13 Best Booking and Appointment WordPress Plugins for 2024 – IsItWP

Do you want to make it easy for customers to book appointments and reservations directly on your website?

With a WordPress booking plugin, you can create a fully functional system to schedule appointments, registrations, and reservations.

We’ve listed the best WordPress Booking plugins that are easy to use, affordable, and feature-rich.

Importance of Using Appointment Plugins

As a business owner, finding different ways to make your work easier and improve the user experience for your visitors is important. One of the best ways to achieve this is by using booking and appointment plugins.

These plugins simplify the scheduling process, making it easy for customers to book appointments online on their own. 

On the other hand, you do not need to manually add your customers to available appointment slots, which can quickly become overwhelming as your business grows.

Here are other reasons to use booking plugins.

• Convenience for Customers: Booking plugins allow customers to book their preferred time slots online, making it easy and convenient for them.
• Automation: These plugins automate the scheduling process, reducing the need for back-and-forth communication to find the best time.
• 24/7 Booking: Customers can book appointments anytime, eliminating the need for you to manage bookings manually.
• Efficiency: By automating bookings, you can better manage your resources and keep your calendar optimized for productivity.
• Enhanced Customer Experience: Providing an easy booking experience improves customer satisfaction, making them more likely to return.

What to Look for in a Booking Plugin

The reality is that not all appointment scheduling plugins are the same. Each is built for a different user base, with unique tools to serve them. 

As a result, choosing the right booking plugin can impact your business significantly. Here are the key features to consider:

• Integration with Other Tools: The plugin should seamlessly integrate with your existing WordPress tools, such as CRM systems, payment gateways, and calendars.
• Reminders and Notifications: A good appointment plugin alerts you and your clients about upcoming appointments, reducing the chances of no-shows.
• Booking Analysis: Look for a scheduling plugin that analyzes booking trends and peak times, providing insights that help you make informed decisions.
• Customizability: The bookings plugin should be customizable to match your brand’s look and feel, offering users a personalized experience.
• Ease of Use: A user-friendly interface ensures that both you and your clients can navigate the booking process without any issues.
• Mobile-Friendly Design: It should work seamlessly on mobile devices, allowing customers to book appointments on the go.
• Multi-User Support: If your business has multiple staff members or locations, ensure the plugin supports multiple users.

Best Booking and Scheduling Plugins

As you can see, depending on your business, there are different things you should look at before settling for a booking plugin. 

That is why we tested each tool on this list ourselves. 

This ensured we found the right booking plugins for our diverse reader base. We installed these tools on different projects to see the features they offer, easy-to-use, and customization properties. 

Apart from that, we looked for different unbiased reviews to see what other users of the plugins thought about them. This helped us gather reliable third-party information for a more practical analysis. 

Now, we understand that you may not have time to go through the entire list. That is why we have provided a table below outlining the top 3 plugins and showcasing their key features and pricing.

With that said, let us rank the best booking plugins for WordPress.

1. Sugar Calendar

Sugar Calendar is the best booking and scheduling plugin because it offers the flexibility to manage all aspects of the appointment process. What sets it apart is its ability to create highly customizable calendars tailored to fit the unique needs of any website.  

For example, Sugar Calendar can help you schedule group events or manage multiple recurring events. 

You can easily schedule events on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis. You can also quickly create events that run over multiple days, helping your users better plan for it. This makes it convenient to keep track of long events without manually updating the calendar. 

To add to that, the plugin allows you to specify time zones and end times while creating a booking calendar. This ensures that events are accurately scheduled, no matter where your client is located.

But with so many scheduling options, Sugar Calendar wants to ensure you manage them easily.

It allows you to set up specific event categories to keep everything organized. You can paint these categories different colors, making it easy for your users to identify what they want.

With this feature, you can set up display options to allow users to filter and view events based on categories, making it simple for them to focus on specific ones. They can also view the master calendar with all events displayed for a quick overview. 

Another reason Sugar Calendar is a top choice is its seamless integration features. For starters, you can connect it with both Stripe and WooCommerce. 

The eCommerce integration enables you to sell products online. While the payment gateway lets you receive funds directly on your WordPress site.

These connections allow you to monetize your events by selling tickets directly from your website. As a result, Sugar Calendar makes it easy to turn your site into a hub for both free and paid events.

