Does your business take bookings? This review of appointment plug-ins covers all appointments from one-on-one personal services such as a dentist appointments through to events bookings or rental bookings such as car hire or hotels. I discuss the pros & cons of each plugin, and discuss the tasks that each are best suited for. Although I own developer licenses and membership for each of the plugins being reviewed, I am not collecting referral fees on this blog so I can give you my genuine evaluation.
Booking System PRO
Purchase from Envato
Price $35
This plugin is my first choice. It is very useful to create a bookings system that has a large number of services such as a restaurant or cafe with a large number of tables. It is easy to set options for minimum and maximum numbers of adults or children. I have found the developer to be very responsive. The plugin will do everything it says it will, and with my experience, the developer will respond in less than a day to make sure it works on your particular site & theme. Everything you expect in a bookings plugin is there, such as manual or auto confirmation of bookings, auto emails to the client and the service provider, and easy editing of available times & days. I have this plugin running on one of my clients sites, PM me to see an example, I’m not posting the link here as I don’t want my client getting false bookings from people testing the plugin.
If you require payment to confirm a booking, this plugin is compatible with WooCommerce and PayPal.
Appoinments+
Purchase from WPMUDEV
Price $19
This plugin is very elegant and provides bookings for unlimited services, but is best suited for one-on-one personal services. It would be ideal for say a hairdressers, because it is very easy to create different services, e.g. cut, shape, dry, colour, etc, and also easy to add service providers, e.g. Sally, Martin, Bryan, Waldo, etc. This plugin is created by WPMUdev, their support is outstanding to help you do what this plugin says it does.
If you require payment to confirm a booking, this plugin only works with PayPal.
It doesn’t work well when any service provider can do more than one client at a time, e.g. a personal trainer or a teacher with several students in a class. Similarly it doesn’t handle cafe or restaurant bookings, it was created primarily for service providers who can only service one client at a time.
Woocommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin
Order Delivery Date Pro for Woocommerce
Purchase from Tyche Software
Price $79 & $49 (free light version also available for Order Delivery Date)
Tyche Software offers a range of calendar enhanced ordering systems for WordPress using WooCommerce or WP-Ecommerce. You must use a shopping cart if you plan on using these plugins. With the Bookings plugin you can use it to create and manage all kinds of bookable products: tickets, tours, attendances, all kinds of scheduled services, rentals, workshops, lectures, appointments, etc.
There Order Delivery Date plugin will allow the customer to choose a delivery date & time on the checkout page. Order delivery settings allow the site owner to decide which dates should be made available for delivery.
I have found Tyche Software to be very supportive. The plugins work as they should, and I have found their sales team are very courteous and gave me an instant refund on one occasion where I had mistakenly purchased the wrong plugin.
See the plugin in action at these websites;
Other Appointment Plugins
So that’s all the plugins I have had a positive experience with. You will notice that all the options I have reviewed are good value for money compared to some of their competitors. Also, they are not 3rd party options so you don’t drive traffic away from your website. I’d love to hear about your experiences with bookings plugins as well.