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Modern Events Calendar vanished from the WordPress.org plugin directory on 11 May 2022. Timely’s All-in-One Event Calendar was permanently closed on WordPress.org on 21 August 2025. Neither is coming back, and both still turn up in event plugin roundups published this year. WordPress has never shipped a built-in way to book a slot or publish a dated event. So the job falls to plugins, and that shelf changes faster than the articles recommending it.
Quick answer: Booking people one at a time (consultations, salon chairs, demos)? Simply Schedule Appointments handles unlimited appointment types free and holds a perfect 5.0 rating across 155 reviews. Publishing dated events for a crowd? Events Manager gives you bookings, multiple tickets and complex recurrence for USD 0. The Events Calendar puts recurring events behind a USD 259/year licence. Selling tickets on a budget? Eventin Standard at USD 89/year is the cheapest ticketing licence here that comes with a refund window.
Last reviewed: August 2026. Install counts, ratings and version numbers pulled from the WordPress.org plugin API on 31 August 2026. Prices checked against each vendor’s own pricing page the same day.
Events or Appointments? Decide This First
These are two different jobs. Picking a plugin built for the wrong one is the most expensive mistake in this category, and everything else follows from getting it right.
An appointment is one visitor claiming one slot from a finite calendar. A haircut at 14:30. A 30-minute discovery call. The software’s real work is availability maths: staff hours, buffer time between bookings, timezone conversion, and refusing to double-book. Attendance is one.
An event is a dated thing many people attend at once. A workshop on 12 October. A conference with four tracks. Here the software’s work is display and capacity. Think calendar views, recurrence rules, venue records, ticket inventory, and a check-in list at the door. Availability maths barely matters, because you’re selling 200 seats to the same moment in time.
Plugins that try to do both tend to do one of them thinly. Amelia is the honest exception, and its directory listing says so out loud: “Booking for Appointments and Events Calendar”. So before you compare a single price, answer this: are you selling a slot, or a seat?
One more thing to settle early. You don’t need a separate calendar plugin, a separate booking plugin and a separate ticketing plugin. Most sites here need exactly one. Stack three and you’ll end up with four calendar post types and a database full of orphaned rows. If you’re weighing how much your site can carry, our guide on how many plugins you should actually install covers the real limits.
How We Built This Shortlist
We kept all five plugins from the 2021 version of this guide, because none of them are dead. Every one has shipped an update within the last 64 days, which was our bar for “still maintained”. Ten of the twelve here updated within the last 30 days, and eight within the last fortnight. Then we added seven more that beat them on installs, ratings, or on doing a job the original five don’t do well.
Three exclusion rules did most of the filtering. First, anything closed on WordPress.org is out, however good it used to be. That removed Modern Events Calendar, All-in-One Event Calendar and BookingPress, the last of which closed on 1 February 2025. Second, we skipped plugins with fewer than 100 user ratings unless they had a specific reason to be here. LatePoint was the exception, and its 99 ratings against 100,000 installs got flagged rather than hidden. Third, anything untouched for over a year was cut before we started writing.
Install counts, star ratings, version numbers and last-update dates come from the official WordPress.org plugin API, not from vendor marketing. Prices come from each vendor’s own pricing page. Where a plugin bills in euros or pounds, we converted at the European Central Bank reference rate for 28 August 2026. That rate: EUR 1 = USD 1.1643, GBP 1 = USD 1.3583. We kept the billing currency in brackets, because that’s what your card actually gets charged.
What we did not do: run load tests, measure booking-form render times, or install all twelve on a production site. Nobody should claim that from a desk. Two figures also stayed unverifiable. Amelia publishes no renewal price anywhere on its pricing page. And The Events Calendar’s move to Liquid Web dropped the money-back wording that used to sit under its plans. We’ve said so in both sections rather than guessing.
Easy Appointments: Best for a One-Off Budget
USD 39, once. That’s the entry price for the Pro extension, and it’s the only paid option in this guide that isn’t a subscription.
The free core does more than the price suggests. You get multiple locations, multiple staff, multiple services, and a booking form that runs in one or two columns. Email notifications are templated and automatic. There’s CSV export for bookings, reCAPTCHA on the form, and GDPR options built in. For a two-person clinic that wants a calendar on the contact page, that’s the whole job done for nothing.
Pro adds Google Calendar sync, Twilio SMS and WhatsApp, Stripe and PayPal payments, iCal feeds, room booking, and an AI booking assistant. Licences run USD 39 for one site, USD 59 for three, and USD 79 for ten. Above that it’s USD 99 for 25 sites and USD 199 unlimited. Amelia, by contrast, wants EUR 49 (about USD 57) every year for a single domain. Easy Appointments costs less in year one and nothing at all in year two.
