Last updated June 27th, 2024 at 06:11 pm
I recently evaluated and compared two free WordPress booking plugins:
- Amelia Lite (Booking for Appointments and Events Calendar – Amelia)
- Simply Schedule Appointments (Appointment Booking Calendar — Simply Schedule Appointments Booking Plugin)
My Criteria
The criteria and scope of my evaluation were limited to my own specific and admittedly simple requirements.
One client at a time
I am typically setting up a telephone or a zoom appointment with a single client. When I’ve needed to set up meetings with multiple participants in different locations, I’ve used Survey Monkey to identify mutually available times. I wrote about that here. But as I said, most of my appointments are with single individuals.
Email & Texting Sucks
The back-and-forth of emailing and texting for setting appointments drives me crazy. Setting up appointments through email has never been satisfactory. Too often I’ve had clients email me, requesting a meeting within an hour, but I don’t even see their email until two hours later. Texting has worked fairly well with many clients for a quick, impromptu meetings. But I don’t enjoy texting someone all my availabilities for the upcoming week.
Calendly didn’t cut it
I have used Calendly — the free version — but its limitations (e.g., being limited to just one event type) don’t suit me. And I don’t love the interface.
No calendar integration needed
I don’t maintain a Google calendar, so there is no need to import such a calendar into a booking plugin.
Free
I pay for lots of plugins. Given my limited requirements, I don’t see the need to pay for a booking solution.
My “Review” Here
My goal was not to produce a general review of these two plug-ins. There are plenty of reviews of booking plug-ins, and many of them do a very good job of comprehensively covering all the pros and cons of these two plug-ins as well as dozens of others. If you want to read any such reviews, just go to Altavista or your favorite search engine and enter:
best wordPress booking plugins
Instead, I’m simply offering my first impressions of each plugin.
Amelia
This is a very highly rated plug-in, both is free and premium forms.
The installation and set up took a bit of a while.
A small complaint is it what should have been called forms in the dashboard is called Configure. That’s not really intuitive, but it’s also not a real big deal.
Amelia Light isn’t lightweight. The plugin’s zip file is 138MB large, and it creates 58 database tables. I imagine much of this stuff is for compatibility with the pro versions.
The free version of Amelia does not support Notes. Wait, what? In other words, someone booking an appointment has no way to indicate what he or she wishes to discuss or accomplish. This seems like a serious omission. For me it was the deal-breaker.
I do like that Amelia supports pending appointments.
Simply Schedule Appointments (SSA)
The video demo of setting up SSA efficiently (and accurately) shows how easy it is to set up the plugin in five minutes.
Setting up SSA did indeed take just five minutes. However, I may need to give some credit to Amelia Lite, because I installed and configured that one first, and the SSA set up was not that different.
SSA supports a Notes field, allowing the person seeking the appointment to furnish some notes about what he or she wanted to accomplish.
SSA does not support pending appointments. I wish it did, but it’s not a deal breaker for me.
The free version of SSA does not support blackout windows. (It does support blackout dates.) This was a bit of a bummer, but I came up with a workaround. Namely, I created four “internal” Appointment Types that only I can use for appointments.
One is for a 90-minute block of time; the others are for 2 hours, 3 hours, and 4 hours, respectively. This way, if I’m not available, say, from 8am – 12noon on some day, I would simply add a 4-hour “Blackout Window” appointment for myself.
Support seems good. I submitted a support question in the WordPress plugin forum at 4 PM on a Sunday afternoon and got an answer 35 minutes later. I don’t want to assume that this is indicative of their standard responsiveness, but I did like it.
UPDATE: Support seems excellent. I recently posted a question about configuring appointment notifications, and @cyn92 posted the answer within 13 minutes.
Conclusion
If your needs for a booking plugin are like mine, you might find Simply Schedule Appointments to be a good solution for your appointment booking requirements. I’d like to know what you think. Do you use a booking plugin for WordPress? Do you use some external booking/calendaring app? Am I wrong to not be using Google Calendar? Weigh in in the comments box below.
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