Apart from the payment gateway and eCommerce integrations, this booking plugin syncs with Google Calendar. This ensures that your users never miss an event as they can access it directly on their everyday calendar. 

On top of that, its connection with WPForms and other popular form builders allows you to collect leads and manage event submissions efficiently. This makes it easier for users to engage with your events while providing you with valuable data to grow your mailing list.

Highlights:

• Simple admin interface
• Multiple calendar widgets
• Fully localized and translation-ready
• Allow users to submit their own events
• Sell and manage event tickets
• Integrates with Google Calendar, iCal, WooCommerce, and other tools

Check out the latest Sugar Calendar review here.

Get started with Sugar Calendar today!

Pricing: Free plugin available. Pro plan starts from $49.50/ Year.

2. WPForms

WPForms is one of the most powerful and versatile plugins for creating booking and scheduling forms on WordPress. It stands out because of its user-friendly interface and wide range of features that streamline the booking process. 

First, It’s jam-packed with features that cater to businesses that want to take:

• Appointments
• Reservations
• Event Registrations
• Room bookings
• Travel bookings
• In-person service bookings
• Online session slots
• …and more.

WPForms comes with 1,800+ premade templates for almost every kind of business out there. As a result, you find appointment and booking forms for patients, dentists, veterinarians, hair salons, hotels, and more. You name it, you’ll find it.

You simply need to select the right template to get started. Then, use the drag and drop visual builder to easily customize the form to match your brand.

On top of this, every template is mobile-friendly, so your form will look great on any device. This means that your users can quickly make a booking on their phone, making it convenient.

One thing we really like about WPForms regarding bookings is its ability to easily collect diverse and exact types of information. 

Using the drag and drop form builder, you can customize the form template to include different fields to match the event. You can add fields like name, booking time, date, number of people attending, and more. 

This flexibility ensures you can prepare effectively for each appointment, making your workflow smoother and more organized.

Beyond information collection, WPForms integrates with many top emailing tools like Constant Contact, Drip, GetResponse, AWeber, and more, making it easy to manage your communication. You can conveniently add client emails to your mailing list as you gather bookings, ensuring you maintain strong connections with your audience. 

These email marketing tools connections are especially beneficial for businesses looking to expand their reach and nurture client relationships.

For better communication, you can also send notifications to both you and your users after a form is submitted. This ensures that everyone is kept in the loop without any additional effort on your part.

WPForms also excels in offering flexibility when it comes to setting up appointments. The plugin allows you to configure different types of bookings, such as in-person, over the phone, or online. 

Users appreciate the ability to select their preferred time and date, and you can even add options for them to choose slots that are most convenient for both parties. This level of customization ensures that the scheduling process is straightforward and user-friendly.

But since you can use WPForms to collect sensitive information, it also improves user experience and security.

Through Ajax, the plugin ensures that forms load quickly and efficiently, without requiring a full-page reload. You can also set up Conditional Logic so the user only sees certain fields based on their responses.

To add to this, WPForms offers country-specific filters, keyword filtering, and easy to set up spam protection to keep your submissions secure. 

These features collectively improve the overall user experience while safeguarding your data.

The best part is that you can add your WPForms booking form anywhere on your site using a shortcode or WordPress blocks. You can also create a new booking page through its drag and drop form builder. 

For businesses that need to collect payments through their booking forms, WPForms integrates smoothly with payment processors like PayPal and Stripe, making it a comprehensive solution for all your scheduling needs.

As you can see, WPForms offers quite an extensive list of features to help you with bookings.

WPForms gives you a centralized list with options to view, edit, delete, and add notes to each appointment. But, the only thing WPForms lacks is a built-in calendar view to manage appointments.

You can, however, connect to Zapier and then integrate with Google Calendar to have your appointments automatically added to your calendar.

For more information, check out this article on how to integrate WPForms with Google Calendar.

Highlights

• Easiest form builder to use with 1,800+ templates
• Payment and email integrations
• Centralized booking management inside the WordPress dashboard
• Autocomplete address field
• Instant notifications and page redirects

Check out the latest WPForms review here.

Get started with WPForms today!

Pricing: Free plugin available. Pro plan starts from $49.50/ Year.