Now the part the pricing page underplays. Every tier except the USD 499 lifetime licence includes one year of updates only. The plugin keeps working after that, but you stop getting fixes. A booking form handling payment data is not something to freeze. No refund policy is published anywhere on the site.
Pros
- Pro is a one-time USD 39, not a subscription
- Free core covers multi-staff, multi-location and multi-service booking
- Updated 14 August 2026, so development is current
- Unlimited-site licence at USD 199 undercuts most agency tiers here
Cons
- Only 10,000+ active installs and a 4.3/5 rating from 131 reviews
- One year of updates on every tier below the USD 499 lifetime licence
- No published refund policy
Best for: A single clinic, studio or freelancer who wants payments and calendar sync without an annual bill.
Skip if: You need vendor support you can rely on in year three.
Buy Easy Appointments if the one-time price is the point, and you accept that updates stop after twelve months. Want the same feature set with someone actively answering support tickets? FluentBooking at USD 63/year is the better trade. And if you need it on 25 sites, the USD 99 tier is cheap. Nothing else here comes close at that count.
Event Organiser: Best for Sites Already Running It
Start with the problem. Event Organiser’s own blog hasn’t posted since 2019. Pricing is in pounds sterling with no US option. Refunds are issued only “in limited circumstances.” For a plugin you’re about to build a booking workflow on, that combination should give you pause.
The code is in better shape than the marketing. Version 3.12.10 landed on 28 June 2026, and the plugin holds 4.6/5 from 139 reviews. That’s the joint-highest rating among the five plugins carried over from 2021. It’s built the way a WordPress developer would expect. Events are a custom post type, venues are a taxonomy, and everything is reachable through normal template tags. Theming by hand rather than dropping in blocks? That architecture beats plugins hiding their data in proprietary tables.
Pro pricing runs GBP 50 (about USD 68) for one site, GBP 90 (USD 122) for five, and GBP 120 (USD 163) for ten. The ten-site tier includes every extension. Set that against My Calendar Pro at USD 69 for three sites: near-identical money, one third of the licences. Renewals are promised “at a significant discount” without the discount ever being named. That is not a number you can budget against.
Bookings, iCal sync, venue maps and discount codes all sit in Pro. The free version handles recurring events and calendar display. That already beats The Events Calendar’s free tier on the single feature most people want.
Pros
- Free version includes recurring events
- Clean custom post type architecture that themes cleanly
- 4.6/5 across 139 reviews
Cons
- Renewal discount never quantified
- Refunds only in “limited circumstances”
- GBP billing adds card conversion fees for US buyers
Best for: Developers hand-building event templates who want standard WordPress data structures.
Skip if: You want blocks and a visual builder.
Keep Event Organiser if it’s already running your site and your templates depend on it, because migrating event data is genuinely painful. Don’t pick it new in 2026. For the same architecture with a healthier support story, Events Manager costs USD 99/year and has shipped continuously since 2008. For blocks and visual editing, Eventin is the modern answer.
The Events Calendar: Most Installed, Most Expensive to Unlock
Six hundred thousand sites run this plugin, more than the other eleven here combined. The free version cannot create a recurring event.
That single gap explains most of the frustration behind its 4.2/5 rating from 2,452 reviews. Largest review pool in the category, one of the lowest scores. Free gets you event creation, saved venues and organisers, month, list and day views, Google Maps and block editor support. Add iCal export and JSON-LD structured data, which helps events surface in search. It’s a capable free calendar. It just can’t repeat anything, and “every Tuesday” is what most people came for.
Unlocking recurrence means Essentials at USD 259/year. Pro is USD 399/year and adds full ticketing with 0% commission, QR check-in and WooCommerce. Elite is USD 599/year for seating maps and email marketing. Compare Essentials against Events Manager Pro at USD 99/year, where recurrence is already free. You’re paying 2.6x more for a feature the alternative gives away.
Two dated changes matter here. Liquid Web announced the wind-down of the StellarWP brand on 22 April 2026. On 12 May 2026 the product sites began redirecting to Liquid Web’s own domain. We confirmed on 31 August 2026 that theeventscalendar.com/products/ now returns a 301 to liquidweb.com. The Events Calendar survived as one of four retained products, so the plugin is safe. But the docs, changelogs and customer portal all moved.
Separately, CVE-2026-78265 was published on 24 August 2026, an unauthenticated PHP object injection flaw in The Events Calendar rated CVSS 9.8 critical. It affects every version up to 6.17.2, and the fix shipped in 6.17.3. If your site is below that version, update before you finish reading this guide.
Pros
- 600,000+ installs means the largest add-on ecosystem here
- Free tier ships JSON-LD event structured data
- Tested against WordPress 7.1 within days of release
Cons
- No recurring events without a USD 259/year licence
- Critical CVE disclosed 24 August 2026 (patched in 6.17.3)
- No money-back guarantee stated since the Liquid Web move
Best for: Larger organisations needing seating maps, QR check-in and a vendor with a support desk.
