10 booking plugins for WordPress

A WordPress booking plugin gives your site its own booking system. Customers pick a time or a date in a form and a calendar, without calling or emailing you. Which plugin fits depends on what you take bookings for. WordPress booking software for appointments by the hour works differently from a plugin for holiday lets booked by the night. All ten plugins below have a free version, so you can try one on your own site before you pay for anything.

How to choose a WordPress booking system

Start with what your customers book, then check the features you can't do without.

• Time slots or whole days. Appointment plugins let customers book an hour with you or a member of your team. Rental plugins block whole days or nights, which suits a holiday cottage, a room or equipment you hire out.
• Payments. Not every free version takes online payments. If customers should pay or leave a deposit when they book, check that the version you plan to use can take it.
• Reminders. Email confirmations are common in free versions. Text message reminders cost extra in several plugins below: some send them only in a paid version, and with Bookly you pay for each text from a prepaid balance.
• Calendar sync. A plugin that syncs with Google Calendar or Outlook helps you avoid double bookings when you also keep a personal calendar.
• A team or several places. If several people take bookings, or you work from more than one address, make sure the plugin handles that without an upgrade.
• Ease of use. Make a booking yourself, on a phone as well as a computer. A form with too many steps puts customers off.

Our advice: if you take appointments for up to five services, start with the free version of Bookly. If customers should pay when they book, start with LatePoint instead, as its free plugin already takes online payments. For a single holiday home or room, WP Simple Booking Calendar is a good fit. For several rooms or properties, MotoPress Hotel Booking is the better fit. Pay for an upgrade once you know you need payments, text reminders or more staff.

Booking plugins for appointments and classes

These plugins take bookings by the time slot, which is how salons, consultants, clinics, tutors and coaches work.

• Amelia is made for businesses that take both appointments and event bookings, such as salons, consultants and clinics.
• Bookly lets customers choose a service, a member of staff and a time, and suits businesses that sell services by the hour, but not hotels or rentals.
• Simply Schedule Appointments is a good fit for consultants, coaches and anyone who books calls or meetings.
• Easy Appointments suits a business that works from more than one place.
• LatePoint fits coaches, salons and clinics that run workshops or classes as well as appointments.
• FluentBooking is built for appointments and meetings.

Amelia

Amelia's free version, Amelia Lite, takes bookings and accepts payments through Square. If you need more, the premium versions add PayPal and Stripe, more employees, reminders and integrations such as Zoom and Google Calendar.

Bookly

The free version of Bookly gives you the booking form and calendar for up to five services. For online payments, unlimited staff and services, you need Bookly Pro.

Simply Schedule Appointments

The free edition of Simply Schedule Appointments gives you unlimited booking calendars, notifications you can customise and blackout dates, the days you don't take bookings. Google Calendar sync and payments with Stripe and PayPal come with the paid editions. They also add online meetings in Zoom or Google Meet, and text reminders through Twilio, a text messaging service.

Easy Appointments

The free version of Easy Appointments gives each location, member of staff and service its own time slots. The free plugin handles all of that. It also sends email confirmations, and customers can confirm or cancel their booking straight from the email. For Google Calendar sync, text and WhatsApp reminders through Twilio, and payments through Stripe, PayPal or WooCommerce, you need the Pro extension.

LatePoint

LatePoint's free plugin includes unlimited appointments, event bookings and payments through Stripe, PayPal or Razorpay. LatePoint Pro adds more payment services and several ticket types for each event.

FluentBooking

In FluentBooking's free plugin, you set your weekly hours and take bookings for one-to-one meetings. The Pro version adds group meetings and round robin meetings, which share bookings out between your team members in turn. It also adds text reminders and calendar and payment integrations.

Booking plugins for rentals and stays

For holiday lets, B&Bs, small hotels and hire businesses, a booking lasts a day or a night rather than an hour. These plugins take bookings that way.

• WP Booking Calendar handles both full-day bookings and time-slot appointments, so it fits a rental as well as a service.
• WP Simple Booking Calendar is for a single holiday home, room or office where visitors mainly need to see which days are free.
• WP Booking System is aimed at rentals, such as a holiday home or a boat hire business.
• MotoPress Hotel Booking is the one for hotels, B&Bs and holiday rentals with several rooms or properties.

WP Booking Calendar

You can set up your own booking forms in the free version of WP Booking Calendar. Paid editions add online payments, seasonal pricing and an availability search. They also add more booking resources, the rooms, properties or items customers book.

WP Simple Booking Calendar

The free version of WP Simple Booking Calendar keeps track of your bookings on one calendar. Premium adds unlimited calendars and syncs them with Airbnb, Booking.com and other sites that support iCal, a common format for sharing calendars.

WP Booking System

In WP Booking System, you manage availability on booking calendars with changeover days, the days when one guest leaves and the next arrives. Customers book through a form you customise. Online payments through services such as Stripe, PayPal and Square come only with the developer's paid Business and Developer plans, and the Personal plan takes offline payments only. The developer also sells paid versions with more calendars and features, so check which version includes payments before you rely on them.

MotoPress Hotel Booking

In the free MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin, guests use a search form to find available dates, and you can set rates by season and take payments through PayPal.

What the paid versions add

The free versions of the plugins above cover a simple booking form. Each developer sets its own prices for the paid versions, so check the plugin's own pricing page before you upgrade. Paying is worth it when you need one of these:

• Payments when customers book. Of the appointment plugins above, only Amelia Lite and LatePoint's free plugin take online payments without an upgrade, and the payment services you can connect vary from plugin to plugin.
• Text message reminders. Easy Appointments and FluentBooking send them only with their paid Pro versions.
• Bookings in a WooCommerce shop. Some paid versions, such as Amelia's premium versions, take payments through WooCommerce, and the official WooCommerce Bookings extension is a paid extension with no free version.
• Support from the developers. You can ask for help with a plugin in its support forum on WordPress.org, but Bookly says it can't always guarantee active support there, as it puts customers of Bookly Pro with a valid support pack first.

Shore, a booking service we offer, works with WordPress through its own plugin. You manage appointments, services and customers in one dashboard. It sends reminders by email and text message and syncs with Google Calendar or Outlook. Customers can also pay a deposit or the full price when they book.

Try Shore Light, one of the Shore plans, on your WordPress site free for 14 days. You don't need a credit card to start.

How to add a booking plugin to WordPress

You need a WordPress site before you can add a booking plugin. If you don't have one yet, our Hosting for WordPress plans come with a one-click WordPress installer, so you can set up your site first.

Before you rely on a booking plugin, check that its developers still update it. Its page in the plugin directory shows when it was last updated. A plugin can also be closed: BookingPress, for example, was closed in the directory on 1 February 2025 and can no longer be downloaded there.

1. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New.
2. Search for the plugin by its name.
3. Click the plugin's title or More Details to read about it before you install it.
4. Click Install Now.
5. When the installation is complete, click Activate.

After activation, you set up your services, availability and booking form in the plugin's own menu in your dashboard. Plugins such as Bookly, Amelia and Simply Schedule Appointments give you a block to add in the WordPress editor, or a shortcode, a short code in square brackets you paste onto a page. Either one places the booking form on the page. Make a test booking on that page before you share it with customers.

Keep the plugin up to date, since its developers use updates to fix problems and keep it secure. You can switch on automatic updates for each plugin on the plugins page in WordPress, but an update can still disrupt your website, so back up your site before your plugins update and keep that backup recent. With Managed Hosting for WordPress, we update WordPress, your themes and your plugins automatically. We check your site visually after each update, and if something is off, we roll it back and let you know.