MotoPress or Easy Booking – What’s Better for a Rental Store?
Table of Contents
What is the best booking solution for a rental store powered by WordPress? Due to being a leading website development platform, it may seem quite easy to get lost in its variety of plugins that allow the CMS to establish a feature-rich rental store. In today’s article, we will take a close look at two of such solutions – the Easy Booking plugin and MotoPress Booking Calendar, both with their own features and differences.
Before we dive deeper into the features and differences between the abovementioned plugins, let’s take a look at them first.
Easy Booking for WooCommerce
Easy Booking plugin is a solution designed for diverse rentals and WooCommerce stores, providing various products and product bundles. Equipped with advanced booking features, the plugin allows you to manage and track items in your inventory, set flexible availability settings, and customize the pricing of the items you rent out. By adding a date picker and calculating the rental price based on the chosen date range, EasyBooking turns a default WooCommerce store into a user-friendly rental website. It also comes with a free version available in the WordPress plugin catalog if you want to try the core features first.
Key features:
- Easy product rentals;
- Works with items of any type;
- Flexible item availability settings;
- List and calendar views for the booking dashboard;
- User-friendly stock management.
| Name | Developer | Price | Installations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy Booking for WooCommerce | Ashanna | Free or from 79€/year | 5k+ |
MotoPress Booking Calendar
In case you’re looking for a WordPress plugin that doesn’t depend on WooCommerce but still delivers quality rental management functionality, MotoPress Booking Calendar can help you. It is designed to meet the needs of various businesses that require proper booking functionality on their websites. Unlike the WooCommerce booking plugin, this one offers a visual calendar with 3 diverse booking modes. This means the plugin can handle reservations with customizable timeslots as well as daily and nightly booking & availability options. The built-in inventory manager and booking form builder enhance your experience and enable you to rent out items and offer services, eliminating the need for manual reservation management. The plugin also has a free Lite version that is great if you want to check out the core functionality before going premium.
Key features:
- Easy-to-use visual calendar with inventory manager;
- Optimized for Gutenberg;
- Automated email notifications;
- Stripe payment gateway integration;
- Booking cart with multiple dates.
| Name | Developer | Price | Installations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking Calendar | MotoPress | Free or from $49/year | 65+ |
Easy Booking Plugin vs Booking Calendar: Top 5 Features
Now, let’s look closer at the two abovementioned plugins, their common features, and differences. To compare them, we’ve chosen 5 core features to demonstrate how each of the solutions, including the Easy Booking plugin, handles various booking management tasks when it comes to rentals. From managing inventory to customizing availability and integrating booking forms, both plugins handle these tasks differently due to their WooCommerce and WordPress orientation. The features we’ll analyze include:
- Booking & inventory management;
- Booking forms;
- Online payments;
- Email notifications;
- Frontend integration.
| Features | Easy Booking for WooCommerce | MotoPress Booking Calendar |
|---|---|---|
| Works with any rented product | Yes | Yes |
| Compatible with WooCommerce | Yes | No |
| Flexible booking settings | Yes | Yes |
| Easy-to-use availability calendar | Yes | Yes |
| Powerful product filtering options | Only via WooCommerce | Limited |
| Inventory manager | Only via WooCommerce | Yes |
| Dynamic rates | Yes | Yes |
| Automated email notifications | Only via WooCommerce | Yes |
| Integrated booking form builder | No | Yes |
| Payment gateway integrations | Only via WooCommerce | Yes |
| Embeddable with shortcodes and widgets | Yes | Yes |
| Available in free and premium options | Yes | Yes |
1. Booking Calendar & Inventory Management
One of the first features we’d like to take a detailed look at is the booking calendar. How different are each plugin’s approaches to it?
When it comes to the Easy Booking plugin, it mostly relies on WooCommerce, while also adding some distinctive rental management features to the core eCommerce functionality. Here, the booking calendar is integrated within the process of choosing an item that is rented out in your WooCommerce store. After choosing any product, the WooCommerce booking solution allows for specifying start and end dates, displaying the final product price depending on the date range. In the site dashboard, you can track accepted rental bookings using a calendar or list views, set rental rates, and modify product availability after adding them using WooCommerce booking calendar tools.
Booking Calendar, on the other hand, delivers fully-featured inventory management tools without relying on third-party plugins. While users certainly get to use a responsive and well-designed calendar when booking, you, as a website admin, get access to a calendar combined with an inventory manager. Unlike many other plugins, this solution allows for easy availability customization and rate editing individually for each item or in bulk with a few mouse clicks. Moreover, you can create as many calendars as you want in one of three modes for each:
- Hourly (with customizable timeslots);
- Daily (great for equipment rentals);
- Nightly (best for vacation rentals).
| Features | Easy Booking for WooCommerce | MotoPress Booking Calendar |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited calendars | No | Yes |
| Visual booking calendar | Yes | Yes |
| Inventory management | Yes | Yes |
| Dynamic pricing | Yes | Yes |
| Bulk editing | No | Yes |
| Availability management | Yes | Yes |
| Product tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Price calculation | Yes | Yes |
| Product filters | Yes | No |
| Manual booking creation | Yes | No |
2. Booking Form
As we mentioned above, the Easy Booking plugin fully relies on WooCommerce for delivering its key features. This also concerns booking forms. The plugin doesn’t provide form customization features, but delivers “one date” and “two dates” modes. This allows the site visitor to easily choose when they want to rent a desired item. Then the client needs to provide basic data as requested by the store to complete the booking process using the WooCommerce tools.