Skip if: Recurring events are your main requirement and USD 259/year isn’t in the budget.
Choose The Events Calendar when you need the ecosystem and the ticketing depth of the USD 399 Pro tier. At that scale the licence is a rounding error against event revenue. If you only want recurrence, Events Manager and Event Organiser both deliver it free. If you want ticketing at a fifth of the price, Eventin Standard is USD 89/year.
WP Event Manager: Best for User-Submitted Listings
Here’s the term nobody puts in the marketing: there is no refund. Asked directly whether refunds are available, WP Event Manager’s own site answers “No, we currently do not have a refund policy.” Read that before you reach for a card. Only Events Manager is as blunt about it; the rest simply stay quiet.
What you get for the risk is the best front-end submission workflow in the list. WP Event Manager is built on the same pattern as WP Job Manager. Visitors submit events through a front-end form, an admin approves them, and the listing goes live without anyone touching wp-admin. For a community calendar, a university department page or a venue letting promoters post their own nights, that flow is exactly right. Most alternatives here treat front-end submission as a premium afterthought.
The core plugin is free and covers listings, categories, search and a submission form. Paid bundles start at USD 99/year, sold by plugin count rather than by feature. There’s Event Manager Plus (20 plugins), Event Manager Pro (27), Virtual Event Manager Pro (30), and All Events Manager Pro. Each is priced across 1, 3, 5, 10 and unlimited sites. Against Eventin Standard at USD 89/year with its 15-day refund, WP Event Manager asks USD 99 and offers none.
At 20,000+ installs the plugin holds 4.0/5 from 247 reviews, the lowest score of the twelve. The last release was 3.4.1 on 22 July 2026. That’s a 40-day gap when most of this list shipped within the past week.
Pros
- Genuine front-end event submission in the free core
- Familiar structure for anyone who has run WP Job Manager
- Add-ons sold individually, so you buy only what you need
Cons
- No refund policy, stated explicitly
- 4.0/5 is the weakest rating in this comparison
- Bundle pricing by plugin count makes tiers hard to compare
Best for: Community and listing sites where visitors post their own events.
Skip if: You want to try a paid tier and change your mind.
Pick WP Event Manager when front-end submission is the requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Retrofitting that onto another plugin costs more than the licence. Want submissions with a refund attached? My Calendar Pro does user submissions at USD 69/year for three sites, refunded within 30 days. If you want the same listing model with a better maintained codebase, Events Manager is the swap.
Events Made Easy: The Most Capable Free Plugin Here
A thousand active installs. Twelve payment gateways. Those two numbers don’t usually appear in the same plugin, and the gap between them is the most interesting thing here.
Events Made Easy is fully free. No paid tier, no upsell, no locked features. The author takes donations. What that USD 0 buys is startling once you list it. Public, private, draft and recurring events. RSVP with optional approval workflows. Member and volunteer management with custom fields. Location management with OpenStreetMap, RSS and iCal feeds, and email templating with scheduling. Plus PDF generation for tickets, membership cards and booking confirmations with QR codes.
Then the payments. PayPal, Stripe, Mollie, Braintree, Worldpay, FirstData, Payconiq, Instamojo, Mercado Pago, Fondy, SumUp and Opayo, all in the free plugin. Events Manager charges USD 99/year for gateway support and ships three, plus manual payments. Events Made Easy ships twelve for nothing. It’s the only plugin here that reaches Mercado Pago or Payconiq without bolting on WooCommerce first.
So why only 1,000 installs against The Events Calendar’s 600,000? Because it’s built by one developer for people who read documentation. The admin screens are dense, the settings run long, and there’s no onboarding wizard easing you in. It also requires PHP 8.1 or newer. That’s a stricter floor than The Events Calendar’s 7.4, and it rules out sites on older shared plans. Support is a community forum, not a ticket queue.
The 110 people who did stick with it rate it 4.6/5, and version 3.2.14 shipped on 26 August 2026.
Pros
- Twelve payment gateways at zero cost
- PDF tickets and membership cards with QR codes, free
- Genuine member and volunteer management, rare at any price
Cons
- Requires PHP 8.1 or newer
- Dense admin interface with no guided setup
- Community forum support only
Best for: Clubs, associations and nonprofits needing memberships, tickets and payments on no budget.
Skip if: You want a polished interface or a support contract.
Install Events Made Easy if you’re technical, patient, and refuse to pay a subscription for something this complete. If the interface defeats you within an hour, Eventin gives you a modern builder for USD 89/year. And if you need a support desk answering within a business day, Simply Schedule Appointments includes that even on its free tier.
