Need a way to display your upcoming events to potential customers? Or an organised way for clients to book meetings or services with you?
Maybe you even have events requiring ticket sales, but you’re not sure how to sell tickets efficiently?
Well, it sounds like you could benefit from having a WordPress calendar plugin on your website. And we’ll help you by going through the best WordPress calendar plugins. We’ll give you an honest review of 6 of the most popular ones, based on their functions and ease of use.
What are the benefits of having a WordPress calendar plugin?
A calendar is a great way of showcasing and managing your events or services. You could even say it’s essential for keeping organised and providing a great customer experience.
Whether you want to showcase your events, sell tickets to events, or simply book meetings, giving your customers a user-friendly experience is essential for business growth.
By having a calendar on your page, you’re making it easy for your customers to find what they’re looking for. This increases engagement, grows your audience and builds brand awareness.
You can display any sort of event or service with WordPress calendar plugins. Events or services can be online, in person, profit or non-profit, and could include:
- Board or committee meetings
- 1 on 1 consultation
- Fundraisers
- Music events
- Classes
- Club or group meetings
- Hotel room bookings
- And more
Having an organised way for people to view and interact with your events or services means you’ll book more meetings, get more RSVP’s or sell more tickets. You’ll just overall increase your productivity.
Depending on the functions you’re after, we can suggest the perfect WordPress calendar plugin for you.
What are the best WordPress calendar plugins?
1. The Events Calendar
Possibly the most popular events calendar plugin is The Events Calendar, with 800,000 active installations on WordPress.
This is a user-friendly calendar that has heaps of free functions to get started with. Unlike most of the plugins on this list, you can even sell tickets for free (via PayPal).
The ‘create new event’ page from the Events calendar on WordPress is integrated perfectly into the WordPress layout. The format is so similar to the ‘add new post’ WordPress template that you’ll forget you’re using a plugin.
With just a few clicks you can make a simple event landing page for your event. You don’t need any coding or development experience.
Going to calendar view, you can highlight your events in a list, month and day view. With the pro version, you can also show your events in week, photo and summary view.
You can do basic customisation on the free version (but this is limited to changing the text colour, background colour, and button colours).
As we said before, you can also RSVP, sell and manage tickets on The Events Calendar for free via PayPal. With the Pro version, you can fully integrate with WooCommerce and other payment gateways (such as Stripe or Braintree). You can also do additional things like add recurring events or attendee registration forms: to collect details such as name, email, t-shirt size or food preference.
This plugin also won’t slow down your website, as it uses Ajax loading (fast loading achieved by loading asynchronously).
Overall this is a clean and simple calendar builder. The free version has everything you need to create, manage, and sell tickets to, events effectively. We did find the customisation to be limited on the free version, but its ease of use more than makes up for it.
The Events Calendar features:
- Super user-friendly interface
- Fully WordPress integrated
- Create and manage events
- Allow RSVPs for events
- Sell tickets via Paypal
- Multiple ways to view calendar
- Ajax loading
- Basic customisation
- Custom CSS for developers
- Responsive design
- SEO friendly
- WooCommerce, Elementor and other integrations (pro)
- Recurring events (pro)
- And more
Price: Free. But you’ll have to go Pro for advanced features (starting at $99 per year for 1 site)
2. HubSpot’s Meeting Scheduler
HubSpot is a powerful CRM system offering a vast amount of marketing, sales and service tools. You might have already seen that we reviewed their chatbot in our article The 7 Best Chatbots For WordPress In 2021, which we thought was incredibly user-friendly, offering plenty of functions.
Well, HubSpot also offers a calendar for booking meetings with their free meeting scheduler, which you can easily embed into your WordPress site.
This is a great option if you want a simple way for customers to book meetings with you 24/7. It eliminates the need for back and forth emails and you can even sync it to your google or office calendar. Contacts also get automatically added to the HubSpot database for further organisation and business optimisation.
And if you already have the HubSpot CRM plugin, then you don’t need to download anything else (so it’s not going to slow down your site’s speed at all).
Although this calendar can only be used for booking meetings, it does this perfectly. If you’re wanting to display or sell tickets to events/ services, though, then this isn’t the plugin for you.
Features:
- Meetings scheduler
- Embed the calendar on your WordPress page
- Allows customers to book meetings 24/7
- Lead generation
- Built into HubSpot CRM (which offers so many more features!)
Price: Free.
3. All-in-One Events Calendar
The All-in-One Events Calendar plugin by TIME.LY is another good option for a WordPress calendar plugin.
You can create a simple event calendar for free, either on the WordPress plugin or on their website, and you need no coding or development experience to do so.
The free version comes with 13 different layout themes to choose from. This edits the font, colours and style of your event page.
The event page is also fully customisable in terms of editing the colours throughout. You can also change the font of your event if you don’t like any of the themes, but you have to do this via Google Fonts or TypeKit.
