WordPress Booking Plugins can make your business faster and easy to build market. When it comes to WordPress website’s booking system plugins. It’s not easy to choose the best one for your booking business.
If you are a travel business owner, hotel-motel owner, or restaurant owner then obviously relies on reservation sometimes. It’s very important for your business to grow. After that, you should use a good and trusted functional plugin for handling your reservations, bookings, and appointments system.
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What is a WordPress Booking Plugin and Why Do You Need One?
A WordPress booking plugin is a powerful tool that allows you to take bookings on your website. It is software that integrates with your existing WordPress site and lets customers book appointments with you. It can also be used to provide an online booking service for any number of businesses, including professional services, workshops, hotels, restaurants, and more.
The WordPress booking plugin can be installed in less than 10 minutes and it comes with many useful features such as:
- Automatic confirmation emails
- Customizable calendars
- Payment integration
- Booking history
- And more
WordPress Booking Plugins
WordPress is the most popular website builder in the world. It has a ton of plugins that can be used to customize your site to meet your needs.
Booking plugins are one of the most popular types of WordPress plugins. There are many different types to choose from, and they all offer a different set of features.
A WordPress booking plugin is used for creating event calendars and allowing you to book events on them.
There are many different types of WordPress – some offer more features than others, but all will allow you to create an event calendar with ease.
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.
Once the extension is activated, it offers fields for descriptions, pricing, titles, and a calendar. For instance, you might be renting out rooms to a bed and breakfast and want to talk about the rooms, pricing, and dates available. Reviews are also possible so that you build some credibility with potential bookers.
The WooCommerce Bookings extension starts at $249 for a single site and goes up to $449 for up to 25 sites. At this price, it’s one of the more expensive plugins out there. Also, the base WooCommerce plugin is completely free so you don’t have to worry about paying for that. Finally, WooCommerce offers a full year of customer support and a 30-day money back guarantee. So, test it out and see if you like it!
Features That Make Woocommerce Bookings a Great Choice
- The WooCommerce Bookings extension provides tools for creating fixed time slots where the customers have to decide based on the times you choose. Or, you can open it up for any time or date.
- All bookings are managed in your dashboard, where you receive filters and update buttons.
- You’re able to limit the number of people who book or even create discounts for a certain number of bookings.
- You have several options to approve the bookings that come in and control when the bookings are available to users.
- The extension links up to WooCommerce, one of the most popular, reliable eCommerce plugins on the market. The extension isn’t free, but it’s a one-time fee and the WooCommerce plugin is free.
- WooCommerce has a free, 30-day “try before you buy” program.
- You can integrate with other WooCommerce extensions for added functionality. For example, adding more fields to your form requires the Product Add-Ons extension.
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.
One of the main advantages of this plugin is how quick and easy it is to set up and manage. The interface is basic enough for beginners but it also provides the flexibility you would need as an advanced programmer. What’s also interesting is that your Google Calendar can be synced from your website, making it a two-way syncing process. I like WooCommerce Appointments best for developers with a need for full customization. It’s also handy in this respect because of the integrations with extensions like WooCommerce Print Invoices, Gravity Forms, and Extra Product Options.
Features That Make WooCommerce Appointments a Great Choice
- The WooCommerce Appointments plugin has a two-way syncing system with Google Calendars. So, you can sync by editing Google Calendar or the schedule on your website.
- The extension integrates with most of the popular WooCommerce extensions.
- You’re able to accept appointments so that your schedule doesn’t fill up too quickly.
- Notifications and reminders are automatically sent out to customers who’ve booked appointments.
- The extension is white-label and developer-friendly. Developers can make quick and easy customizations without any problems.
- You receive shortcodes for inserting your booking forms anywhere on your website. You’re not limited to widgets or certain pages.
- The extension gives you complete control over your schedule with padding time between appointments, lead times, scheduling windows, and multi-day scheduling.
- There are several rules that can be set for pricing, capacity, and availability.
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.
The booking form is entirely customizable and responsive. It has multiple views for both admins and customers. Not to mention, Bookly has a module for creating an unlimited number of staff members, where each member can create unique pricing and availabilities. So, for instance, a gym might do this for a group of personal trainers.