Amelia: Best for Multi-Staff Service Businesses
Picture a salon with five stylists. Three also work a second location. Each offers a different service menu at different prices, with a deposit taken at booking. That scenario breaks most appointment plugins. It’s the one Amelia was built for.
Amelia handles employees as first-class objects, each with their own working hours, days off, service lists and pricing. It does locations, service extras, group appointments, discount coupons, taxes and invoices. There’s a mobile app for staff. Recurring appointments work, which matters for anything sold as a course of six sessions. With 90,000+ installs and 4.6/5 from 785 reviews, it has the deepest review pool of any appointment plugin here. That’s roughly eight times LatePoint’s 99 ratings, despite LatePoint reporting more installs.
Pricing is in euros and starts at EUR 49 (about USD 57) per year for one domain on the Starter tier. Standard, Pro and Elite sit above it, with lifetime licences offered alongside the annual ones. Against LatePoint’s USD 79 entry, Amelia is the cheaper start by roughly USD 22. There’s a 15-day money-back guarantee.
Two honest limitations. Amelia doesn’t publish a renewal price on its pricing page. Its higher tiers also rendered inconsistently when we checked on 31 August 2026, so we’re quoting only the entry tier we could confirm. Every serious integration lives in the paid product too. The free version on WordPress.org is a working booking system, but Stripe, WooCommerce and most notification channels sit behind the licence.
Pros
- Real multi-employee and multi-location scheduling
- 785 reviews at 4.6/5, the deepest feedback pool here
- Deposits, taxes, invoices and coupons built in
Cons
- Renewal price not published
- 15-day refund window is shorter than Simply Schedule’s 30
- EUR billing adds conversion cost for US buyers
Best for: Salons, clinics and agencies scheduling several staff across more than one location.
Skip if: You’re one person booking one type of meeting.
Amelia earns its keep when staff scheduling is genuinely complex and the EUR 49 entry beats paying for a custom build. If you’re a solo operator, it’s overbuilt, and FluentBooking does the job for USD 63 with a published renewal. Need a renewal number before you commit? LatePoint states its own plainly and Amelia does not.
LatePoint: Most Installs, Fewest Reviews
LatePoint reports 100,000+ active installs against Amelia’s 90,000. That makes it the most-installed appointment plugin in this guide. It has 99 ratings. Amelia has 785. Weigh that ratio before you buy.
The 99 people who did review it gave LatePoint 4.9/5, the second-highest score here. The product earns it on feature parity. Every paid tier includes the identical feature set, and only the site count changes. Custom fields, calendar sync for Google, Outlook and Apple, SMS and email notifications, Zoom and Google Meet. Then invoicing, payment processing, multiple locations, multiple agents, group bookings, WooCommerce and workflow automation. All of it ships at the entry price. Nothing is held back for a higher tier, which is both unusual and refreshingly honest.
Annual pricing is USD 79 for one site, USD 149 for five, USD 299 for 100. Renewals go to USD 99, USD 249 and USD 499 respectively. LatePoint states that “all renewals are at full price displayed during checkout.” That’s a 1.25x lift on Starter and a steeper 1.67x on the two higher tiers. Set against Eventin Premium, which jumps from USD 149 to USD 299 at renewal, LatePoint’s increase is mild. More to the point, it’s published. Lifetime licences start at USD 199, which pays for itself against the annual price in year two.
The refund window is 14 days, the shortest of any plugin here that offers one at all.
Pros
- Every feature at every tier, only site count varies
- 4.9/5 rating and the highest install count for appointments
- Lifetime licence from USD 199 beats annual pricing by year two
Cons
- Only 99 ratings behind 100,000 installs
- 14-day refund, the shortest here
- Renewal jumps 1.67x on Scale and Agency tiers
Best for: Buyers who want the full feature set on one site without decoding a tier chart.
Skip if: You need a long evaluation window before committing.
Take LatePoint if flat feature parity appeals and you’ll buy the USD 199 lifetime licence rather than renewing annually. Want a month to evaluate rather than a fortnight? Simply Schedule Appointments gives 30 days plus a free tier you can run indefinitely. If you’re licensing five sites, price Amelia’s Pro tier against LatePoint’s USD 249 renewal.
Simply Schedule Appointments: The Only Perfect Rating Here
A 5.0 average across 155 reviews. No other plugin in this guide holds a perfect score at that volume. On a shelf where 4.2 is normal for a market leader, that’s worth a pause.
The free tier is why. Simply Schedule Appointments gives away unlimited appointment types, the limit competitors usually meter first. It also includes one-click support with a one-business-day response, even for people paying nothing. That last detail is close to unheard of. A consultant who needs three meeting lengths on a contact page can run this free forever and still get a human reply.
Paid tiers add capability rather than lifting caps, which is a nicer way to be upsold. Plus at USD 99 brings group bookings and integrations. Professional at USD 199 is where payments and SMS live. Business at USD 399 adds team scheduling, resource management and a live onboarding call. All three cover one site only.