Unlike the previously mentioned WooCommerce booking plugin, Booking Calendar has its own way of customizing how booking data is gathered – its very own booking form visual builder. Offering an experience similar to editing pages and posts with Gutenberg, this tool allows you to add varied fields and edit the booking form without installing any additional plugins. Just by dragging the form fields, you can add dropdowns, checkboxes, numbers, and other types of fields that you find necessary, such as:
- Short/long answer;
- Country;
- Phone;
- Name;
- Email;
- Price adjustment;
- Multiple choice.
| Features | Easy Booking for WooCommerce | MotoPress Booking Calendar |
|---|---|---|
| Booking form builder | No | Yes |
| WooCommerce form integration | Yes | No |
| Custom fields | No | Yes |
| Form currency settings | Only via WooCommerce | Yes |
| Visual form customization | Only via WooCommerce | Yes |
3. Payment Integrations
Easy Booking plugin uses built-in payment gateways provided by WooCommerce Payments to ensure the store visitors can instantly and securely pay for rented items. This allows you to accept payments digitally from all over the globe without having to develop any integrations manually or rely on costly third-party solutions. Such an approach provides flexibility in setting things up and growing your business using WooCommerce bookings.
Other plugins also pay a lot of attention to payment gateways, including Booking Calendar. Its developers have recently introduced a new feature that offers support for Stripe payments. It is quite easy to configure, yet it opens new automation and secure payment possibilities, allowing you to accept transactions in multiple currencies and using diverse payment methods when a booking is submitted. Note that a registered Stripe account is required for the integration to work properly.
| Features | Easy Booking for WooCommerce | MotoPress Booking Calendar |
|---|---|---|
| WooCommerce Payments support | Yes | No |
| Stripe integration | Yes | Yes |
| PayPal integration | Yes | No |
| Apple Pay | Yes | Yes |
| Google Pay | Yes | Yes |
| Credit card | Yes | Yes |
4. Email Notifications
Unlike many popular rental or booking plugins, the Easy Booking plugin for WooCommerce doesn’t include built-in, customizable email notification features. Instead, it relies on the standard WooCommerce email system. This means your customers receive only the default order confirmation and status updates. Sadly, this doesn’t provide booking-specific notifications like solutions by MotoPress and other popular WordPress developers. To add any extra information about rented items, you’ll need to edit the template manually or use third-party extensions together with EasyBooking.
Luckily, with Booking Calendar, no extra plugins are required to set up email notifications. The solution already includes a user-friendly system to define how your email reminders will look and what events trigger them. You can also send emails to multiple recipients if necessary. Moreover, you can use tags and the ready-made template to make your emails universal for nearly any case.
| Features | Easy Booking for WooCommerce | MotoPress Booking Calendar |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple event triggers | Yes | Yes |
| Customizable email template | Yes | Yes |
| Placeholder support | Yes | Yes |
| Test mode | No | Yes |
| Custom email recipients | Yes | Yes |
5. Frontend Integration
Now, let’s talk about integrating the plugins’ functionality on the frontend. Unlike many popular WordPress-only plugins, the Easy Booking plugin acts as a WooCommerce extension rather than just a separate plugin. As a result, you don’t need to perform any extra steps to make the rental item details and filters show up. Just add products, set rental rates, and you’re good to go!
As for the Booking Calendar plugin, it supports two ways of adding a calendar to the site – using the Gutenberg block and a configurable shortcode. Both allow detailed customization, for example:
- Active calendar;
- Date selection;
- Number of displayed months.
While the Gutenberg block is perfect for pages created with the default WordPress builder, the shortcode is more flexible and can be integrated anywhere. It will help you display the chosen calendar on any part of your website, from sidebars to pages and posts.
| Features | Easy Booking for WooCommerce | MotoPress Booking Calendar |
|---|---|---|
| Gutenerg block | No | Yes |
| Shortcode support | Yes | Yes |
| WooCommerce integration | Yes | No |
| Booking cart | Yes | Yes |
| Customizable booking forms | Only via WooCommerce | Yes |
What to Choose: Easy Booking Plugin vs MotoPress Booking Calendar
Both plugins we have mentioned above are obviously great for rentals of all kinds. But is the better choice out of the two? The answer depends on your goals, the nature of your rental website, and your budget if you decide to upgrade from their free versions. If you already have an established WooCommerce bookings store and want to provide certain equipment, vehicles, clothes, or any other goods for rental, choosing the Easy Booking plugin is preferred.
