Appointly vs Appointment Hour Booking – Booking Calendar

For service businesses that can’t sell flat-rate. Where every appointment needs a custom quote before it becomes a booking. Appointly is a quote-based booking system for WordPress that puts you back in the loop. Instead of automatic scheduling and fixed prices, customers submit booking inquiries, you review each one, send a personalized quote (with or without pricing), and the customer accepts or declines. Every booking is deliberate, every price is yours to set, every customer gets a personal touch. Perfect for lawyers, consultants, tradespeople, event planners, hair & beauty salons, tattoo artists, photographers, yoga and fitness studios, tutors, and any service business that quotes before it confirms. Why Appointly? Most booking plugins force automatic scheduling with fixed prices. Appointly is different: Customer picks a date or time slot and submits an inquiry You review the request in the admin dashboard You send a personalized quote with a price and personal note Customer accepts or declines via a link in the email Booking confirmed, everyone gets notified This quote workflow gives you the flexibility to adjust pricing per request, check availability manually, and add a personal touch before confirming any booking. Exactly what service businesses with variable pricing need. Features: Booking Calendar: Beautiful, responsive appointment calendar with real-time availability. Day-mode (whole-day) and timeslot mode (customer picks a time slot of configurable length within a daily window) Unlimited Services: Create as many services as you need, with title, description, image, and base price Personal Offer Workflow: Review every inquiry and send customised offers with automatic email delivery and one-click Accept / Decline links SMTP Email Delivery: Reliable email delivery with presets for Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, IONOS, Strato, World4You, Host Europe, ALL-INKL, Hetzner, and more Default Email Templates: Five polished HTML email templates (inquiry, admin notification, offer, confirmation, cancellation) with light and dark modes, fully translatable Dark Mode: Calendar automatically adapts to the visitor’s colour scheme Accessibility: WCAG AA compliant with keyboard navigation Gutenberg Block & Shortcodes: Add the calendar via block editor or shortcode Setup Wizard: Guided onboarding in four steps GDPR Ready: Consent checkbox on the booking form, personal data exporter and eraser integration, encrypted SMTP credentials Multilingual: Full i18n support. German translation included (de_DE, de_DE_formal, de_AT, de_CH, de_CH_informal) Appointly Pro: Appointly Pro is a separate companion plugin that extends Appointly with professional booking features. It is sold on https://appointly.tscholene.com for €2.99 per month and is NOT distributed through the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. The free plugin remains fully functional without Pro. Pro is an opt-in upgrade, not a lock on existing features. Currently shipped in Appointly Pro: Custom Branding: Primary colour, accent colour, and logo applied across the frontend booking form and all customer emails. Custom Email Template Editor: Live preview editor for all 10 customer-facing and admin notification templates with placeholder picker. Custom Service Fields: Build your own booking form per service with text, textarea, number, select, and checkbox fields. Validation rules, drag-and-drop reordering, conditional rendering. Service Addons & Upsells: Offer extras with configurable pricing, quantity, and per-service availability. Per-line pricing in offer and confirmation emails. Recurring Bookings: Automatic re-booking for weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly sessions. Ideal for yoga teachers, therapists, coaches, and anyone running regular appointments. Direct Booking (Auto-Confirm): Per-service auto-confirm for fixed-price services. Customers book instantly without admin approval. Configurable lead-time and cancellation window. Blocked Dates: Block individual dates globally or per service, plus date-range blocks (“block December 20 to January 3”). Customer Self-Cancel: Secure email-link cancellation for direct-booking services. No admin contact needed. Planned for upcoming Pro releases (no timeline commitment): Booking Reminders: Automatic reminder emails sent before each appointment, plus an optional daily admin digest. Multi-day Bookings: Date-range bookings for multi-day events, workshops, retreats, and courses. Group Bookings: Multiple seats per time slot for classes and small-group events. Customer Self-Service Reschedule: Token-authenticated reschedule on top of the existing self-cancel flow. Cancellation Policies: Rule-based cutoff times and fees per service. Per-weekday Slot Schedules: Different availability windows per weekday (e.g. Mon/Wed/Fri morning + afternoon, Tue/Thu only afternoons) on top of the basic timeslot mode shipped in Appointly 2.1.0. iCal Feed: Subscribe to bookings in Google Calendar / Apple Calendar / Outlook. Deposit Collection via Stripe (using your own Stripe keys, no middleman). Learn more at https://appointly.tscholene.com Shortcodes & Block: Gutenberg Block: Search “Booking Calendar” in the block editor [appointly_calendar]: Display the booking calendar [appointly_calendar service="2"]: Calendar for a specific service [appointly_form service="2"]: Standalone booking form External services Appointly loads Google Fonts on the WordPress admin pages so the admin UI can render with the Appointly brand typography (Instrument Serif for hero headings, Plus Jakarta Sans for body text, DM Mono for data labels). This is the only external service that the free plugin connects to. Service: Google Fonts (https://fonts.google.com) Purpose: Loading three web font families so the admin SPA renders with the Appointly brand typography Data sent: Your browser’s IP address and User-Agent are sent to fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com when an admin user opens any Appointly admin page. No booking, customer, or plugin-specific data is transmitted. When: Only when an authenticated WordPress administrator opens an Appointly admin page. Fonts are never loaded on customer-facing booking pages, iCal feed requests, or REST API calls. Terms of use: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users Privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy If you prefer to block Google Fonts entirely (for example in a privacy-hardened admin environment), the admin UI degrades gracefully to a system font stack (system-ui / BlinkMacSystemFont / Segoe UI / ui-serif / Menlo) and remains fully functional. No other external services are contacted by the free plugin. Appointly does not call any payment providers (Stripe, PayPal), analytics services, license servers, or telemetry endpoints. Appointly Pro, the separate companion plugin sold on https://appointly.tscholene.com, will, when installed, connect to appointly.tscholene.com for license validation (once per day) and plugin update checks. That connection is a feature of the Pro plugin and does not affect this free plugin. Appointly Pro ships with its own readme, privacy disclosures, and external-services documentation. The free plugin on this page does not make any requests to appointly.tscholene.com at runtime. Build Instructions The admin dashboard and the Gutenberg block are pre-built with @wordpress/scripts (webpack) and ship as the compiled admin/build/ and blocks/build/ artefacts. To inspect or rebuild from source, clone the repository at https://github.com/jolenelederer/appointly (uncompiled admin/src/ + blocks/src/ are not shipped in the WP.org distribution since 2.1.0. They are dev-only). Source rebuild: cd admin && npm install && npm run build cd blocks && npm install && npm run build The public frontend calendar (public/js/appointly-calendar.js) and stylesheet (public/css/appointly-calendar.css) are not compiled: they are vanilla JavaScript and CSS, human-readable as-is.

