Many companies need an online booking or appointment management system and are looking to create a WordPress website with this functionality. Setting up these types of systems takes work, but it can be done with the help of WooCommerce.
We Offer Woocommerce Services!
Reach new heights with our WooCommerce services. Our developers can make your website beyond your expectations according to your business needs..
How? Well, complementing it with some very complete tools. Of all of them, below we are going to see what are currently the best booking plugins for WooCommerce, as well as all their advantages, disadvantages, main features, and pricing.
So in this post, I will discuss the best WooCommerce booking plugins.
Booking System with WordPress and WooCommerce
If you are reading this article, you probably have a business or a business idea that needs an online booking and appointment system. You will have already read a lot of information on the internet, but despite having a fair idea, you do not finish deciding on the tool that you should use.
We are talking about companies that need to create an automatic reservation platform in which customers can choose a date and time for a service or product from the website itself.
This is the case with any type of accommodation, restaurant websites, premises rental websites, vehicles, sports equipment, tools, tourist cruises, movie tickets…
Or also small business websites that need to manage their appointments online, such as; hairdressers, photographers, personal trainers, physiotherapy clinics, aesthetics, dentists, event agencies, consultancies, real estate…
In the case of small businesses, this system can save countless hours of work, since, in addition to automating appointments or reservations, it helps to obtain optimal availability planning. Or do you still see yourself making reservations on paper or by phone?
If this is your case, it will help you to take a look at the following comparison with 3 booking plugins that work perfectly with WooCommerce.
Let’s see what they are!
Best Booking Plugins for Woocommerce
1. WooCommerce Booking
The WooCommerce Booking plugin is perhaps the best known.
This is the official WooCommerce extension for booking and reservations, so both plugins combine perfectly. It allows you to sell reservations from your website, based on time or date, simply and completely.
You simply have to go to the product page edition in WooCommerce and select “Bookable Product” to show you the necessary configuration fields.
With this plugin, your customers will be able to check the availability of your services or products through a calendar, and then book and pay for them through a payment page, similar to other WooCommerce products.
Therefore, it is a perfect tool for those who want to add an appointment, service, or rental management system. And it offers several benefits that you won’t find in other free booking plugins like WooCommerce Easy Booking.
Pros
- Being integrated with WooCommerce you can take advantage of all the features of this plugin: payment gateways, tax settings, notifications, etc.
- Reservations can be defined by the unit of time you want: minutes, hours, days, weeks… In fact, it allows the option of both the owner defining the duration of the reservation (for example, in a hotel, you will set «1 day» as the duration) as well as that it is defined by the clients themselves, establishing a minimum and maximum reservation time (for example, if your website is for the rental of sports equipment, the client chooses the number of hours).
- Allows you to define when availability is available and set global rules for all products that can be booked.
- You also agree to establish a cost for specific hours, and dates or even create availability rules, such as requesting an appointment with a specific hairdresser, that a cot is available for the room, or a class with a teacher of a certain specialty.
- A minimum term in advance can be defined so that the client can reserve or cancel the reservation.
- In the case of accommodation, it has a specific extension that includes the possibility of configuring prices per night instead of for whole days and of establishing check-in and check-out times. This extension is free and is called WooCommerce Accommodation Booking.
- It is possible to charge a fixed price plus another that depends on the reserved units.
- Filter and update reservations, as well as their availability from your WordPress admin. You can view them in list or calendar format.
- Allows you to set special rates for weekends, holidays, or seasonal.
- Accept reservations for several people. So you can configure a maximum number of people per reservation and multiply the cost per person.
- To simplify management, it is possible to create groups of rooms (or any “reservable” product) with similar characteristics.
- You can offer extra services or products linked to each room with the Product Add-ons extension.
- If the reservation requires approval, the client can check the availability of reservations without payment.
- If several professionals work in the same business, it is possible to create an agenda for each one with their rates, schedules, etc.
- You can also establish periods between one reservation and the next, that is, leave fifteen minutes or the necessary time between one session and another (for example, for massage rooms, private classes, etc).
