Ever wonder what the best WordPress plugin for events and booking systems is, and why you’d use them?

If you’re a freelancer or a small business selling services, you’re better off implementing your own booking and events system into your website, rather than relying on a third-party service.

Sure, for events with a big attendance size, perhaps a third-party solution is better. However, if you’re a service provider with a few employees, then we recommend that you look into self-hosting solutions to save on cost and ease of use!

In this article, we’re going to introduce you to the most efficient and effective plugins that WordPress has to offer for bookings, events, and appointment management.

The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar is one of the most popular calendar plugins on the WordPress market. The professional and modern features really excel in making this plugin fit right into in any events calendar situation that you can imagine. Some of the most prominent WordPress developers have thoroughly investigated the level of security this plugin provides and the countless hours of support questions have led to the perfectionism that this plugin portrays.

This plugin’s features include quick events generation, venue and organizer management, calendar view, custom search for events, Google Maps integration for easier location accessibility, custom widget, Google Calendar integration, and AJAX support for smooth loading. It works responsively with smartphones and tablets and works with all leading WordPress theme frameworks. It also has built-in SEO features and provides a selection of custom themes.

Event Calendar WD

Event Calendar WD fixes the gaps that other plugins might be leaving out on the table. These include a fully responsive website layout that will make your events easy to view on any device. It also comes with a calendar widget that you can insert into your WordPress sidebar for easy event promotion. The Google Maps features will also make it easy to find the location of an event and save time from having to Google it.

A social button integration is another great built-in feature of the plugin. So, your events can get free marketing through the process of social sharing. People love to tell their friends about the events they plan to attend, especially very important ones. You can createcustom venues and allocate events for those too. Everything can be viewed monthly, weekly, and daily and the ability to create SEO-optimized event pages is another huge advantage. With a very rich codebase, you can integrate several external modules and plugins. This could very well be the plugin that helps you start your own fully functional events management website.

WordPress Event Calendar

WordPress Event Calendar names itself as one of the most flexible WordPress Calendars available. And it’s free! If you’ve found yourself in a pickle when it comes to calendar management on WordPress, then this calendars functionality will quickly resolve any lasting issues and solve your event management problems once and for all. So often we lose track of the things we need to attend, so having a simple calendar widget that can record your current and future events is really helpful.

To count down some of the features: mobile responsive, unlimited calendars and events, a widget for displaying upcoming events, style management for calendar categories to create a more unique experience. Event descriptions can be modified with full HTML5 compatibility and category management makes the event sorting process more flexible for yourself, and your website members. The feature to Integrate a lightbox into your calendars to create a more personalized and attractive UI experience as well is another thing we love about this plugin.

Event List

We like the approach that Event List has taken. The events dashboard is built with intuitive design in mind, separating events by monthly, and yearly basis that helps with productivity, since you don’t want to have all the events displayed in a single list without a sense of direction.

The event management details include the event name/title, time of event, time when the event starts, the location of the event, and the description. The WordPress content editor can be used to modify the description of your events, which means that you’ll have the ability to create visual and interactive descriptions. Copy any of your previous events with a single click of a button, to further increase your productivity. Shortcode support, but also a very solid sorting algorithm to help in finding the events that you or others are looking for is what puts htis plugin on our list.

Quick Event Manager

If time is of the essence, you may want to check out Quick Eevents Manager. This plugin is as quick as it gets for those situations where you need a simple events creation dashboard with the single feature of adding shortcodes anywhere that you wish to promote your events, be it pages or posts, or widget areas.

The multiple layout selections are great for choosing the right style for your own design. Payments can also be processed, so this plugin although very simple, does support the payment collection process. All attendee details can be downloaded or sent to an email address, making the “guest” list so much more flexible. Events can be displayed in list format or calendar of course.

Very Simple Event List

The shortcode provided by the Very Simple Event List‘s author is so flexible that you can add multiple shortcodes on the same page and have the events outlined in a design-aligned way. The settings panel is very quick to learn how to use, you’ve got the widget settings where you can disable or enable things like date, time, location, image, link, and image info, and you can choose to preview the event summary if you like.

Event On

EventOn is our only premium plugin on this list, however, it didn’t earn more than 20,000 sales on Codecanyon because the developers hit a goldmine. It was the combined efforts of everyone working on the plugins codebase and its rich set of features to make it amongst the most complete and thorough event calendar plugins that have ever been made for the WordPress platform.

Not only is the design great, but the hundreds of features that EventOn includes will ensure that you’ll never need to look for another calendar. Create stunning widgets that display the information about upcoming events and allow your customers to make their own choices.