Appointly vs Meow Mailer – Free SMTP, Everything Included

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.

For years, almost every WordPress site I ran ended up with a different plugin just to send email. I never really chose them. I installed whatever looked fine at the time, because honestly there is no clear winner. Most of them advertise features I don’t need, or hide the basics behind a paywall. At one point I simply wanted to see the emails my site had sent, or failed to send, and even that asked me to upgrade. That felt wrong. So I decided to build the simplest and most honest email plugin I could for WordPress. You pick one provider, set it up once, and every email your site sends goes through it. Everything is logged, so you always know what happened. No upsell maze, no ads, nothing basic locked away. That is Meow Mailer, and all of this is free: One provider, set up once. Pick the one you use and forget about it. No confusing multi provider routing. Import from your current SMTP plugin. Already set up with WP Mail SMTP or Easy WP SMTP? Meow Mailer notices and copies the provider, credentials and sender over in one click, so switching never means digging out your API keys again. A fallback for when it breaks, free. Name a second provider (or plain WordPress, which needs no setup) and it steps in only when the first one refuses an email. Your mail still goes out, the log tells you exactly who failed and why, and an alert lets you know your main provider needs a look. A real email log, free. Every email in a clean table with recipient, subject, provider and status (sent, failed, offline, pending). Click any row to read the full message, see the error, and resend it. Many plugins charge for this. Here it is free. Stays out of the way. Until you pick a provider, Meow Mailer doesn’t change how your email is sent, so activating it never breaks what already works. It still logs everything WordPress sends on its own, so you get the log from the moment you activate it. Never miss a failure. A dashboard warning appears when emails fail, so silent problems don’t go unnoticed. Dismiss it once you have had a look and it stays away until a new email fails. Failure alerts by email, free. Get told when your site stops being able to send, instead of finding out from a customer. The alert is sent by WordPress itself rather than your provider, so it still reaches you when the provider is the thing that broke. One alert per hour at most, however many emails fail. Alerts on Slack, Discord or Teams, free. Paste a webhook URL and the alerts and the weekly summary are posted to your chat as well, so finding out that email is broken never depends on email. Handy when you look after a lot of sites. Individual emails are never posted anywhere: this tells you about your site, not about the people it writes to. Weekly summary, free. A short email with what was sent, what failed, and the most common errors. Nothing is sent on a quiet week. Control WordPress’s own emails. Switch off the notifications WordPress sends by itself: new user registrations, password and email change confirmations, comment moderation, automatic update reports. Password resets are never affected, so nobody gets locked out. Background sending. Email goes out after the page has loaded, so your visitors never wait on the mail server. Offline mode. Capture every email in the log without sending. Perfect for staging and development. Filters and export. Filter by status and provider, search by subject or recipient, and export to CSV. Test and resend. Check your setup with an HTML or plain text test, and resend any logged message in one click. Auto prune. Keep logs forever, or delete anything older than 7, 30 or 90 days. Multisite ready. Set your provider up once on the main site and let every site of the network use it, or leave each site to configure its own. Email logs always stay per site. Light and private. No bloat, no tracking. Your credentials can live in wp-config.php instead of the database. What Meow Mailer will never do No open or click tracking. Other email plugins advertise it as a premium feature. It works by putting an invisible pixel in every message and rewriting every link to pass through a redirect, which means logging when your recipients read their mail and what they clicked. That is surveillance of the people your site writes to, it is personal data you then have to account for under the GDPR, and rewritten links make your email look more like spam, not less. Meow Mailer does not do it, and that is not a gap waiting to be filled in a Pro version. There is no Pro version. Supported providers Generic SMTP, Mailgun, Brevo, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Postmark, SMTP2GO, Mailjet, Resend, MailerSend, Maileroo, Gmail / Google Workspace (OAuth 2.0), Microsoft 365 / Outlook (OAuth 2.0), and Zoho Mail (OAuth 2.0). About Meow Apps Meow Mailer is part of the Meow Apps family of plugins, focused on doing one thing well with a clean, modern interface. External services Meow Mailer contacts an external service only after you choose and configure an email provider. Until then (the default “None”) and in “Offline” mode, it sends nothing anywhere. When you pick a provider, your outgoing email (recipients, subject, body, headers and attachments) and the credentials you entered are sent to that provider so it can be delivered, and only when your site actually sends an email. For Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Zoho Mail, Meow Mailer also contacts their OAuth servers when you connect and refresh your account. Nothing else is ever sent. You choose a single provider. Generic SMTP talks only to the server you configure. For the others, please review their terms and privacy policy: Mailgun (terms, privacy), Brevo (terms, privacy), SendGrid (terms, privacy), Amazon SES (terms, privacy), Postmark (terms, privacy), SMTP2GO (terms, privacy), Mailjet (terms, privacy), Resend (terms, privacy), MailerSend (terms and privacy), Maileroo (terms, privacy), Gmail (terms, privacy), Microsoft 365 (terms, privacy), and Zoho Mail (terms, privacy). Development Meow Mailer is open source. The full source, including the React code used to build the admin interface, lives on GitHub.