However, when it comes to transforming a WordPress-only website into one providing rental booking functionality, MotoPress Booking Calendar may be a better option. It provides more customization and control over inventory without having to install extra booking plugins like WP Booking System or Bookly. From email notifications and form builder to easy-to-use Gutenberg block and Stripe integration, the plugin can become your all-in-one solution for managing rentals and automating the booking process.
| Easy Booking for WooCommerce | MotoPress Booking Calendar |
|---|---|
| One and two-day booking modes | Nightly, daily, and hourly booking modes |
| Automatic price calculation | Dynamic pricing and rate management |
| Easy-to-use calendar view for tracking bookings | Visual booking calendar |
| Inventory management per date | Inventory & availability management |
| Developer hooks and filters | Bulk editing |
| Customizable button texts | Editable booking forms via a visual builder |
| Duration discounts & surcharges | Email notification system |
| WooCommerce Payments support | Stripe payment integration |
| Duration discounts & surcharges | Smart booking cart with multiple dates |
More MotoPress Solutions for Your Rental Website
Suppose you are looking for additional solutions that could help you integrate booking functionality in any WordPress website or build an online presence for your rentals. In that case, MotoPress has something more to offer aside from Booking Calendar. providing more features and more flexibility than the Easy Booking plugin, booking solutions and themes developed by our team can help you create a memorable and smooth booking experience for your site visitors.
Hotel Booking
One of the most popular MotoPress plugins, Hotel Booking is an all-in-one property management solution for hotels and vacation rentals. It allows you to present a rental property efficiently, while also managing various types of accommodations, prices, and availability. With a responsive search form, your potential guests will be able to easily rent a room or the whole apartment. Thanks to a real-time availability calendar and a built-in channel manager, you can also automate the reservation process and get direct bookings from other platforms that support iCal formats for synchronization.
Key features:
- Centralized room booking calendar for site owner;
- Efficient property presentation with galleries and rates;
- Advanced accommodation search form;
- Multiple bookable properties at once;
- Secure online payment gateways are supported.
| Name | Developer | Price | Installations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hotel Booking | MotoPress | Free or from $139/year | 13,4k+ |
Appointment Booking
In case you want to manage a rental business based in various locations without using the Easy Booking plugin, then Appointment Booking may be the right plugin for you. Built for service-based businesses (spa salons, gyms, medical clinics, etc), the plugin can be adapted for rentals, too. It provides a step-by-step booking wizard that helps your clients rent out any item added to the Services tab of the plugin. Additionally, as one of appointment plugins offers individual schedules for employees, email notifications, customer accounts, group bookings, and a lot of other game-changing features.
Key features:
- User-friendly booking process;
- Stripe & PayPal support;
- Automated email notifications;
- Synchronization with clients’ calendars;
- Built-in analytical tools.
| Name | Developer | Price | Installations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appointment Booking | MotoPress | Free or from $49/year | 1,8k+ |
Lorenty
When it comes to getting a design for your rental website, you can’t go wrong with Lorenty. Packed with 5 diverse niche layouts, this theme is built to drive rental bookings of any kind, including party equipment. Moreover, it is fully customizable with the Gutenberg editor and the Getwid plugin, allowing you to create new pages and completely transform existing ones. The theme also features the Appointment Booking plugin that offers smooth rental bookings and support for flexible pricing settings. As a result, you get a theme that not only looks impressive on any device but also gives you full control over your inventory and rental services.
Key features:
- Multiple homepage designs for rental services;
- Includes a variety of pre-designed pages (team, gallery, blog, FAQ);
- Easy-to-use booking widget;
- Perfect for multilocation rental companies;
- Efficient booking & client management on the dashboard.
| Name | Developer | Price | Installations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lorenty | MotoPress | From $49/year | 108+ |
Conclusion
As you see, not just the Easy Booking plugin and Booking Calendar, but also lots of other tools can help you establish a striking rental website. Whether you need smooth inventory management, dynamic pricing, or simply want to automate the routine processes and save some time, modern WordPress solutions can easily help you. Besides, you don’t even have to have a web development background to succeed. Such solutions also offer some extra benefits you may not want to miss:
- Mobile responsiveness: Solutions like Booking Calendar are designed to be responsive. This means you and your customers will get the same positive experience during the booking process on any device.
- Customizable design & branding: Aside from being responsive, modern rental WordPress plugins also come with wide customization potential. From editing booking forms to changing colors in the calendar, adapting a plugin’s look can be diverse and give impressive results, ensuring your brand’s identity.
- Calendar synchronization: If you want your customers to be reminded of their rentals or appointments, we recommend choosing WooCommerce booking calendar plugins with a built-in calendar synchronization feature. From Google Calendar to Yahoo and Outlook, many apps and platforms may be supported by WordPress rental plugins.
- User-friendly UI: Finally, most of the plugins for the leading CMS (including those mentioned in the article) can boast of having an efficient and attractive UI, providing a smooth user experience. This ensures your clients will not only access the necessary booking features but also enjoy their time spent on your website.
