WP Booking Calendar vs MotoPress Appointment Booking – Detailed Comparison

Are you looking for the best WordPress appointment booking calendar to complement your site? With many plugins and SaaS solutions compatible with WordPress, picking the right one may be complex. In today’s post, we compare two top-rated plugins for planning & scheduling appointments to help you choose the right one for your needs – WP Booking Calendar or MotoPress Appointment Booking.

From their distinctive features to similarities, below you’ll find a detailed comparison of these two plugins that can help your business strive.

WP Booking Calendar: Features & Pricing

Before moving to the actual comparison of these two online appointment calendar plugins, let’s learn more about them first.

WP Booking Calendar is a flexible and modern solution designed for easy appointment management. It is built to help your customers quickly choose a proper date and time slot to book an appointment in a few clicks.

Whether you want to display available dates for booking on your site or just need an integrated panel for scheduling in your WordPress dashboard, the WordPress appointment calendar can be the right choice for your site. It comes in two options – free and paid. The first one is available for free download from the WordPress plugin catalog. The premium option of the WordPress appointment booking calendar gives you more booking features and can help with enhancing the scheduling process for your customers from $39 for 6 months of support and updates. Check out the detailed pricing plans below.

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MotoPress Appointment Booking Pricing Options

The Appointment Booking WordPress plugin by MotoPress is a feature-rich solution that is built to be smoothly integrated into your WordPress website. Created for service-based sites, this plugin is a perfect pick for beauty salons, car repair workshops, and other companies. It provides an easy-to-use booking wizard that allows your customers to book a service or rent equipment in an instant. Additionally, with this solution, your site visitors can pay for any service or appointment right away using online payment gateways.

Similar to our previous mention, this plugin comes in two options. The free one called Appointment Booking Lite is available for download via the WordPress plugin catalog. It comes with the majority of features being available without any extra fees. The premium version can be purchased on the MotoPress website starting from $79 per year. It extends the default functionality range and allows you to connect payment gateways to your booking form alongside syncing reservations with your Google Calendar account.

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WP Booking Calendar vs Appointment Booking: Top 5 Features

Now that you know more about these WordPress appointment booking calendar plugins, it’s time to learn what their differences are.

To do so, we picked 5 core features that are a part of each plugin. With both of these scheduling solutions being key elements of many business websites, they may seem nearly identical. However, even their essential features have certain differences. Sometimes they may influence your choice of a plugin. Here are the features that are highly asked for by the owners of WordPress business websites:

• Visual booking calendar;
• Support of online payment methods;
• Automated email notifications;
• Employee schedules;
• Customizable booking rules & rates.

1. Booking Calendar

One of the key features every user looks for in a WordPress appointment plugin is its booking calendar. With WP Booking Calendar, your customers get a well-designed visual tool for planning their future appointments. As a website owner, you gain complete control over scheduled meetings with your clients. Being integrated into the WordPress dashboard this plugin provides an easy way to monitor all planned reservations and appointments accessible in a few clicks. Moreover, you can add a calendar and a booking form using a pre-designed Gutenberg block to enhance your site’s functionality.

The Appointment Booking plugin provides a similar feature in both free and premium versions. The booking calendar supplied with this solution allows you to see the schedules and planned appointments of all your employees. This feature also enables clients to see available time slots that can be booked using a simple yet appealing calendar design on your site’s front end. Such calendars can be added to each page if necessary. They can also be displayed during the booking process via the scheduling wizard that not every WordPress appointment booking calendar can offer.

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2. Online Payments

When it comes to paying for appointments online, many plugin developers compete trying to provide more options for their customers. Besides, this feature has already become a must-have for many business planning WordPress plugins. It is also present in the WP Booking Calendar as a part of business pricing plans. This feature allows you to configure online payments by adding online payment gateways for your customers. It can be activated via the plugin settings to enable these and other payment methods:

• Cash payments
• Authorize.net
• PayPal
• Stripe
• iPay88

Alongside providing a WordPress appointment booking calendar, the plugin from MotoPress also comes with online payment gateway integrations. When enabled and configured in the dashboard, your customers get access to instant online payments for scheduled appointments. The WordPress Appointment Booking plugin offers a slightly more diverse selection of supported online payment services and platforms. You can use any of the below-mentioned integrations to enhance your website with flexible payment methods & gateways.

3. Email Notifications

Moving on to the next vital feature of any online appointment calendar & plugin, we need to mention email notifications.

