Best WordPress Calendar Plugins for 2022

The best WordPress calendar plugins for 2022 make it simple to add a calendar to your website for visitors to view events, availability, class schedules, and a lot more. WordPress calendar plugins also make it easy for visitors to schedule appointments, buy tickets, RSVP, register, or request one-on-one meetings.

In this guide, we’ll cover the best WordPress calendar plugins to help you decide which plugin will best suit your needs, depending on if you need a basic calendar or more complex features. 

With so many great WordPress calendar plugins out there, you have many different and powerful options. This guide will walk you through the best WordPress calendar plugins for 2022 so you can decide for yourself which ones best suit your needs.

Before making your choice though, you need to understand what is a calendar plugin and how it can benefit your website.

What is a WordPress Calendar Plugin?

A WordPress calendar plugin allows you to add a customizable calendar to your website that you can display on pages or posts. They give you the ability to display events, availability, class schedules, and much more, within a calendar view that allows your visitors to quickly see them.

In addition to adding a calendar to your website, the best WordPress calendar plugins add additional e-commerce, booking, and registration functionality, including the ability to:

• Book appointments
• Buy tickets
• RSVP
• Register for an event
• Schedule meetings

If these functionalities are needed on your site, WordPress calendar plugins are what you need.

Why Use a WordPress Calendar Plugin?

Scheduling is a big part of the way a lot of websites and businesses operate: From gyms, to schools, to salons, to nonprofits, events and appointments drive entire industries and communities.

And WordPress websites use calendars for a whole host of reasons:

• Nonprofits use calendars to promote fundraisers and schedule board meetings
• Brick-and-mortar businesses such as barbers, beauty salons, and car repair shops, use calendars for scheduling appointments and to ensure they aren’t double-booked
• Gyms offer exercise classes and personal training sessions
• Churches, clubs, and neighborhoods organize events and activities
• Schools and universities keep parents and students up-to-date with events, activities and deadlines
• Consultants book calls with clients and potential leads
• Teachers and mentors book meetings and sessions with students
• Businesses, organizations, and associations host online and virtual events (especially in today’s changing world)

And those are only a few uses of WordPress calendars.

If you need to use a calendar on your WordPress site, where should you start looking?

What to Look For in a WordPress Calendar Plugin

Before you start looking for the best WordPress calendar plugins for 2022, consider closely the reasons you need a calendar on your website.

Do you need a calendar that:

• Displays a view of events and activities?
• Displays availability for appointments?

The difference between events and appointments in WordPress calendar plugins is a major variant. While one particular plugin may be great for events, it might not (and most likely won’t) work for appointments. 

And that’s fine because they are very different requirements that are unique to your website.

In addition, consider if you need e-commerce and purchasing abilities from your calendar for options such as:

• Booking
• Ticketing
• RSVPs
• Registration

Purchasing and registration open a whole other level of complexity. You’ll definitely need to consider if you need this functionality beforehand. You also want to find a plugin that aligns with your brand voice and image. These things will help you narrow down your search for the right plugin.

The Best WordPress Calendar Plugins for 2022

To get you started, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the best WordPress calendar plugins for 2022. Read on, and you’ll learn about each plugin’s features, pros, cons, pricing, and our final verdict. 

The Events Calendar 

The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar was one of the first event calendar plugins created for WordPress. It boasts well over 800,000 active installs and has more than 1,400 5-star reviews. 

Pros of The Events Calendar

The biggest pro of The Events Calendar is that it does exactly what it says it will do. You simply install it, activate it, and it starts doing its job. There are no complicated setup or compatibility issues.

And it’s very easy to use.

Apart from its ease-of-use and modern user interface, the plugin brings a wealth of functionality and features to the free version, along with free add-ons like Event Tickets to allow you to sell tickets to any of your events on your calendar. 

Cons of The Events Calendar

There aren’t many (if any) cons to the actual The Events Calendar software. For users who prefer to stick to free plugins, certain advanced features such as recurring events, and photo view are only available in the Premium version.

Aside from that, the plugin is the perfect WordPress calendar plugin solution.

The Events Calendar Pricing

The Events Calendar operates as a freemium model with add-ons. In 2022, the Pro version has the following pricing tiers based on the number of websites you want to use it on:

• 1 Site ($99)
• 3 Sites ($149)
• 10 Sites ($299)
• Multisite ($349) 
• Unlimited Sites ($750)

These are all yearly costs, renewable every 12 months. Add-ons include:

• Event Tickets — Sell tickets and allow RSVPs to your events for free. No fees charged.
• Filter Bar – Let users filter events by category, tag, venue, organizer, day of the week, time of day, and price.
• Virtual Events – Highlight virtual and hybrid events on your calendar and integrate with your favorite online meeting tools.
• Event Aggregator — Import events from platforms like ical, Eventbrite, Meetup, Google calendar, and more. 
• Community Events — Allow the community to submit events on your WordPress website. 
• Community Tickets – Let users create and sell tickets for events they submit to your calendar.
• Promoter — Allows you to email your community with new events.
• Eventbrite Tickets – Create Eventbrite tickets and events right from your WordPress dashboard.