3. Start Booking

Start Booking is one of the best booking and scheduling plugins due to its versatility and ease of use. It allows users to easily manage different types of sessions, including one-on-one appointments or group classes.

On top of this, you can adjust class sizes, set available times, and even assign specific instructors to each session. This makes it a highly practical booking plugin for different business needs. As a result, Start Booking maximizes all your resources by ensuring no booking slot goes unused.

You can integrate your booking system if you’re already using Google Calendar.

At a glance, your customers can view and select a bookable service on your booking page. After selecting a service, they will be prompted to choose the best date and time. Then the checkout flow will capture all the essential information from your customer and securely store it within the Start Booking system.

For better convenience, this scheduling plugin comes with a reminder feature. This allows you to send out manual or automated reminders to clients, ensuring everyone stays informed and engaged.

Apart from that, Start Booking offers personalized payment options. 

You have full control over when you receive payments, before, during, or after the class. This gives you flexibility that suits your business model. To support payments direct event payments, Start Booking integrates easily with Stripe. As a result, you can use this payment gateway to accept credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, and more. 

You can even receive tips or add coupons easily, providing an enhanced user experience for clients and administrators.

Highlights

• Create a fully customizable and optimized booking flow
• High speed and performance
• Built-in calendar view
• Comprehensive customer profile and preference management
• Integrates with Google, Stripe, Zoom, and Mailchimp

Get started with Start Booking today.

Pricing: Starts from $79/ year.

4. Bookly

Bookly stands out as a booking plugin because of its many automation features. First, it comes with multiple automated event notification systems, including SMS, voice, and WhatsApp. This ensures that Bookly can accommodate clients’ communication preferences. 

You can send customized email and SMS notifications, further enhancing user-friendliness. This allows clients to receive clear, tailored communication that aligns with your business brand and needs.

On top of this, its strong notification system helps inform clients, minimize missed appointments, and reduce administrative overhead.

Bookly also excels in team management.

It syncs with Google Calendar to manage schedules effortlessly, ensuring that everything is updated. This allows your users to easily plan for your events in a convenient way.

Apart from this, it provides an easy-to-use system that allows you to create separate profiles for each team member. You can then assign different prices for the services of each team member and allow them to manage their schedule independently. 

This precise control ensures that everyone on your team can handle their workload while maintaining an organized and efficient booking system.

To add to this, Bookly integrates smoothly with PayPal Express Checkout, making the payment process as hassle-free as possible for users. 

Bookly is compatible with the WPML plugin, so you can create a multilingual online booking website without coding experience. It also manages your client base effortlessly by providing an unlimited, sortable, and searchable customer list.

You can also enhance the core features of the plugin by using addons. These addons can help you add coupons, custom fields, group bookings, chain appointments, and recurring payments.

Highlights

• Fully customizable booking form
• Built-in filters, sort by, and search options for booking list
• Import and export to CSV
• Unlimited service list and staff members
• Google Calendar sync

Get started with Bookly today.

Pricing: The Regular License starts from $89.

5. BirchPress

BirchPress is one of the best booking scheduler plugins that allows service businesses to schedule bookings and accept payments online.

With BirchPress, booking forms can be easily made using the built-in form editor and then embedded on your pages via shortcodes.

It syncs with your online calendars, such as Google Calendar and iCal, so you can quickly view your appointments and availability.

BirchPress also allows you to send highly customized emails to your clients when an appointment is booked, rescheduled, or canceled. You can also remind your clients about an upcoming appointment without having to use a different email marketing service.

This WordPress schedule plugin comes bundled with PayPal payments. For more payment options, you can integrate your website with WooCommerce.

The BirchPress plugin also comes with thousands of functions and hooks, making it one of the most developer-friendly WordPress appointment plugins.

Highlights

• Sync with existing calendar
• Import and export appointments and availability
• Accept online payments with PayPal
• WooCommerce integration
• Developer friendly with action hooks and filters

Get started with BirchPress today.

Pricing: Starts from $99/ Year.

6. Booking Calendar

The Booking Calendar plugin is a multipurpose plugin that allows you to manage both appointment and reservation bookings from your WordPress site.

