modern layout or customize it with the help of CSS.
2. WooCommerce Appointments
The WooCommerce Appointments extension is another option that integrates with WooCommerce. It’s rather similar to the previous extension, but the pricing is a bit more affordable, starting at $89 per site. This, of course, goes up to around $200 for 25 sites. Support and updates are provided for a full year, but if you don’t want those then the pricing is a one-time fee.
The extension is not sold through WooCommerce, but the BookingWP developers are reputable and known for quality products. As for the extension itself, you can expect some excellent features, starting with integrations with WooCommerce and Google Calendar. This way, you can accept payments from customers and sync with your previously set up Google Calendar. Appointments and bookings can be accepted for free, but you also have settings for charging money.
3. Bookly
The Bookly plugin has both free and paid versions. If you plan on upgrading to the premium version, expect to pay a one-time fee of $89 (unless you’d like to continue paying for customer support). The free plugin is a basic booking tool, but you don’t get support for online payments and an unlimited number of staff users. So, unless you’re accepting free bookings, the Bookly premium version is the best for you.
As for its characteristics, Bookly is the most modern-looking plugin on this list. It has a sleek design on the backend and frontend, and you can customize many areas of the booking form without knowing any code. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re planning on using custom code, but I feel like most beginners and advanced users will feel at home with the plugin’s capabilities and style.
4. Booked
The Booked plugin is only sold through CodeCanyon and it goes for an affordable price of $49. Some of the types of bookings allowed include paid bookings, guest bookings, and registered bookings. You can present your time slots in a calendar or list view and even translate it into other languages. What’s more is that you’re able to assign calendars to certain people in your organization. So, you might have travel agents or personal trainers that need their own schedules. Along with multiple calendars, each user is able to create somewhat of a personal profile to stand out to customers.
5. Bookings for WooCommerce
Bookings for WooCommerce allows you to accept bookings on your website using the WooCommerce plugin. This gives you all the advantages and flexibility of using the world’s most popular ecommerce platform, including a huge choice of payment gateway, as well as allowing to sell other items.
With Bookings for WooCommerce, you can sell bookable products like vacation rentals, product hire, venue hire, and rentals. Users can select a start and end date using separate calendars and you can set the bookable period as nightly, daily or weekly. You can specify bookings to start on specific days of the week – crucial if you are renting out your property on certain days. You can also define buffer periods at the start and end of each booking, ensuring that bookings don’t overlap and that you have enough time for any changeover.
6. Trafft, Online scheduling software your customers will love.
Schedule on-site or virtual appointments, meetings & events, manage staff and services, accept payments, send reminders - all in one tool. Or, as Arno from the collectivebrain.co said: "It is a really strong and extremely well coded tool. We successfully managed a few thousand appointments for vaccination. The booking solution is very flexible, beautiful and intuitive. Overall, we are very thankful for this powerful tool."
Trafft is a booking solution for Salons, Healthcare, Sports & Training, Fitness, Education, Consulting, Administrative, Financial, Professional & Personal Services. Focus on your business, and leave appointment scheduling to Trafft. System includes a custom domain and email service, featured integrations and tools to make your online booking system a must.
We are currently running a Special on Trafft Lifetime plan which is available to our customers here Order a Lifetime Trafft Service (occasional offer available until stocks last)
7. Booking Calendar
Booking Calendar is one of the oldest booking plugins for WordPress, and the ratings show that it hasn’t slowed down with quality development over the years. The core plugin is free and comes with most of the features an average small business would need. However, you can upgrade to one of the many larger business plans, starting at around $60 for one website. After that, the pricing is way too confusing. If you go to the pricing page you’ll find five plans for Single Sites, five plans for Developer Sites, and five plans for MultiSite.
8. Amelia
The Amelia plugin is a simple to use yet powerful automated booking specialist, working 24/7 to make sure your customers can make appointments and pay online or offline. This plugin is available free of charge, suitable for small business. For larger businesses, there is a paid version of the plugin. Lifetime licenses are also available and they start at $189 for one domain and move up in price from there. 6 months of extremely responsive support is included, and if you need support beyond this period, you can extend the support for a small fee. If you want all your employees, types of services, extra services with integrated paying methods at one place – Amelia Pro is perfect for you.
Amelia has various built-in functions for the fixed lifetime price, like no other on the market. It provides SMS notifications which allow you to be in instant touch with your customers and employees, and Google Calendar Synchronization let your employees keep track of all appointments in their own Google calendar, to mention a few. It has a nice neat, and modern design both on back-and a front-end. Its design is customizable, so it matches your website design like an integral part of it, added with a simple shortcode.
9. Yith Bookings for Woocommerce
The complete solution to build a Booking, Renting & Appointment website based on WooCommerce. With Yith Bookings and Appointments for Woocommerce you can easily Enable a booking/appointment system to manage renting or booking of services, rooms, houses, cars, accommodation facilities and so on.
Do you need to see your doctor or book an appointment at the dentist? Even the usual Friday dinner out at your favorite Italian restaurant is possible only if you remember to book a table in advance. And what about your personal trainer, hairdresser, Spanish lessons, plumber, moving truck…? Our everyday life is full of appointments and services to book.
Let’s admit that our lives would be much easier if all these businesses used an online booking system. This would prevent us from having endless calls and dates written on pieces of paper we undoubtedly lose.
For both business and customers, the best way to manage bookings, rentals, reservations and appointments is through a WooCommerce site enhanced with a complete booking solution, developed to make everything smoother and easier.
YITH Booking for WooCommerce integrates an e-commerce site built using WooCommerce with a powerful booking system which can be used by both customers and vendors: this is ideal for all of those professionals who cannot base their business on sales alone: real estate and travel agencies, hairdressers, doctors, business consultants, etc.