The pricing page is explicit that these are introductory rates: “all annual renewals are at full price.” We calculated what that means. Plus renews at USD 129, a 1.30x increase. Professional and Business renew at USD 249 and USD 499, both 1.25x. So the year-two cost of Plus lands within a dollar of Events Manager Pro Plus at USD 129. The difference: Events Manager locks that price, and Simply Schedule keeps it at the higher rate from then on.
The refund window is 30 days, joint-longest here with My Calendar. The vendor cites 70,000+ WordPress businesses, and WordPress.org confirms 50,000+ active installs.
Pros
- Unlimited appointment types free, with real support
- 5.0/5 across 155 reviews
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Cons
- Payments need the USD 199 Professional tier
- Plus renews at 1.30x, the steepest entry-tier lift here
- Every paid tier covers one site only
Best for: Consultants and small teams who want a free scheduler that won’t nag them into upgrading.
Skip if: You need to take payment at booking and USD 199/year is too much for that alone.
Start here if you’re not sure what you need. The free tier is the most generous in this guide, and you lose nothing by trying it. If taking deposits matters, FluentBooking bundles payments into a USD 63 tier where Simply Schedule wants USD 199. Need more than one site? Look at LatePoint’s USD 149 five-site licence instead of buying this three times.
Events Manager: The Only Licence That Doesn’t Cost More Next Year
Every other paid plugin in this comparison raises your bill at renewal. Events Manager Pro Plus locks the price you signed up at, so year three costs exactly what year one did. It isn’t the cheapest licence here, but it’s the only one you can budget for.
Marcus Sykes has shipped this plugin since August 2008, eighteen years of continuous development. Version 7.4.3 landed on 27 August 2026. Its free version gives away more than most plugins here charge for, and only Events Made Easy beats it. You get full booking management with approval and rejection, multiple tickets per event, and complex recurrence with blackout dates. Add multiple timeslots with buffers, Google Maps with location filtering, iCal feeds, GDPR tools, a REST API and 30+ translations. Recurrence and ticketing, free, is precisely what The Events Calendar charges USD 259/year to unlock.
What Pro buys is money. Payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net and offline), custom booking forms, PDF tickets and invoices, check-in management, coupons and WooCommerce. Standard Pro is USD 99/year for one site, up to USD 499 unlimited. Pro Plus runs USD 129 to USD 599 and carries the locked-in renewal.
Run the three-year maths on a single site. Simply Schedule Plus: USD 99 then USD 129 twice, USD 357 total. Events Manager Pro Plus: USD 129 three times, USD 387. So Events Manager costs USD 30 more over that window, and hands you free recurrence and ticketing before you pay a penny. Simply Schedule can’t sell a ticket at all. If you’re selling seats through WooCommerce, our guide to WordPress ecommerce hosting covers the server side.
Then the sting. No refunds, on any tier: “Due to the nature of this product, we cannot provide refunds.” Test the free version thoroughly first, because it’s the only trial you get. The 4.2/5 from 547 reviews reflects a plugin whose admin screens carry eighteen years of accumulated options.
Pros
- Bookings, multiple tickets and recurrence free
- Pro Plus has locked-in renewal pricing, unique here
- Maintained continuously since 2008
Cons
- No refunds on any tier
- Free version can’t take payment
- Settings screens are dense after eighteen years of features
Best for: Anyone wanting free recurring events and ticketing now, with an upgrade that won’t reprice later.
Skip if: You need a refund safety net on a paid licence.
This is the value pick of the events half, and Pro Plus at USD 129 is the tier to buy. The locked renewal is the entire point. If you want a modern block-based editing experience, Eventin looks and feels a decade newer. If your event volume justifies seating charts and QR check-in, The Events Calendar Pro at USD 399 is the upgrade path.
FluentBooking: Best Calendly Replacement
Paying a SaaS scheduler monthly to send people a booking link? This is the plugin that ends that subscription. FluentBooking puts the same round-robin, buffer and availability model on your own domain, where the bookings belong to you.
The free version is unusually complete for a plugin this new. Unlimited hosts, unlimited calendars, unlimited bookings, and one-on-one meetings. In-person, phone, online and custom locations. Email notifications and reminders, date overrides and buffer times. Four blocks for embedding, plus a dashboard with booking analytics. It ties into Fluent Forms and FluentCRM, which is the point if you already run WPManageNinja’s stack.
The free tier’s real limit isn’t a quota, it’s calendar sync. Connecting Google, Apple, Outlook or Nextcloud requires Pro, and a scheduler that can’t see your existing calendar will double-book you. Payments, group and round-robin meetings, Zoom and Teams, SMS via Twilio, WooCommerce and webhooks are also Pro. Contrast Simply Schedule Appointments, which also holds back payments and puts calendar integrations behind its USD 99 Plus plan.