- You accept to establish specific days, periods of the year, schedules, and days of the week or of the month, in which the product is not available (holidays, Sundays, vacations…).
- Discounts may be offered depending on the length of the reservation.
- Allows you to export reservations to CSV.
- You can also make reservations with an open date, which is very useful for services that can be given away.
- Allows you to manually create reservations through the WooCommerce Bookings admin.
- If a reservation is canceled, those available places are automatically shown again.
- You can also charge a part as a deposit when making the reservation and the rest is pending payment at the time the service is provided.
- One of the advantages that make it among the best reservation plugins for WooCommerce, and that other reservation management extensions do not include, is that the confirmation email can be configured for each product. In addition, personalized email notifications can also be sent to people who have reserved a product.
Cons:
- WooCommerce Bookings does not currently support subscriptions with WooCommerce.
- It also does not support recurring reservations.
- Reservations can only be modified by the website administrator and not by customers.
- You can configure whether or not reservations are confirmed automatically for all products, but you cannot define it independently for each one.
- The minimum reservation time cannot be defined at the level of each product.
- It is not possible to configure the availability of a reservation for a specific type of user.
- Does not work with WooCommerce variable products or product groups.
- There are some cases where this WooCommerce Booking plugin is not the most suitable. For example, for event tickets, since an event is not a reservation. In this case, you could use the WooCommerce virtual product option.
- High price compared to its competitors.
Pricing:
WooCommerce Booking is available with 3 types of licenses, all of them include 1 year of updates and technical support and of course, as with all official plugins, you have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Their prices are:
- The price for a single site is $249.00
- The price for up to 5 sites is $299.00
- The price for up to 25 sites is $449.00
2. Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce
Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce belongs to Tyche Softwares and is another very popular online booking and appointment plugin.
It allows you to transform your WooCommerce store into a complete platform that supports all types of reservations based on time or date (can be filtered by category).
It is one of the best tools to create a platform for selling event tickets, tickets, tours… But it is also one of the best tools to sell services and manage appointments or online reservations.
Pros:
- It works with all payment gateways available with WooCommerce.
- Allows you to select the language and calendar format. In total there are included 62 languages and 24 different themes.
- It has a powerful widget with which customers can book faster by searching for available dates and times.
- It makes it possible to create reservations with both simple and variable, grouped, combined, and compound products. This is one of the great advantages over WooCommerce Bookings.
- Visitors can view reservation details at each step of the WooCommerce checkout process.
- It allows you to set special prices for business days, time intervals, special dates, holidays, or even exclude days in the same product.
- You can also set availability by time intervals or even specify the date and time of availability (for example, services that are available for a limited period, such as a play or a movie).
- Allows you to set variable prices based on the number of days to reserve.
- Allows you to configure volume discounts.
- You agree that customers can reschedule reservations. You can change reservation dates and times on the purchase and payment page and can even change the reservation date and time from the My Account page.
- Allows you to set a maximum number of reservations per day or a maximum or a minimum number of nights to reserve in the case of accommodation.
- Different duration intervals can be created in the same product (for example, a tour or activity that has a different duration depending on the day it is booked).
- Admin can add manual reservations and check availability in real-time.
- Reservations can be synchronized with Google Calendar, both that of the administrator and that of the client (even with different calendars depending on the product or service). It also allows synchronization with other external calendar applications.
- It allows the export of reservations to CSV, pdf, or excel formats.
- It gives the possibility to easily modify the label of the reservation field and the availability messages.
- It allows you to accept unlimited reservations, without transaction-based fees.
- Reservation requests can also be accepted by phone or email.
- Avoid over-booked reservations.
- Compatible with the WPML multilingual plugin.
- It is much cheaper than the official WooCommerce Bookings plugin.
Cons:
- Does not include reminders or email notifications.
- For more options, you can complement this plugin with up to six available add-ons, the drawback is that these are not included in the price and are paid separately.