Our Opinion on The Events Calendar 

The Events Calendar is without a doubt one of the most sophisticated WordPress calendar plugins available. For most people, the free version is enough. It works great out of the box with minimal customization. Coupled together with their free Event Tickets plugin, you can have a calendar on your website with commission-free ticket sales in just a few clicks. 

Bookly

WordPress Online Booking and Scheduling Plugin – Bookly

Bookly is a WordPress calendar cross booking plugin that doubles as a full appointments system. It has more than 40,000 active installs and over 100 5-star ratings. 

While the free version of Bookly is full of features, it’s missing some critical plugin components. A few of these include things like basic payment functionality and unlimited services. 

Bookly Pros

Bookly is the most comprehensive booking plugin available for WordPress, with a huge feature set that is only enhanced by the wide range of available add-ons. 

Coupled with a clean and modern interface on the front-end, Bookly gives your WordPress website a professional-looking calendar that allows customers to book appointments and services directly on your site. 

The plugin is perfect for barbers, hair salons, beauty salons, cleaning companies, and any other business that needs to take online bookings. 

Bookly Cons

The elephant in the room with Bookly is the support and reliability of the software. Personally, we’ve encountered no issues with using Bookly. But plenty of users have. 

In fact, out of over 170 reviews, more than 50 are 3-stars or below.

And more than 30 are 1-star reviews. 

While you sometimes need to take reviews with a grain of salt, with that many negative reviews, there could be something underneath the surface. 

Apart from that, like many plugins, Bookly operates under the add-on model, We’ll explore some of the negatives surrounding the pricing below. 

Bookly Pricing 

Bookly is sold exclusively through CodeCanyon (part of the Envato network) which is rather unusual for a freemium plugin. CodeCanyon is known for its high fees for plugin authors and theme authors alike.

The main negative surrounding the pricing of Bookly is that you can only buy a single site license at a time. There’s no way to buy a license for multiple sites. And the rule is the same for all their add-ons. 

Bookly Pro comes in at $89 for a single-site license. The add-ons vary in price, starting from $29 and climbing to $49 on a per-site basis. 

Bookly has gone a bit add-on crazy. In our opinion, there are simply too many of them. And it seems like some should be a part of purchasing a Bookly Pro single-site license. 

This is reflected in the low sales volumes (some add-ons have only sold as few as 10 units at the time of writing). And this makes us question why all of these add-ons are continuously developed if they aren’t bringing in much revenue. 

Our Opinion on Bookly

Bookly is a comprehensive calendar and booking plugin for WordPress. But it has some unique issues with poor customer reviews. And the pricing structure isn’t the best if you’re running multiple WordPress websites. 

However, if you’re looking for a free WordPress calendar plugin that you can accept bookings on, and you operate a single website, it could be a good solution.

Simple Calendar 

Simple Calendar – Google Calendar Plugin

Simple Calendar is, well… a simple WordPress calendar plugin. It integrates your Google Calendar with your WordPress website and does exactly what it says. 

Simple Calendar has more than 70,000 active installs, and over 200 5-star reviews (although there are more than 70 1-star reviews). 

Most of the reviews are related to support, back when the plugin wasn’t compatible with PHP 7. The most recent reviews are more favorable.

Simple Calendar Pros

The main pro of Simple Calendar is that it really is simple; you don’t have a complex interface to figure out. And you won’t need to create your events in a different way than you’re already doing in Google Calendar.

In fact, all you do is create your events in Google Calendar, like you always do, and the plugin imports them for display on your WordPress website. 

Along with the easy integration with Google Calendar, you also get full responsiveness out-of-the-box. This means that Simple Calendar works great across both desktop and mobile. 

Simple Calendar Cons 

Apart from the negative reviews, there aren’t any particular cons with Simple Calendar. It does exactly what it should do; nothing more and nothing less. 

Simple Calendar Pricing

Simple Calendar, like most WordPress plugins, operates on the freemium model. The core plugin is free and the paid version consists of two paid add-ons, or the add-ons bundle. 

The paid add-ons are:

• Full Calendar: This adds daily and weekly views to the calendar rather than only having a monthly view like the free version
• Google Calendar Pro: Displays private and public Google Calendars. Highlight events with colors. Display attendee names, avatars, and RSVP status

The add-ons are available separately for $29 each, for a single site license. 

They are also available in the following site quantities:

• 5 Sites ($49)
• 25 Sites ($99)
• 50 Sites ($179)
• 100 Sites ($299)

If you buy the add-on bundle, it’s available as three plans:

• Personal ($49): Single site license along with support and updates for a year
• Business ($79): 5 site license along with support and updates for a year
• Agency ($149): 25 site license along with support and updates for a year

If you need the plugin on even more websites, bulk pricing is available for the add-on bundle:

• Ultimate 50 ($279): 50 site license along with support and updates for a year
• Ultimate 100 ($479): 100 site license along with support and updates for a year

While there’s a lot of different pricing options, it’s reasonably straightforward to decide what license you need to buy for your specific application.