Pro is USD 63/year for one site, USD 159 for five, USD 319 for 50. All are discounted from USD 79, USD 199 and USD 399. Renewal takes each back to the regular price, a consistent 1.25x lift across all three tiers. Lifetime runs USD 199 to USD 599. At USD 63, FluentBooking undercuts LatePoint’s USD 79 by 20%, though Amelia’s EUR 49 (USD 57) still starts lower.
Version 2.3.0 shipped 28 August 2026, the most recent release in this guide. It holds 4.7/5 from 43 reviews across 20,000+ installs. That small review count is the honest caveat: this is a young product.
Pros
- USD 63/year, 20% under LatePoint’s entry tier
- Unlimited hosts, calendars and bookings on the free tier
- Predictable 1.25x renewal across every tier
Cons
- Calendar sync is Pro-only
- Only 43 ratings, so the track record is short
- No refund period stated on the pricing page
Best for: Solo consultants and small teams replacing a monthly SaaS scheduler.
Skip if: You need a proven multi-year support history.
Get FluentBooking if you already run Fluent Forms or FluentCRM, because the integration turns three tools into one. Want a longer track record behind your booking form? Amelia has 785 reviews to FluentBooking’s 43. If you’d rather stay free permanently and can live without calendar sync, Simply Schedule Appointments has the better free tier.
My Calendar: Best for Accessibility Requirements
My Calendar is built by Joe Dolson, an accessibility specialist who teaches WordPress accessibility at LinkedIn Learning. The plugin is designed accessibility-first rather than accessibility-eventually. Both the front-end calendar and the admin screens are tested with assistive technology. Events carry fields describing the accessibility provisions at a venue. A wheelchair user sees step-free access before booking, not after arriving.
For a university department, a public library, a council or any US organisation with ADA exposure, that’s not a nice extra. It’s the requirement. And it’s the one thing no other plugin in this guide is built around.
The free version covers grid, card and list views across month, week and day. Add template customisation, filtering by category, location and author, and recurring events. Then widgets, email notifications, iCal and Google Calendar export, JSON-LD structured data and multisite support. Version 3.8.2 shipped 25 August 2026 and holds 4.7/5 from 159 reviews. Not bad for a plugin the big roundups rarely mention.
Pro is USD 69/year for three sites, USD 199 for ten, USD 399 unlimited. It adds front-end event submissions with Akismet spam control, custom fields, and CSV or iCal imports. Then advanced search, cross-site event sharing over the REST API, and language marking so screen readers pronounce multilingual events correctly. Put the entry tier against Event Organiser’s GBP 50 (USD 68) single-site licence: same money, three times the sites. Every other entry tier in this guide covers one site, bar Eventin’s two. Refunds run 30 days, no questions asked.
One honest limitation. The plugin describes assistive technology testing but doesn’t publish a WCAG conformance level such as 2.1 AA. If you’re procuring against a specific standard, run your own audit rather than cite a vendor claim.
Pros
- Accessibility-first design from a recognised specialist
- Three sites at entry, where rivals give you one
- 30-day no-questions refund
Cons
- No published WCAG level
- No ticketing or payment handling at any tier
- Visual design is plainer than newer competitors
Best for: Public sector, education and nonprofit sites with accessibility obligations.
Skip if: You need to sell tickets.
Choose My Calendar when accessibility is a procurement requirement rather than a preference. Retrofitting it onto another calendar costs more than this licence ever will. If you need to take money for events, this plugin simply doesn’t, and Events Manager does it free. Want submissions plus ticketing together? WP Event Manager covers both, though without the accessibility work.
Eventin: Best Modern Ticketing on a Budget
Where WP Event Manager asks USD 99/year and refuses refunds, Eventin asks USD 89 and gives you 15 days to change your mind. That comparison sets up the rest of the section.
Eventin comes from ThemeWinter, and it’s the most modern-feeling plugin in this guide. The free version already handles event creation and listings, speaker pages, and multiple or variable ticketing. Add Zoom integration, Elementor widgets and WooCommerce payments. Selling a basic ticket costs nothing, which is more than The Events Calendar’s free tier manages.
Pro adds recurring events, template builders for events, tickets and certificates, and email automation. Then QR codes, seating maps, multivendor support and analytics, plus Stripe, PayPal and FluentCRM. It holds 4.7/5 from 397 reviews across 10,000+ installs, and version 4.1.23 shipped 27 August 2026.
Now the pricing, which needs care. Standard is USD 89/year for two domains, discounted from USD 99, so renewal is a mild 1.11x. Premium is USD 149 for 100 domains, discounted from USD 299. Agency is USD 299, discounted from USD 599. Those last two renew at 2.01x and 2.00x, the steepest increases in this comparison. Buy Premium at USD 149 and year two costs USD 299. That’s 2.3x what Events Manager Pro Plus charges every year, locked. Lifetime licences sidestep this entirely: USD 109 for one domain, USD 299 for 100, USD 399 for 500. Every tier carries a 15-day money-back guarantee.