Overall, Bookly looks like a steal for small businesses that may not have the resources to hire a custom developer. It should provide most of the tools you need to run a booking system yourself.
Features That Make Bookly a Great Choice
- It’s the closest to a complete booking package you can find on the market right now. In short, you don’t have to know much about coding to come out with a beautiful result.
- You can include numerous service providers (employees) in the booking schedule. This way, your employees can charge separate rates and show different times.
- Not only can you send out automated email notifications, but an SMS system is built-in as well.
- There’s a Google Calendar integration that supports multiple calendars from all of your workers.
- Several add-ons are sold, such as one for coupons or one for adding extras to your services.
- The plugin lets you add an unlimited number of services in your booking page. You can also categorize them for better organization.
- Payment and booking rules are available to make your schedules more flexible for everyone.
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.
As with most plugins sold through CodeCanyon, the Booked fee is a one-time price. However, you’re able to extend the customer support for an extra $16.50 for a full 12 months.
Most of the customization settings involve calendar colors and fields, but that’s what makes this plugin so easy to use. The frontend interface looks elegant and modern, and you’re able to integrate with a wide range of other add-ons such as Payments with WooCommerce, Front-end Agents, and Calendar Feeds.
Features That Make Booked a Great Choice
- The plugin is virtually ready to go out of the package. The interface looks wonderful and you’re not forced to use any custom coding.
- The pricing is only a one-time fee and it’s much cheaper than other booking plugins.
- You get a few add-ons for free, including something called Front-end agents, which is great for your agents to see a user-friendly booking management screen on the frontend.
- The plugin supports multiple employee calendars.
- You can change calendar colors.
- Guest booking is possible, so the user doesn’t have to be registered on your website.
- The custom time slots are useful for specifying things like vacation days or holidays.
- You receive some handy shortcodes so that you can pretty much place a booking calendar anywhere on your website.
5. Booknetic
Booknetic is a feature-rich appointment booking plugin that fits various businesses including beauty, medical, fitness, law, education, and many more. It is very easy and quick to configure and manage the plugin. Its easy-to-use back-end and front-end and modern features are life-saver for businesses that cannot afford high-tier software solutions. Various integration channels allow you to fully automate your appointment bookings and settle a smooth workflow.
Full customization of features helps to get control over your appointments. Multi-device compatibility ensures that appointments can be made, or changes on the go. Using drag and drop builder, you can customize the booking panel, reorder the original steps, add or remove the extra steps to create your ideal booking panel.
You can use the back-end panel to manage your overall workflow. It has separate sections for staff, customers, appointments, locations. Using the reporting panel, you can get insights into the real-time statistics of your business, see the most earned, booked employees and services and compare one with another.
Booknetic has world-class customer support that is reputable for its comprehensive and timely responses. The plugin is sold through the Envato market, where it has a 5.00 rating from customers. As for its customer support and the usability of its features, Booknetic ranked number 1 in the Envato market. You can pay $79 for a single website on a one-time basis. Finally, it gives you lifetime access to future updates and 6-month customer support.
Features That Make Booknetic a Great Choice
- Calendar sync to avoid double bookings
- You have a booking widget to place anywhere on your website
- The complete control of your schedule by defining breaks, day-offs, padding times between appointments
- Sign in with Facebook or Google feature
- Unlimited services, employees, and locations to set your booking panel
- Customization options to organize your booking flow
- Customizable design to match your branding
- Online payments through the most secure and popular payment gateways like Paypal, Stripe, Mollie, and more
- Ability to sales your upsell your services via WooCommerce payments
- Online billing and invoicing for easier accounting
- Automatic notifications and reminders to staff and customers about the appointments, payments, and sales offers
- Ability to access virtual events via Zoom integration
- Recurring appointments to avoid repetitive bookings
- The plugin allows you to send notifications through messages, emails, and WhatsApp
- Comprehensive reporting to define performance by staff, location, and the service
- Gift Cards and discounts to increase customer retention