Best WordPress Appointment and Reservation Plugins

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 booking and reservation plugins:

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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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

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 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

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:

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?