So the buying advice is unusually specific. Take Standard or take a lifetime licence. Treat Premium’s headline discount as a one-year rate rather than a price.
Pros
- Free tier sells tickets, including variable pricing
- USD 109 lifetime for one domain avoids renewals entirely
- 4.7/5 from 397 reviews, block and Elementor native
Cons
- Premium and Agency renew at roughly 2x
- 10,000+ installs is small next to The Events Calendar
- Recurring events require Pro
Best for: Small organisers who want modern ticketing without a four-figure licence.
Skip if: You’d buy Premium annually and forget about the renewal.
Buy the USD 109 lifetime licence and Eventin becomes the best-value ticketing plugin in this guide outright. Buy Premium annually and you’ll pay USD 299 in year two. At that point Events Manager Pro Plus, locked at USD 129, is the better long-term hold. If you need seating maps and 600,000-install stability, The Events Calendar Elite is the enterprise answer.
What These Licences Actually Cost in Year Two
Almost every guide to this category quotes the discounted first-year price and stops. We calculated the renewal multiplier for each plugin from the vendor’s own stated renewal terms. The spread is wider than anything in the feature comparison.
- Events Manager Pro Plus: 1.00x. USD 129 stays USD 129, the only locked price here.
- Eventin Standard: 1.11x. USD 89 becomes USD 99.
- LatePoint Starter: 1.25x. USD 79 becomes USD 99.
- FluentBooking, all tiers: 1.25x. USD 63 becomes USD 79.
- Simply Schedule Plus: 1.30x. USD 99 becomes USD 129.
- LatePoint Scale: 1.67x. USD 149 becomes USD 249.
- Eventin Premium: 2.01x. USD 149 becomes USD 299, and Agency does the same at 2.00x.
Amelia, The Events Calendar, WP Event Manager and Event Organiser publish no renewal figure at all. Budget for the list price and treat anything better as a bonus.
The refund picture is worse, and it’s the mistake we see buyers make most often in review threads. They assume a plugin licence works like a hosting plan. It usually doesn’t. Only two of twelve offer 30 days: Simply Schedule Appointments and My Calendar. Amelia and Eventin give 15 days, LatePoint gives 14. Events Manager and WP Event Manager state plainly that they issue no refunds at all. Event Organiser refunds only in “limited circumstances”, and Easy Appointments, FluentBooking and The Events Calendar publish nothing. Test the free version before you buy. For six of these twelve, that free version is your only trial.
How to Choose the Right Plugin for Your Site
Budget: USD 0, recurring events. Events Manager, free. It does recurrence with blackout dates, multiple tickets and booking approval without a licence. Skip The Events Calendar here. Recurrence alone costs USD 259/year, and that’s the single feature you came for.
Workload: one person, three meeting types. Simply Schedule Appointments, free tier. Unlimited appointment types and one-business-day support at USD 0. Don’t buy LatePoint’s USD 79 Starter for this. You’d be paying for group bookings, multi-agent scheduling and invoicing you’ll never open.
Audience: 200+ attendees, tickets online. Under USD 150/year? Eventin Standard at USD 89, or better, the USD 109 lifetime licence. Skip The Events Calendar Pro at USD 399 unless you need QR check-in and seating maps. That’s a 4.5x price difference for features a 200-person event rarely uses.
Workload: five staff, two locations. Deposits taken at booking? Amelia from EUR 49 (USD 57). Employee-level working hours and per-staff service pricing are the hard part. Amelia is the only plugin here that models them properly at that price. Skip FluentBooking despite the USD 63 tier. It’s built around individual hosts, not a shared staff roster.
Requirement: accessibility procurement. My Calendar Pro at USD 69/year for three sites. Run your own WCAG 2.1 AA audit regardless, since no vendor here publishes a conformance level. Skip Eventin and The Events Calendar for this use, however good they look. Neither treats assistive technology testing as a design constraint.
Budget: no subscription, ever. Events Made Easy if you’re technical. Easy Appointments Pro at USD 39 one-time if you’re not. Both stop the annual bill. Just note that Easy Appointments gives you twelve months of updates and then goes quiet.
What Breaks After You Install It
Three things go wrong on nearly every event or booking site, and none of them are the plugin’s fault.
Your host throttles confirmation emails. This is the one that catches people out. Event plugins send transactional mail for every booking, reminder and cancellation, and shared hosting caps that hard. SiteGround’s own documentation puts the limit at 400 emails per hour on StartUp, GrowBig, Ecommerce and Coderick plans. GoGeek and Cloud get 800, and each recipient counts separately against the quota. Email 500 attendees about a venue change and you’ve breached a 400/hour cap with one click. The fix is to route mail through a dedicated SMTP service rather than your host’s server. Our guide on why WordPress isn’t sending email walks through the setup.