Appointment Hour Booking is a WordPress plugin for creating booking forms for appointments with a start time and a defined duration over a schedule. The start time is visually selected by the end user from a set of start times calculated based in the “open” hours and service duration. The duration/schedule is defined in the “service” selected by the customer. Each calendar can have multiple services with different duration and prices. This plugin is useful for different cases like booking of medical services where services with different duration and prices may be available, for personal training sessions, for booking rooms for events, for reserving language classes or other type of classes and other type of services/resources booking where start times are selected and the availability is automatically managed using the defined service duration to avoid double-booking (the booked time is blocked once the booking is completed). Main Features: Easy visual configuration of calendar data and schedules Working dates, invalid/holiday dates and special dates can be defined Supports restriction of default, maximum and minimimum dates Open hours can be defined for each date Each calendar can have multiple services defined Each service can have its own price and duration Start-times are calculated automatically based in the open hours and service duration Available times are managed automatically to avoid double-booking Multiple services can be selected on each booking Services can have multiple capacity Automatic price calculation Customizable email notifications for administrators and users Form validation and built it anti-spam captcha protection Manual and automatic CSV reports iCal addon with iCal export link and iCal file attached into emails Calendar available in 53+ languages Multiple date formats supported Blocks for Elementor and Gutenberg Multi-page calendars Printable appointments list Features in commercial versions: Visual form builder for creating the booking form fields Booking form can be connected to payment process (Ex: PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro, Stripe, Skrill, Authorize.net, TargetPay/iDEAL, Mollie/iDEAL, SagePay, Redsys) Payments are SCA ready (Strong Customer Authentication), compatible with the new Payment services (PSD 2) – Directive (EU) Addons for integration with external services: reCaptcha, MailChimp, SalesForce, WooCommerce and others Addons with additional features: appointment cancellation addon, appointment reminders addon, clickatell and twilio SMS add-ons, signature fields, iCal synchronization, Google Calendar API, Zoom Meetings … Appointment Hour Booking can be used for: Booking services or resources: Define schedule, open hours, services, prices and durations and let the calendar plugin manage the schedule. Sample cases: Medical services, personal training, resource allocation, booking rooms, classes, etc… The services can have a maximum capacity (example: number of persons that can book/attend the service at the same time). The default capacity is 1. If the service capacity has been set to 1 the time-slot will be blocked for new bookings after getting one booking. If the service capacity has been set to a greater number (example: service with capacity 10) the time-slot will be blocked after filling the capacity (example: after getting bookings for a total of 10 persons). This feature is described in detail at https://apphourbooking.dwbooster.com/blog/2019/01/24/bookings-for-multiple-persons/ The Troubleshoot Area Use the troubleshot if you are having problems with special or non-latin characters. In most cases changing the charset to UTF-8 through the option available for that in the troubleshot area will solve the problem. You can also use this area to change the script load method if the booking calendar isn’t appearing in the public website. The Notification Emails The notification emails with the appointment data entered in the booking form can sent in “Plain Text” format (default) or in “HTML” format. If you select “HTML” format, be sure to use the BR or P tags for the line breaks into the text and to use the proper formatting. Exporting Appointments to CSV / Excel Files The appointment data can be exported to a CSV file (Excel compatible) to manage the data from other applications. That option is available from the “bookings list”, the appointments can be filtered by date and by the text into them, so you can export just the needed appointments to the CSV file. Other Versions and Features The free version published in this WordPress directory is a fully-functional version for accepting appointments as indicated in the plugin description. There are also commercial versions with additional features, for example: Ability to process forms/appointments linked to payment process (PayPal, Stripe, Skrill, …) Form builder for a visual customization of the booking form Addons with multiple additional features Payments processed through the plugin are SCA ready (Strong Customer Authentication), compatible with the new Payment services (PSD 2) – Directive (EU) that comes into full effect on 14 September, 2019. Please note that the pro features aren’t advised as part of the free plugin in the description shown in this WordPress directory. If you are interested in more information about the commercial features go to the plugin’s page: https://apphourbooking.dwbooster.com/download