- These are deposits or partial payments, exclusive settings for rental reservations, printable tickets, multiple time intervals when reserving a product/service, seasonal prices, recurring reservations, and Tour Operators (so that each one sees their reservations).
Pricing:
This plugin to create a reservation center in WooCommerce is constantly updated with improvements, just like the previous one, it has a 30-day guarantee and all its licenses include updates and support for 1 year.
Their prices are:
- The price for a single site is $119
- The price for up to 5 sites is $199
- The price for an unlimited number of sites is $249.00
3. YITH Booking for WooCommerce
Finally, YITH Booking for WooCommerce, developed by YITH, also allows all those businesses that need it to create an online booking platform for WooCommerce.
Like the previous ones, this plugin allows you to organize your reservations by date, period or season, number of people involved… It is a simple reservation system that can be used by both clients and suppliers.
Pros:
- Besides English, It has versions available in many languages like Spanish, Italian, and Dutch.
- The time unit of the product or service can be established in days, months, or years.
- It makes it possible to establish a duration or a minimum and a maximum number of the reservation.
- Allows users to set the duration of the reservation. Here the admin can fix a set date or leave a free date for the user to choose the start and end date, or the start date and duration.
- You can create an unlimited number of products to reserve.
- Likewise, you can also multiply the price according to the number of people.
- It allows you to efficiently view the list of reservations made using various filters, such as date, period, departure date, name, and surname.
- You can also export reservations in CSV, PDF, or Excel.
- Allows users to cancel their reservation until a specified date.
- You can set the first and last dates available for a reservation, as well as the maximum number of reservations allowed on the same date.
- You can restrict availability based on specific days of the week or time frames
- It also allows you to create labels by age, marital status, membership, and work… (For example, adults, children, etc).
- It is possible to add extras to the reservation, either free or by applying a cost to the reservation based on its duration or set prices according to the season… This is something that not all reservation plugins include and is a basic function for websites of accommodations that want to charge, for example, extra costs for breakfast, parking, extra bed…
- These charges can be activated or deactivated depending on the type of product or room, in this case.
- Includes the ability to create custom search forms. This is very useful in the case of offering services in different cities, for example.
- You can add a map by setting the location of the reservation with the Google Maps API (for example, to show the location of accommodations).
- It contains a detailed booking payment system.
- Allows integration with other YITH plugins, except YITH WooCommerce Product Bundles.
- Compatible with the WPML multilingual plugin.
- Automatically send email notifications of reservation status, new reservation, confirmed reservation, rejected, canceled, or paid.
- The admin can add manual reservations from the WordPress backend.
- On the other hand, it can be configured either to automatically approve new reservations or to review them before confirmation.
- Products are added to the cart and displayed on the checkout page similar to WooCommerce.
Cons:
- It does not include the possibility of making reservations by the hour, so it would not be useful for companies that sell events, tours, or activities by the hour online.
- Does not work with WooCommerce variable products or product groups.
- Can’t sync with Google Calendar.
Pricing:
You can purchase the YITH booking plugin standalone or you can also pay a monthly or yearly subscription to get access to all Yith plugins and themes, with continuous updates, unlimited downloads, and up to 30 license sites for all items.
If you purchase the YITH Booking for WooCommerce plugin independently:
- The price for a single site is $147 (although they usually offer occasional discounts)
- The price for a maximum of 6 sites is $245
- The price for a maximum of 30 sites is $409
Conclusion – Best Booking Plugin for WooCommerce
As you can see, since they are all integrated with WooCommerce, the operation of these plugins are very similar and valuable.
The product or service to reserve is displayed as if it were a product card and the purchase process is the same as that of a standard WooCommerce store.
However, although they have similar configurations, depending on your preferences or type of business, one may benefit you more than the other.
In short, implementing a complete reservation system on your website is somewhat more complex than setting up a standard online store.
In any case, the tools that I have just presented to you make this type of system available to anyone and although there are many other options, these are the best booking plugins for WooCommerce.
I hope this list of best booking plugins helps you. If you have any questions or suggestions don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts in the comment box below.
