Appointly vs OpenStation

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.

wp-admin forgets. OpenStation doesn’t. You know the moment. You’re deep in a post and you need one image from the Media Library. You click over, find it, click back, and everything you had going is gone. Your scroll position, your half-typed thought, the three other things you had queued up in your head. That’s not a bug you hit. That’s the design. wp-admin shows you one screen at a time, and every navigation throws the last one away. It has worked this way since 2003, like a fridge that empties itself every time you close the door. WordPress has rebuilt almost everything else. The editor, the site editor, the patterns, the styles. The admin’s one-screen-at-a-time model is the layer nobody touched. OpenStation touches it. Install it and admin screens become draggable, resizable windows. Edit a post while the Media Library sits open next to it. Drag an image from one window straight into the other. Keep comments open in the corner. Reload the browser and your window layout — open pages, positions, sizes, and window states — comes back where you left it. OpenStation itself is free, GPL, and opt-in per user. One click in the admin bar turns it on for you. One click turns it off. Nobody else on your site sees anything change, and deactivating the plugin restores the classic admin exactly. No Core patches and no lock-in. Optional AI providers may charge for their service. Built and maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and Tumblr. Work on more than one thing at once Admin pages open as windows, including pages added by most other plugins. Drag them, resize them, snap them, tile them, minimize them to a taskbar. The admin menu becomes a dock of icons. Two editors open at once is one click away. Never lose your place Moving between open windows leaves each page in place. Across reloads, OpenStation remembers your open pages, window positions, sizes and states, virtual desktops, and focus. Closing a window with unsaved changes warns you first. A desk you can actually put things on Drop posts, media, and links right onto the wallpaper. Sort them into folders. Trash them to a Trash that actually holds things. The stuff you’re working on this week can just sit out where you can see it. One desktop per job Virtual desktops, the way your operating system does them. One for writing. One for the store. One for comment triage. One for that redesign you keep poking at. Switch between them without closing anything. Find anything with Cmd+K The full WordPress command palette, plus slash commands from your plugins, all under one keystroke. Turn on the optional AI assistant and you can ask it things like “which post had the comment asking for the recipe?” and it searches your own content to answer. (Requires an AI provider configured in Settings → Connectors on WordPress 7.0+. Details under “External services” below.) See how your site fits together The Corkboard is an interactive, zoomable map of how your posts, pages, and products link to each other. Pan around it. Find the orphans. Find the hubs. Running a store? Orders, Products, Coupons, and Customers become browsable folders with stock and sale ribbons. Open a customer to see their lifetime spend and what they buy most. Follow a product to its buyers, or a coupon to who redeemed it. Make it yours Wallpapers, from color presets to animated scenes to your own photo. Live widgets pinned to the desktop: drafts, stats, recent comments, a focus timer. Uploadable desktop themes, including a built-in Legacy theme that brings the old WordPress blue back in one click. And Mio, a soft-body desk companion that drifts across your wallpaper and gets bumped around by your windows. Off by default. You’ll turn it on. For developers Extend OpenStation through documented PHP and JavaScript APIs. Register windows, icons, wallpapers, widgets, commands, and settings tabs through stable openstation_register_* PHP APIs and a typed JavaScript API; customize dock items through documented hooks; add AI tools with the WordPress Abilities API. Copy-paste examples live in the developer docs on GitHub. External services No external service is required for OpenStation’s desktop interface. The optional AI Assistant and two user-initiated enrichment features make the external requests described below. AI Assistant The optional AI Assistant sends data to the AI provider you configure in WordPress’s Settings → Connectors (for example OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). Generation is routed through WordPress 7.0’s built-in AI Client, which supplies the credentials stored in Connectors. The plugin never handles an API key itself. With no provider configured in Connectors, no external AI requests are made. When the AI Assistant is enabled and a user invokes it (via Cmd+K or the slash-command palette): What is sent: the user’s prompt, the conversation history for the active session, and tool-call metadata. The plugin’s built-in tools (search_posts, search_pages, search_comments) run WordPress’s native keyword search and may include excerpts of the matching posts/pages/comments in tool results, which are then sent back to the provider as part of the agentic loop. When it is sent: on user-initiated AI requests, and (if an administrator enables “Score new comments with AI”) on comment-save hooks for spam analysis. Posts, pages, and taxonomy terms are not sent automatically. Why it is sent: to obtain model completions and tool-call decisions that drive the AI Assistant. Who provides the service: whichever provider you configured in Settings → Connectors. Which provider (and endpoint) receives the data depends entirely on that configuration. Review the chosen provider’s own terms and privacy policy (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). URL shortcut favicons When an authorized user creates a desktop shortcut to an external URL, OpenStation asks that URL for its page HTML and favicon so the shortcut can display the site’s icon. The request is made from your WordPress server and sends the requested URL, the server’s IP address, an OpenStation user-agent string, and normal HTTP request metadata to the operator of that site. This happens only when a user creates the shortcut. The destination site’s terms and privacy policy apply. WordPress.org plugin information When an authorized user opens or refreshes parts of OpenStation’s Plugins window, OpenStation may request public plugin details, update metadata, and review excerpts from WordPress.org. These requests send plugin slugs, the site’s locale, and normal HTTP request metadata to WordPress.org. This information is used only to display and manage plugins. Review the WordPress.org Privacy Policy. OpenStation’s OAuth relay does not contact a service by itself. Third-party plugins that configure the relay may contact their own providers and are responsible for disclosing those services. Credits OpenStation is brought to you by Automattic. The plugin is open source under GPLv2-or-later; contributions are welcome on GitHub. Third-party libraries The plugin bundles the following third-party JavaScript library, loaded on demand only when a feature that needs it is in use: PixiJS (MIT License) — used by the Corkboard window, built-in canvas wallpapers (e.g. the animated WordPress logo), the Mio desk companion, and the Inkfall typing game. PixiJS is loaded from the plugin’s own assets/vendor/ directory; no CDN requests are made. Data files The Inkfall game’s word list (assets/games/inkfall/words.txt) is generated from the following sources (attribution also ships in the file’s header): FrequencyWords by Hermit Dave (CC-BY-SA 4.0) — English word-frequency ranking derived from the OpenSubtitles corpus. english-words by dwyl (Unlicense) — used as a validity filter. LDNOOBW English list (CC-BY 4.0) — used as an exclusion filter.