Although there are slightly more customisation options on TIME.LY’s free version, in comparison to The Events Calendar free version, we found the user interface harder to navigate. For example, to edit the event post’s customisation you have to click the tiny ‘embed code’ button, at the top of the page. There isn’t a clear ‘edit’ section from the main page, and we’re not sure why.
You also have to embed the code into your WordPress page, which some people might find harder than a fully integrated plugin (like The Events Calendar).
A couple of other drawbacks are that the free version has TIME.LY advertising on it, and you have to pay to sell tickets.
It’s still a great option for a WordPress calendar, though, with plenty of customisation options (we especially like the pre-made themes). It’s also super easy to embed your social share links into the event page and calendar, meaning your customers can easily share your events with their friends and family. And, unlike The Events Calendar, you can create recurring events for free.
Features:
- Create and manage events
- Week, month and agenda calendar viewing
- Customisable
- Custom CSS for developers
- Single day, multiple days, all day, and recurring events
- Upcoming events widget
- Filtering events by different categories
- Responsive design
- SEO friendly
- Social share buttons
- Allow RSVPs for events (pro)
- Sell tickets (pro)
- And more
Price: Free, but you’ll have to go premium for additional features (custom price)
4. Modern Events Calendar Lite
Modern Events Calendar Lite is the free version of Modern Events Calendar and is a great, stylish WordPress calendar plugin. It’s really easy to use and needs no coding or development experience.
You have to use a shortcode to add the calendar to your WordPress site. However, if you use Elementor, then there is a specific Modern Events Calendar widget that gets added to the Elementor page. So the Lite version is fully integrated with Elementor. We thought this was pretty great.
Where this calendar excels though is by being the best calendar for layout and display customisation. Even in the free version, Modern Events Calendar gives you 18+ event display layouts to choose from, including slider, carousel and countdown. These are advanced display features that are not even available on some of the other paid plugins. You can even see demos of their layouts on their website before choosing one.
Recurring events are also included in the free version, so you can easily add daily, weekly, monthly, yearly (etc) events and save time.
You do have to upgrade to get booking/ ticketing and payment features in the app. However, the free version lets you link a website to your event page, so you could link it to your Eventbrite or another ticketing platform to get around this.
The upgraded version also has location maps, a booking calendar, custom booking forms and exclusive content for customers, and much more.
Features:
- Create and manage events
- Easy to use
- Fully integrated with Elementor
- 18+ event display layouts (50+ in paid version)
- Customisation
- Custom CSS for developers
- Responsive
- SEO friendly
- Recurring events
- Loads of booking and ticketing features (pro)
- Location maps/ google maps (pro)
- WooCommerce, Paypal, Stripe, Bank integration (pro)
- And much more
Price: Free, or $75 for the upgraded version for 1 site.
5. Elementor Extras Calendar Widget
We’re big fans of Elementor at Square Internet. As we’ve said before, using Elementor to build websites means fewer plugins are needed. Therefore your website is a lot faster than a WordPress site with loads of plugins.
Well, Elementor offers an Elementor Calendar Widget as an add on, but it’s a bit different to the other events calendars on this list.
It lets you display content from any post type on a simple calendar layout. And the calendar is fully customisable. Check out some of the things you can do with it:
However, it doesn’t include back-end event or service management features. So if you’re wanting a calendar with these features, that integrates easily with Elementor, then you should go for Modern Events Calendar.
Features:
- Showcase events
- Showcase content/ blog posts
- Add custom entries directly in Elementor
- Easy to use
- Add on for Elementor
- Customisation
- And more
Price: $26 for 1 site for 1 year.
6. WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments
If your website is built on WooCommerce (or by a WordPress Agency) and your business is based on regular bookings, then you should go for the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments calendar.
This plugin has everything you need to create listings and manage your bookings in an organised way.
The design is incredibly user-friendly and you can easily create a booking calendar for any kind of product. This could include:
- Booking meetings
- Hotel Rooms
- Event tickets
- Online courses
- Restaurant tables
- Salon appointments
- And more
There’s a specific bookings section of the plugin where you can manage everything. You can even add confirmation requirements to your bookings so that you have to confirm the booking before your customer pays.
Features:
- Fully integrated with WooCommerce
- Many advanced booking features
- Easy to use
- Customisable
- Google Calendar sync
- And more
Price: $99 for 1 site
So, what is the best WordPress calendar plugin?
That’s a tricky one, as the best WordPress calendar plugin completely depends on your business requirements.
If you just want an easy way to display your content or events, then the Elementor Extras Calendar widget will do the trick.
But if you need back-end event or service management features, then it would be either The Events Calendar or Modern Events Calendar. The Events Calendar is incredibly user-friendly, fully integrated with WordPress and the free version even comes with the option of selling tickets via Paypal. On the other hand, Modern Events Calendar is fully integrated with Elementor, is also easy to use, and is the best calendar for layout and display customisation.
Overall, we think Modern Events Calendar is the best value plugin out of all of the paid versions. It offers all of its vast amount of features at a clear 1 off payment price ($75). It’s also the most stylish calendar (you can display your events in a carousel, slider, countdown and more) and the best for integration with Elementor.
