​​7+ best WooCommerce Bookings alternatives: which is the right plugin for you?

If you’re looking to set up a system for online bookings on your WooCommerce site, you might be inclined to go for WooCommerce Bookings.

It’s an official WooCommerce extension with over 10,000 active installations, making it one of the most popular booking plugins across the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem. However, there are many WooCommerce Bookings alternatives that might be better suited for your business.

In this article, we’re going to look at 7 plugins for online bookings and explain why you might want to consider them instead of WooCommerce Bookings.

How to choose an alternative to WooCommerce Bookings

How do you decide which WooComerce Bookings alternative is the right choice for your business? Check out this list of criteria that you can keep in mind when reading about the 7 plugins in this article.

• Price: How much do you want to pay for a plugin? At $249 a year, WooCommerce Bookings is on the higher end of booking plugins. You might want a plugin that is more affordable or one that offers a wider range of features at the pricepoint.
  
• Features: You’ll want to make sure to choose a plugin that has the right features to support your specific business needs. Do you own a hotel with various types of rooms and packages? If so, you’ll want to set up and customise multiple booking calendars. Do you want to offer discounts to customers if they select certain options? If so, you’ll want a booking plugin that allows conditional pricing.
  
• Booking Management: You’ll want a plugin that lets you manage your bookings easily. For example, if you’re hosting an event, you’ll want to automatically know the exact number of people who have booked their place, and how many of them have paid.
  
• Theme compatibility: WooCommerce Bookings is not compatible with every WordPress theme, which could be a reason to look for an alternative. Choosing a plugin that integrates with any theme gives you more flexibility to update your site’s design down the line.

The top 7+ WooCommerce Booking alternatives

Before we start going over our list of the top 7 WooCommerce Booking alternatives, it’s worth mentioning that another reason you may be considering an alternative booking system is that you don’t have a WooCommerce site, and want a plugin that’s just compatible with WordPress.

A few of the plugins on our list will run on WordPress alone, but we do recommend that you install WooCommerce. It’s free to set up and gives you much more flexibility as a business owner in the long run.

1. Bookings for WooCommerce

Bookings for WooCommerce offers a professional solution for creating bookings on your WooCommerce site.

It’s the best booking plugin designed for WooCommerce and is ideal for setting up all kinds of product rentals, including property rental bookings, holiday lettings, venue rentals, vehicle rentals, and equipment rentals. The plugin is easy to set up and configure.

You can create a seamless shopping experience on your WooCommerce site with Bookings for WooCommerce. The plugin lets customers select their “Check-in” and “Check-out” dates directly from the single product page. This way, when users are done selecting their booking details, the product can be added to their shopping cart just like any other WooCommerce product. Once customers check out from your WooCommerce site, they will receive an email notification containing their booking details.

Check out this tutorial on how to accept hotel and accommodation bookings with WooCommerce if you want to see a practical example of how easy it is to set up Bookings for WooCommerce and benefit from its features.

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin gives you lots of flexibility to set up bookable products on your WooCommerce site. You can set the booking unit as days, nights, or weeks, set maximum and minimum booking lengths, block out specific booking dates, and add buffer periods between bookings. This gives you full control over setting up WooCommerce online booking products based on your unique requirements.

In addition to this, the plugin also comes with built-in functionality that lets you set up conditional pricing for booking products on your WooCommerce site. This way, you can offer discounts based on specific criteria set by you. For instance, you can offer a 5% discount when customers rent a car for over 5 days.

You can also set up premium and discount pricing for specific periods in the year for your online booking products. This way, you can charge extra for busy periods of the year and offer a discount during quieter periods without having to change these manually every time.

Bookings for WooCommerce also makes it easy to manage inventory for bookable products and equipment rentals on your WooCommerce site. This is especially useful to keep track of your inventory when you want to rent out multiple versions of the same product. For instance, you can know how many items are available to rent when renting multiple rooms in the same hotel, or renting 10 identical bikes.