This appointment plugin is extremely easy to use with a lot of functionalities, tailored to a wide range of businesses.

Since all bookings and settings are stored in your WordPress database, you don’t need to have a third-party account to manage bookings. However, if you want to import feeds from third-party sources like Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway, TripAdvisor, and so on, then you can easily do that as well.

Your booking forms and calendars are responsive. This means they will look great on all devices such as desktop, mobile, or tablets.

Best of all, it supports a wide range of online payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.Net, and more.

Highlights

• User friendly frontend and backend interface
• Works with all versions of WordPress and popular WordPress themes
• Approve book requests instantly
• Enable/disable terms and conditions
• Add booking hours, user permission, page redirects, and more with the pro version

Get started with Booking Calendar today.

Pricing: Free version available. The premium plugin starts at $60.

7. WP Simple Booking Calendar

WP Simple Booking Calendar might be the right booking calendar solution for you if you’re after a simple WordPress schedule plugin that only shows your customers the availability of your holiday home or hotel.

With the free version of this schedule plugin, you get all the basic features you would expect from a booking calendar plugin. For example, you can display a booking calendar widget that shows availability and also accepts bookings through a user-friendly interface with multilingual support.

Remember that this plugin doesn’t allow you to accept online payments, so you will have to accept payment offline.

With the premium version, you can easily sync your booking calendars with third-party vacation rental apps, like Airbnb, Booking.com, and Flipkey. Any changes made to your website booking calendar will be automatically reflected on your third-party accounts in real time.

Highlights

• Display availability dates and legend
• Simply user-friendly interface
• Responsive and mobile-friendly
• Backup/restore calendar and data

Get started with WP Simple Booking Calendar today.

Pricing: Free version with limited features. The premium version starts at $39.

8. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most powerful lead generation plugin for WordPress. It lets you create campaigns like popups, slide-ins, floating bars, and more to prompt visitors to book an appointment or schedule a session with you.

This gives them easy access at any time while they’re browsing your site. They won’t have to look for your booking form page. OptinMonster also has powerful campaign triggers and audience targeting rules.

You can display booking options based on the user’s location, interests, and actions on your site. So instead of having a generic booking form, you can dynamically change the campaign based on which page the visitor is on.

This plugin will not work as a standalone solution to create bookings and online appointments. Instead, you’ll need to pair it up with a form builder like WPForms. Then you can embed your booking form using shortcodes and create stunning campaigns to boost conversions and signups.

Highlights

• 50+ templates and a drag and drop builder for easy customization
• Plenty of email integrations
• Exit intent technology to recover abandoning users
• Retargeting and followup campaigns

Check out the latest OptinMonster Review here.

Get started with OptinMonster!

Pricing: Starts at $9/ Month with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

9. The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar is a booking plugin that’s designed for online and offline events, ticketing, and appointment scheduling. It’s an all-in-one solution to manage any event from start to finish.

The plugin comes with an events calendar to let users book appointments for your events. They can select a date and time slot for your event and confirm their booking online.

You’ll need to integrate your bookings with your main events calendar and your scheduled times will appear in a calendar view.

With this plugin, you can create multi-day and recurring events and even list your availability. It works great for conferences, retreats, and other events.

Highlights

• Integrates with Gravity Forms, Elementor, Mailchimp, and more
• Automatically create a WordPress user account when someone makes an appointment
• Display your availability by day, time, and type of appointment
• Add custom fields to collect the info you need

Check out The Event Calendar review here.

Get started with The Events Calendar.

Pricing: Starts from $149/ Year.

10. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is one of the best form builders for WordPress. You can create all kinds of forms including booking forms.

Plus, the plugin integrates with booking and events software that includes Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Acuity Scheduling, Todoist, and Simply Schedule Appointments.

It comes with date picker options to date fields so you choose the dates that can be selected.

Once the user books an appointment, you can send an email autoresponder. You can also schedule email notifications and SMS notifications to be sent to users to remind them of their appointments.

All forms are responsive and sized automatically for each device so your booking form will look good for all users.

Formidable Forms also makes it easy to manage form entries, and export the data if you need.

Check out the latest Formidable Forms Review here.

Get started with Formidable Forms.

Pricing: Starting from $39.50 for the Basic plan.