License renewals receive a 30% discount, which is quite substantial and makes an already reasonably priced plugin even less expensive.

Our Opinion on Simple Calendar

Apart from negative user reviews, which seem to be a thing of the past, Simple Calendar does everything you’d need from a Google Calendar plugin. And with the Pro add-ons that are reasonably priced and add more functionality (such as daily and weekly calendar views, RSVP status, highlighted colors, and more), you really can’t go wrong with this plugin. 

If you don’t need the fancy features offered by other WordPress calendar plugins, then we’d definitely recommend taking a look at the Simple Calendar plugin.

Modern Events Calendar

https://wordpress.org/plugins/modern-events-calendar-lite/

The Modern Events Calendar is a versatile plugin with both a free and pro version. It is responsive and mobile-friendly. The plugin is designed to easily display an events calendar on your website. And it is a comprehensive events management plugin. With over 100,000 active installations and a 4.5 star rating on WordPress.org, you’ll find that this plugin will find the layout you need to match your event and brand.

Trending design methods were obviously used to create this plugin. It has a great design and can fit into many different websites. There is an advanced booking system available on the Pro version of the plugin.

You are able to create different recurring or single events on the frontend of your site. The plugin has many modern skins and designs. The plugin allows you to insert images for calendar locations and organizers to further customize for your site viewers.

Features:

• Schema ready
• Event status is shown in the submission form
• The shortcode is compatible with Elementor, Divi Builder, Visual Composer and King
• Composer
• Search bar shortcode
• Pre-built skins
• Event location system
• Events widgets and sidebar
• Google Calendar integration

Pros:

• Great features on the free version
• Shortcode for page builders
• Easy to use
• You can display multiple locations for events
• Social media share icons

Cons:

• Limited support available
• Although the plugin has a great free option, there is a wide range of features available through add-ons

In 2022, the Pro version has the following pricing tiers based on the number of websites you want to use it on:

• 1 License ($75)
• 5 Licenses ($255)
• 10 Licenses ($455)

Addons for Modern Events Calendar

• WooCommerce Integration ($35) for PRO
• Multisite Event Sync ($35) for FREE or PRO
• User Dashboard ($35) for FREE or PRO
• Event API ($45) for FREE or PRO
• Elementor Single Builder ($35) for FREE or PRO
• Elementor Shortcode Builder ($35) for FREE or PRO
• Elementor Form Builder ($35) for PRO
• Elementor Shortcode Designer ($35) for FREE or PRO
• Ticket and Invoice ($124) for PRO
• Advanced Map ($45) for PRO
• Advanced Reports ($15) for PRO
• Fluent-view Layouts for FREE or PRO
• Zapier Integration ($35) for PRO
• Virtual Events ($35) for FREE or PRO
• Waiting List ($35) for PRO
• Divi Single Builder ($35) for FREE or PRO
• Zoom Integration (35) for FREE or PRO
• Advanced Organizer ($15) for FREE or PRO
• Advanced Speaker ($15) for FREE or PRO
• Advanced Location ($15) for FREE or PRO
• Advanced Importer ($35) for FREE or PRO
• Advanced Taxonomies Bundle ($35) includes 3 addons
• BuddyBoss Integration ($35) for FREE or PRO
• RSVP Events ($65) for FREE or PRO
• Elementor Addons Bundle ($99) includes 4 addons
• Woo Plus Elementor Bundle ($115) includes 5 addons

All-In-One Event Calendar

Timely All-in-One Events Calendar

The All-In-One Event Calendar offers one of the most advanced website calendar systems available on WordPress. The events calendar plugin is easy to manage. It has a clean and professional visual design. The included features help you to create an advanced calendar for your website.

All-in-One Event Calendar plugin is fully customizable and easy to use. It provides attractive visuals while being 100% responsive and accessible for the community with disabilities.

If you download the add-on with this plugin, you can have access to front end submission forms and extended views. Ticketing, venues, and Twitter integration is also added with the plugin. This events calendar allows you to import events from other sites. You are able to offer your users the option to subscribe to your calendar.

Features:

• Day view, week view, month view of events
• Recurring events
• Filtering by event category or tag
• Color coded events
• Embedded Google Maps
• 3 Theme options

Pros:

• The plugin is translated into many languages
• Easy to use
• Professional Look
• Great features

Cons:

• For more features, you have to download the add-on
• The new free version limits the number of events you can list.
• More support needed

For 2022 pricing, you’ll need to register for a 10-day trial of the calendar plugin.

Wrapping Up

There are many different WordPress calendar plugins in today’s marketplace. The one you choose will depend on your use case.

And being equipped with the information you’ve just consumed will help you land on the exact right one for your application.