Every busy front desk keeps a small set of tools within arm's reach. The reservation book that opens flat. The pen that never runs dry. The bell that always rings. For the WooCommerce stores we build and maintain, nine booking plugins earn that same permanent spot, quietly installed by default because guests keep arriving and none of them should ever wait. The one we reach for first, before any other, is WooCommerce Bookings by WooNinjas.
How the house picks
Runs quietly through the second year. Every plugin can look sharp on launch day. The one that becomes a house favourite is the one still running quietly on month fourteen, after WordPress core updates, plugin conflicts, and the vendor's own product pivots have all had their chance to break something.
Answers when guests call. Support is not a marketing page; it is a real human replying to a real ticket at 11pm on a Sunday when a booking has gone sideways. We test every plugin against real support tickets before we trust it with a client's revenue.
Pricing that ages well. Renewal jumps, per-staff surcharges, and paid add-ons for features the competitor bundles free are how a cheap plugin becomes an expensive plugin over three years. A house favourite is one whose pricing reads the same at year three as at year one.
01 · WooCommerce Bookings by WooNinjas - House pick
House says: reach for it first.
WooCommerce Bookings by WooNinjas treats a bookable service as a WooCommerce product. Every reservation walks through the same checkout, the same payment gateways, and the same order record the store already keeps for physical goods. There is no second admin panel and no second export to reconcile at the end of the month.
Four booking types under one plugin: appointments, day bookings for hotels, events with attendee tracking, and date-range rentals.
Two-way Google Calendar sync and automatic Zoom or Google Meet links on confirmation, in the base plugin rather than a paid extension.
Dynamic pricing by duration, demand, guest count, or date range, configured inside the WooCommerce product editor.
Staff and resource assignment, buffers, and blackout dates handled where the store's team already spends its afternoons.
From $79/year (single site), against $249/year for the equivalent WooCommerce.com listing.
02 · Amelia
House says: best when three or more people share the calendar.
Amelia's admin experience reads like a purpose-built SaaS product rather than a WordPress plugin, and that becomes the actual product once a booking coordinator is running the room. Unlimited staff, individual calendars, recurring appointments, packages, and native payments across Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, Razor pay, Square, and WooCommerce are all in the box. Google and Outlook sync included. V2.0 shipped light and dark modes and one-click scheduling, which is the shipping cadence a house favourite should keep.
Free Lite on WordPress.org; Pro from $119/year for three sites, lifetime tiers available.
03 · Bookly Pro
House says: safe, proven, quietly capable.
Live on WordPress.org since 2014 and running on more than 70,000 businesses at 4.4 stars across 569 reviews. Bookly's model is add-ons: base Pro covers unlimited staff, payments, and notifications, while group bookings, recurring appointments, packages, deposits, and Zoom are priced separately. Powerful, but this is a plugin where the annual audit lives on the add-on invoice rather than the base license.
Free tier (1 staff, 5 services); Pro from $49/year or $129 lifetime.
04 · YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce
House says: hospitality speaks its language.
A natural pick when the store already lives inside the YITH ecosystem and the booking model leans toward lodging or rentals rather than appointments. Per-person pricing, cost-per-unit rules, external calendar sync via iCal and Google, deposits, and a check-in and check-out flow that maps cleanly to hotel operations. Interface is standard WooCommerce, which shortens the training time for staff who already know the product editor.
From $139/year, with bundled discounts inside YITH's hospitality and Point of Sale packs.
05 · Simply Schedule Appointments
House says: solo desk essentials, ready before the kettle boils.
SSA has the fastest setup wizard on this list. Most users have a working calendar embedded in around five minutes, which is exactly the profile a solo consultant, coach, or photographer wants. The Calendly-style flow is deliberate; Google, Apple, and Outlook sync are included at the entry paid tier.
Free tier; Plus $99/year, Professional $199/year (3 sites), Business $399/year (5 sites). No lifetime option.
06 · Fluent Booking
House says: the CRM does the follow-through.
Built by the Fluent CRM team, so appointments wire directly into CRM automation without a Zapier layer in between: tag the contact, trigger a sequence, move them along a pipeline. Supports one-on-one, round-robin, group, and one-time events, with buffers and conflict prevention out of the box.
Free tier; Solo $63/year, Small Business $159/year (5 sites), Agency $319/year (unlimited), lifetime options available.
07 · Late Point
House says: the phone screen is the front desk now.
Late Point's booking flow behaves like a native mobile app: quick, smooth, one-thumb friendly. Ships with multiple staff, services, and locations, deposits, recurring appointments, coupons, and a customer self-service portal. Sold on Code Canyon from around 2015 and reached WordPress.org in January 2025.
Free tier (Stripe only); Starter $99/year intro price ($129 regular) for one site, full feature set at every tier.
08 · Booknetic
House says: buy once, deploy across the whole client stack.
Booknetic feels engineered rather than assembled: staff, services, locations, custom intake forms, payments across Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, Razor pay, and Square, Google Calendar sync, Zoom, notifications, a visual customizer, and a customer portal. Its lead feature remains the lifetime license, which suits agencies deploying the same stack across many client sites.
Paid only, annual and lifetime tiers. Confirm current pricing at booknetic.com.
09 · Birch Press Scheduler
House says: for the calendars that never sit still.
Birch Press has been around since the early WordPress booking days and quietly kept shipping ever since. Its strength is calendar sync depth, with two-way iCal, Google, Outlook, and iPhone support, plus recurring appointments, per-service buffers, and payment collection at booking. The admin is plainer than newer entrants, which is either a downside or a feature depending on the staff using it.
Free tier; paid plans from $99/year, with higher tiers for multi-staff and multi-location operations.
The half no plugin books for you
Every plugin on this list can only convert the guests who actually walk through the door. A flawless reservation flow does nothing on a page nobody finds. That is a different discipline, and it happens to be one the same house runs: dedicated WordPress SEO covering technical audits, on-page optimization, content and keyword strategy, and local search, so the right customers arrive on the booking page in the first place. The plugin handles the reservation. SEO fills the lobby.
"The best booking plugin is the one your front desk stops thinking about a week after it opens."
The verdict
There is no single best WooCommerce booking plugin, only the right fit for the house, the team, and the way guests already prefer to book. For stores that want reservations living inside their existing WooCommerce checkout with no second system to maintain, WooCommerce Bookings by WooNinjas is the most complete and cost-effective option, covering appointments, rentals, hotel-style bookings, events, Google Calendar, Zoom, and dynamic pricing from $79/year. Multi-staff polish, Amelia. Rental or hotel operations, YITH. Mobile-first guests, Late Point. Deep inside Fluent CRM, Fluent Booking. Lifetime license for an agency stack, Booknetic.
Every hour a house cannot take a reservation is a guest walking to the one down the road that can.