If you want to add even more flexibility to Bookings for WooCommerce, there are a couple of plugins that integrate seamlessly with it: WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate and WooCommerce Deposits and Parts Payments. This way, you can create bookable products while ensuring an optimal and frictionless shopping experience on your online store.

Pricing – You can opt for the Basic plan for $59 that’s only available to use on one site or the Pro plan for $99 if you want to use it on unlimited sites. You can also get a lifetime license by making a one-time purchase.

This is a far better option than paying for WooCommerce Bookings for just one year, as you can get the Pro lifetime license for Bookings for WooCommerce at the same price. It’s clear Bookings for WooCommerce offers more value when you compare the two plugins.

2. WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments

WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments is a robust online booking system plugin that makes it very simple to create online bookings on your WooCommerce site.

It’s a versatile plugin that makes it easy to set up online bookings as well as WooCommerce appointment scheduling on your online store. Depending on your bookable products and services, customers can choose between a start and end day, or a start and end time as they wish. You can also offer recurring bookings or let customers book multiple series of dates in a single order. For instance, a customer might want to rent out a hotel hall for two days but on separate weeks.

The WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments plugin also lets you set up dynamic price calculations on your WooCommerce site. This way, your booking product’s price is automatically calculated by factoring in the number of days selected, the number of people, the total services selected, and the applicable discounts used by the customers. In addition to this, you can also add custom fields such as text boxes, checkboxes, or dropdown menus to create a sort of booking form.

There’s a lot of flexibility here but keep in mind that to get the most out of this plugin, you’ll need to integrate with some additional WooCommerce extensions. While the plugin offers basic online booking functionality, it’s still not comparable to what the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin offers. It’s also important to note that it’s more expensive compared to Bookings for WooCommerce.

Pricing – The single-site license for WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments costs $99.

3. YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce

The YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce plugin is a user-friendly plugin that offers a complete solution for creating online booking products on your WooCommerce site.

The plugin gives you full control over how online bookings are displayed on your WooCommerce site. This means you can customise the booking time slots, and offer hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly bookings for any bookable services (such as a spa treatment). It’s perfect for offering multiple types of online booking products on the same WooCommerce site. For instance, if you own a gym you could offer hourly booking options for personal training, and also offer daily or weekly booking options for fitness classes.

The YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce plugin also gives you multiple options for setting up conditional pricing for your online booking products including creating “person types” to trigger discounts. For example, you can offer senior citizens over 65 a discount when they book a pool day through your WooCommerce site.

Additionally, you also have the option to create free or paid resources that customers can select as add-ons when setting booking options. This way, you can charge extra or offer complimentary services to users who make bookings with your business. For instance, you can offer free breakfast as an add-on when customers book hotel rooms or set an extra charge for customers who select the room service add-on.

While the plugin is great for setting up bookings on your WordPress site, it’s quite expensive, costing around the same as WooCommerce Bookings.

Pricing – You can get the YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce for $249.99 per year.

4. Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce

Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce is a simple yet powerful plugin that comes with many of the essential booking features.

The plugin offers an intuitive way of creating online booking products on your WooCommerce site. Customers can easily select their desired booking dates based on their booking availability or the available booking dates of the product. Once customers complete the payment process (using whichever payment gateway you’re using such as PayPal) and check out from your WooCommerce site, they will automatically receive booking reminders.

The plugin also integrates with Zoom so you can generate online meeting links doubling as an appointment booking plugin. The flexible plugin allows you to create bookable products with simple, variable, grouped, bundle, composite, and subscription products. While it’s great in terms of functionality, it’s one of the more expensive plugins on the list.

Pricing – The single site license or the Starter package plan will cost you $199 per year.

5. RnB WooCommerce Booking and Rental Plugin

RnB WooCommerce Booking and Rental Plugin is a popular online bookings plugin that is best suited for adding rental products such as bikes, dresses, cars, and equipment to your ecommerce store.

