Best Free WordPress Appointment and Booking Plugins
Last Updated: November 25, 2021 in Review
For the website owner of clinics, spas & salons, hotels, restaurants, or other services, having reservations and appointments booking on their websites are very crucial. Thanks to the free dedicated plugins, now you can easily create and set up the booking function for your WordPress websites. Let’s find out the strengths and highlight features of the top 4 following appointment and booking plugins.
Why Should You Use Booking Plugins?
With the support of these booking plugins, your service will gain many benefits, such as:
- Allow clients to book appointments easily with a few simple steps, and save more time instead of calling or texting;
- Help service providers quickly update appointment status, vacancies, working hours, etc. on their websites so that customers can know and proactively arrange their time;
- Let service providers easily track and manage appointments or reservations to arrange and avoid duplication of schedules and work;
- Make websites look more professional and increase customer experiences.
Best Appointment and Booking Plugins
In this article, I will mention only the features of the free version. Depending on your purposes, you can learn more about the features of the paid version of each plugin.
Bookly
Bookly is one of the most popular appointments and booking plugins with more than 50.000 active installations. This plugin supports booking for many types of businesses, especially spas, salons, fitness & gyms, hotels, restaurants, etc.
Highlight features:
- Allow classifying services by category (up to 5 categories with the free version), helping you to manage bookings more efficiently. You can classify, search, and organize appointments into different categories and assign different employees to be in charge of each one;
- Unlimited number of scheduling forms on your websites;
Bookly is compatible with the WPML plugin, so you can translate contents on user interface and notifications into more than 40 different languages; - Responsive design on all devices. This enhances the experience of users or clients since they can make appointments on any device;
- Show the date and time that are the most suitable for customers and admins. Besides, the booking system will only provide available time to avoid confusion or duplication;
- Inform clients and service providers about approved, pending, and canceled appointments via SMS and email notifications.
Booking Calendar
Booking Calendar is one of the pioneer appointment and booking plugins with over 60.000 active installations and 4.5-star ratings out of 484 reviews. This booking plugin supports many types of businesses, such as accommodation, rental, or any other booking types (meetings, events, medical services, etc.).
Highlight features:
- Easily approve or decline users’ bookings through the Admin Panel;
- Responsive booking forms and calendars on all devices;
- Receive email notifications of customers’ searches and activities;
- Sort bookings by different parameters and criteria;
- Synchronize bookings: It allows you to import data from different sources like Airbnb, booking.com, TripAdvisor, or any calendars using the .ics format;
- Easily integrate Google Calendar into the Admin Panel;
- Show the number of new bookings on the booking menu;
- Allow adding appointment blocks to Gutenberg so you can easily add booking forms to websites;
- Support multi-language translation;
- Responsive design for both back end and front end;
- Support reCaptcha spam protection.
Appointment Hour Booking
Appointment Hour Booking is an appointment and booking plugin that currently has more than 20.000 activations and 337 5-star ratings over 356 reviews on wordpress.org. This booking plugin is suitable for different types of services like hotels, restaurants, classrooms, fitness gyms, etc.
Highlight features:
- Show working days, holidays, and special occasions as well as opening hours of each day, giving customers clear information to make the most suitable appointments;
- The calendar display is translated-ready in 53+ languages;
- Provide reCaptcha spam protection and booking form validation feature;
- Automatic pricing feature for provided services;
- Automatically manage free time to avoid duplicate appointments;
- Be able to integrate multiple services on each booking with different prices and times of each service;
- Allow customizing email notifications for admins and users whenever there are new bookings.
WP Simple Booking Calendar
WP Simple Booking Calendar is currently being used by many small and medium enterprises with over 10.000 free activations. This booking plugin can be used by every company and business type, especially clinics, restaurants, hotels, room rentals, house rentals, equipment rentals, etc.
Highlight features:
- Simple, easy-to-use, and easy-to-set-up interface;
- Allow customizing legends items with different colors;
- Let clients check vacancies to make an appointment easily;
- Legend items and dates are translated-ready in 30+ different languages;
- Add and save booking information for each day on each different appointment;
- Responsive calendar layout;
- Language translation option using PO file;
- Backup or restore calendar and data.
Last Words
So I have introduced to you the top 4 appointment and booking plugins that I have used and experienced so far. Each plugin has its own strengths, so please use this article as the reference to pick the most suitable booking plugin for your businesses or services.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comment section below so that I can answer them for you. Thank you for reading! Please look forward to my next article and wish you success!