WP Booking Calendar offers this functionality for free, ensuring your clients are always notified of their upcoming appointments. The plugin provides detailed email reminder options with multiple templates pre-configured for varied occasions. You can freely edit the email template right in the settings window and specify the necessary recipient (if you’re sending an email to employees) or sender addresses. A notification can be sent using the following triggers:

• New booking received (notification for site admin or visitor);
• Pending;
• Approved;
• Rejected;
• Deleted.

As for MotoPress Appointment Booking, this plugin allows you to create diverse email notifications, just like our previous mention. However, the solution from MotoPress allows you to add any amount of email notifications, even in the Lite version. It also has a fully editable email template that supports tags, similar to the WordPress appointment booking calendar. However, if you are willing to pay extra, you can add SMS reminder functionality to your Appointment Booking installation by integrating Twilio. As for emails, the plugin supports multiple triggers, such as:

• Booking placed;
• Booking canceled;
• Payment completed;
• Before/After appointment.

4. Group Booking & Rate Management

Scheduling appointments is a multifaceted process that also includes group bookings. For now, not all plugins are ready to provide this functionality out of the box.

MotoPress Appointment Booking is an exception since it provides group booking functionality for its users. Whether you’re planning a meeting or want to allow a single customer to book for multiple people, this WordPress appointment calendar can help. With it, you can set the maximum capacity for each service you provide and even multiply the price based on the group size.

Unfortunately, the WP Booking Calendar doesn’t provide group booking features out of the box. However, it allows for multiple booking per time slot, which means it lets people book the same time multiple times, but they can’t choose how many people will be there. Moreover, it delivers flexible pricing management when it comes to appointments. While your clients may not schedule in groups, they surely will be satisfied with seasonal pricing options and duration-based costs of your services. Some of these options are also available with the WordPress Appointment Booking plugin. Still, the WordPress appointment booking calendar solution provides detailed options for booking rates.

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5. Booking Rules

Alongside flexible rate management tools that you can add to your favorite WordPress theme, WP Booking Calendar is also known for its highly customizable booking rules. The variety of options supplied with this WordPress appointment plugin is quite impressive. From advanced season availability to different time slots for different days, there is a lot to choose from if you need a tailored schedule for your bookings. Moreover, you can add a buffer period before and after each booking to prepare a certain service for your customer using the WordPress appointment booking calendar.

Appointment Booking also comes with a nifty set of options for booking rules. It provides the essentials that are required for any service-based business to successfully schedule appointments regularly. For example, a service provider & site administrator can set minimum & maximum time frames for reservation. This will help you avoid last-minute bookings and will keep your appointment schedule stable. Additionally, you can add buffer periods to each service (just like with WP Booking Calendar) to ensure you have enough time to prepare for each appointment you have.

WP Booking Calendar vs Appointment Booking: What to Choose?

As you see, both of these plugins can be a fitting choice for small and medium businesses. But what’s the best choice for you? Firstly, it depends on your needs and budget. For example, the WP Booking Calendar provides more flexible booking rules and other interesting options such as changeover days and duration-based costs. Note that some of these options are only available as a part of costly pricing plans. Luckily, if you don’t want to pay for premium features right away, you can start with a free version of the WordPress appointment booking calendar.

MotoPress Appointment Booking, on the other hand, provides a straightforward approach to pricing. Moreover, it is more affordable if you compare it to the WP Booking Calendar rates. While it provides essential booking rule options, it gives you access to booking capabilities for unlimited locations. It also supports multiple employee profiles without requiring the purchase of a separate license. However, if you want to extend the default functionality even further, the MotoPress team provides a variety of add-ons to meet your needs.

Wrapping Up

It goes without saying that modern booking solutions vary in functionality, design, and pricing options. No wonder it may be often confusing to pick the right WordPress appointment booking calendar plugin for your site. However, we hope that with our guide to WP Booking Calendar and MotoPress Appointment Booking, we’ve helped you choose what’s best for your business. Thanks to their constant development and updates enhancing your site with easy-to-use booking tools won’t require any special knowledge or hiring a web development expert.

Pros of WP Booking Calendar vs MotoPress Appointment Booking:

• Advanced hourly bookings;
• Powerful tools for price customization;
• Early booking discounts;
• Easy availability search.

Pros of MotoPress Appointment Booking vs WP Booking Calendar:

• Independent schedules for employees;
• Group and event bookings;
• Built-in analytical tools;
• Many custom designs;
• Multilingual plugin UI.