11. Amelia

Amelia is a simple but powerful automated booking plugin for WordPress. It acts as your assistant to automate interaction with customers. You can take appointments, schedule slots for events, and more.

With this booking system in place, your users can create bookings 24/7 and even make payments online.

The plugin is suitable for services and business owners like lawyers, gyms, spas, private clinics, and repair centers, to name a few.

Highlights

• Booking, reschedule, and cancellation features
• Customizable designs
• Insightful admin panel and admin calendar view
• Step-by-step booking wizard
• Search booking widget
• Email and SMS notifications

Get started with Amelia.

Pricing: Offers a free plugin. Pro Plan starts at $49 per year.

12. Events Schedule

Events Schedule is a booking plugin that’s designed for events and classes. There are 12 styles of display so you can create a booking system that matches your brand and goals perfectly.

You can create an image carousel along with a timetable for your events or classes. You can even add a daily agenda to your sidebar.

The plugin is ideal for online course websites and those that have a long list of events available. Users can apply filters to easily find the classes or events that they’re looking for.

Events Schedule supports repetitive events but there’s no option for multi-day events.

Highlights

• Easy visual builder
• Google Maps integration
• SEO friendly
• Fast and high performance

Get started with Events Schedule.

Pricing: The Regular License starts from $39.

13. SeedProd

SeedProd is the best landing page builder for WordPress. It comes in handy when you want to create a dedicated page for bookings and appointments.

There are 300+ beautiful templates and a visual drag and drop builder to create a centralized landing page where you can send all interested traffic.

SeedProd lets you add countdown timers, giveaways, optin forms, and much more to your page to optimize it for conversions.

It also lets you put your website into coming soon and maintenance mode and display custom booking pages. This means you can take appointments even when your website is under development.

SeedProd comes pre-integrated with WPForms. There’s a contact form block inside the page builder that lets you select any form that you create with WPForms. This makes embedding appointment forms into your WordPress landing page incredibly easy.

Added to that, SeedProd integrates with WooCommerce. This means you can allow visitors to book their slots and make payments directly from your landing page.

Highlights

• Email and WooCommerce integrations
• Subscriber management with visual data
• Responsive mobile friendly pages
• Built for speed and performance
• Developer friendly with CSS and custom scripts
• Built-in spam protection

Check out the latest SeedProd review here.

Get started with SeedProd today!

Pricing: Offers a free version of the plugin. Pro plan pricing starts at $39.50 per year.

There you have it! That’s our roundup of the best booking plugins for WordPress. If you’re still undecided on which one is the best, we give you our verdict next.

What is the Best Booking Plugin for WordPress?

After comparing the top booking plugins, our top 3 choices are:

1. Sugar Calendar
2. WPForms
3. Start Booking

Our first choice is Sugar Calendar. It lets you quickly add new events, edit events, and view event posts on a monthly, weekly, or daily calendar. You can also display your event calendar on your website easily using multiple event calendar widgets. Plus, you can collect payments for appointments right from your WordPress site.

WPForms is up next in the second position. It lets you create a simple booking form, but it’s the most versatile option. It works for any business, event, service, or WordPress website. No matter what kind of appointment you want, we found that WPForms has a solution.

It’s rich with features to create and manage appointments. The only thing we miss is the built-in calendar view, but like many other plugins on this list, you can sync it to Google Calendars and automatically add all your appointments.

Check out this article to learn how to create a booking form with WPForms.

We also recommend Start Booking and rank it third. It gives you a full-fledged appointment system for your business. Start Booking comes with a calendar view and easy customer management. Plus, users can book single and multiple appointments together.

No matter your services, the plugin is packed with great functionalities to manage appointments online and grow your business.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress booking plugin. If you have any more questions, check out the FAQs below.

FAQs: Best WordPress Booking Plugins

That’s It! You can now select a booking plugin for your WordPress website. To improve user experience, check this article on the Best User Login and Registration Plugins.

On top of that, here are other articles you may be interested in reading.

• How To Sell Digital Products Online with WordPress
• Add Push Notifications to WordPress to Drive Traffic
• How to Let Users Submit Calendar Events in WordPress

The first post shows you how to sell digital products online. The next article walks you through how to set up push notifications. While the last article teaches you how to let users submit calendar events.