Your cache hides sold-out slots. Booking forms and availability calendars must never be cached. Exclude the booking page, the checkout page, and any REST endpoint the plugin uses. Otherwise two people will book 14:30 and only one gets it.
WP-Cron will miss your reminders. WordPress fires scheduled tasks when someone visits the site. On a low-traffic events page, a 24-hour reminder can go out nine hours late or not at all. Disable WP-Cron and replace it with a real server cron job running every five minutes.
Worth checking your PHP version too, before you pick. Events Made Easy needs PHP 8.1 or newer. The Events Calendar and My Calendar run on 7.4. If you’re on an older shared plan, that decision is made for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the free version of The Events Calendar enough for recurring events?
No. Recurring events are the headline feature of Events Calendar Pro, which starts at USD 259/year. The free version handles single events, venues, organisers and calendar views, but nothing repeats weekly. If recurrence is your requirement, Events Manager and Event Organiser both do it free, and Events Made Easy adds payments on top.
Which WordPress appointment plugin is completely free?
Simply Schedule Appointments has the strongest free tier for appointments. You get unlimited appointment types and one-business-day support at no cost, though payments need the USD 199 Professional plan. FluentBooking’s free tier gives unlimited hosts, calendars and bookings, but calendar sync needs Pro at USD 63/year. For events rather than appointments, Events Made Easy is fully free including twelve payment gateways.
Can I sell event tickets in WordPress without WooCommerce?
Yes. Events Made Easy takes payment through twelve gateways including Stripe, PayPal and Mollie, and generates PDF tickets with QR codes. Eventin’s free version sells tickets with variable pricing, and Events Manager Pro at USD 99/year adds PayPal, Stripe and Authorize.net. Add WooCommerce only when you’re already running a store and want tickets in the same cart.
How much does Amelia cost per year?
Amelia starts at EUR 49 per year for a single domain, roughly USD 57 at the 28 August 2026 ECB rate. Standard, Pro and Elite sit above it, with lifetime licences sold alongside and a 15-day money-back guarantee. Amelia does not publish a renewal price, so assume list price in year two. LatePoint at USD 79 and FluentBooking at USD 63 both state their renewal figures openly.
Why aren’t my event confirmation emails arriving?
Nine times out of ten it’s your host’s sending limit, not the plugin. SiteGround caps outgoing mail at 400 per hour on most shared plans, and every recipient counts separately. The rest is deliverability, since mail sent without SPF and DKIM records tends to land in spam. Route transactional mail through a dedicated SMTP provider and the problem usually disappears.
Is Modern Events Calendar still safe to use in 2026?
Modern Events Calendar Lite was closed on WordPress.org on 11 May 2022 for a guideline violation, and the closure is permanent. Webnus still sells the Pro product on its own site and ships the free version through GitHub, so it isn’t abandoned. But a plugin outside the directory won’t tell your dashboard when a security fix exists. For something handling bookings, that’s a risk worth avoiding when Events Manager and Eventin sit inside the repository.
Final Verdict
For appointments, Simply Schedule Appointments is where to start. A 5.0 rating across 155 reviews, unlimited appointment types free, real support on the free tier, and a 30-day refund. That’s the lowest-risk entry in this guide. Need multiple staff across multiple locations? Amelia from EUR 49 (USD 57) is the one plugin here that models that properly. And if you just want a self-hosted Calendly, FluentBooking at USD 63/year is the cheapest credible route.
For events, Events Manager wins on value and it isn’t close. Bookings, multiple tickets and complex recurrence cost nothing. Eighteen years of continuous development sit behind it. Pro Plus at USD 129 is the only licence here that costs the same in year three as in year one. Test it properly first, because there are no refunds.
Want a modern interface and ticket sales on a budget? Eventin‘s USD 109 lifetime licence is the smartest purchase on this page, provided you avoid Premium’s 2.01x renewal. Choose The Events Calendar only when you need seating maps, QR check-in and a vendor support desk. Update to 6.17.3 or later today regardless of which tier you’re on. Public sector and education buyers should go straight to My Calendar.
The wider lesson from this rewrite: two of the plugins that dominated this category five years ago are gone from the WordPress directory. A third was patched for a critical flaw the week we published. Check the last-updated date before you install anything, and check it again at renewal.
A few related guides go deeper on the pieces around these plugins. Our roundup of must-have WordPress plugins covers the SEO, caching and backup layer every event site needs underneath the calendar. Ticketing sites running WooCommerce will get more from managed WordPress hosting in the USA. That’s where the server absorbs the traffic spike when tickets go on sale.