The plugin offers extensive pricing options that make it easy to set up pricing that’s relevant to your booking product or service. For instance, when renting out a car, you can set the pricing by kilometer.

RnB WooCommerce Booking and Rental Plugin also comes pre-built with multiple layouts that help you quickly set up online bookings on your WooCommerce site. This includes responsive templates such as the “Basic Layout”, “Uber-Like Layout”, “Hourly Booking Feature”, “Inventory Variations”, and “Appointment Booking Feature”.

The best part about the plugin is its price, but it might be better to spend a bit more for a better plugin.

Pricing – You can get started with RnB WooCommerce Booking and Rental Plugin for $29.

6. PinPoint

PinPoint is an online bookings plugin that runs on WordPress but also seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce sites.

If you have a WooCommerce site, you can set up online bookings with your existing payment gateways (such as PayPal or Stripe) which makes it easier for you to quickly start renting out bookable products.

Customers on the front end will be able to make bookings from your site thanks to the plugin’s responsive layout that stays the same across all devices.

Additionally, you can also use booking calendar extensions to add extras, booking forms, discounts, taxes and fees, and coupon fields. While it’s a great plugin overall, it’s still more expensive than Bookings for WooCommerce if you want to purchase the license for more than one site.

Pricing – You can get started with PinPoint for $70 per year for one WordPress site while the five-site license will cost you $140, which is significantly higher than Bookings for WooCommerce.

7. Booking Calendar

Booking Calendar is an intuitive plugin that’s a very simple alternative to the WooCommerce Bookings plugin.

Although it’s quite old, it’s constantly been updated over the years and has booking calendar blocks for the Gutenberg editor. This makes it easy to showcase a booking calendar anywhere on your product pages.

Booking Calendar doesn’t require WooCommerce integration, although as we’ve discussed above, that’s not necessarily the right reason to choose a plugin. Its main advantage is the ease of use and how it lets you add a simple shortcode to display a responsive booking calendar on your WordPress page or post. It also offers Google Calendar sync.

This plugin is not at the top of our list because it has a few shortcomings. For starters, it’s visually outdated and doesn’t make for the best customer experience. You also have to approve or decline reservations made by customers manually yourself, which can be quite hectic, especially if you’re also responsible for other important business operations.

In addition to this, even the pro version features you get, although perfectly functional, are quite basic as compared to what you get with other plugins on this list like the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin.

Pricing – You can get the free version of Booking Calendar from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

8. Sales Igniter WooCommerce Bookings & Tours

Most WooCommerce bookings plugins merely add a calendar to your product page, and then a backend page where you can see a table of your bookings. But what about all the other needs of your rental business store? You need a way to edit your orders and rental dates, a way to see day by day visually for a month what your inventory is, a way to track what has been checked out and checked in. Sales Igniter WooCommerce Bookings & Tours is your ultimate solution with many exclusive features not found anywhere else. 

What’s the best alternative to WooCommerce Bookings?

Out of all the WooCommerce Bookings alternatives in this roundup, we recommend using the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin.

It’s the best plugin available for most types of rental booking businesses that want an easy way to let customers make online bookings. With Bookings for WooCommerce, you can set up bookings for multiple properties or bookable products on your online store. It also lets you set up custom pricing, discounts, and date ranges for all bookable products you create.

This also means you have the flexibility to effectively set up bookings on your WooCommerce store while ensuring you can easily manage all bookings for your business from the default WordPress backend.

If you need a single-site license, you can get started with the Basic plan for only $59 per year. But if you need to use it on multiple sites, you don’t have to pay much more. You can get the Pro license for $99 per year, which is usable on unlimited sites. You can even get the lifetime licence at $149 for the basic plan and $249 for the pro plan, which saves you more money in the long run. Pick your plan and get started today with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Ready to start easily setting up bookings on your WooCommerce site? Get Bookings for WooCommerce today!