According to statistics on consumer preferences, industry trends, and the impact of technology, businesses have increased their customer base by 26% by owning an online scheduling system.
So, you must pay attention to scheduling and managing appointments when running a business providing services to customers such as spas, clinics, health, photo studios, classes, coaching, yoga classes, or any session-based appointment-run business.
Whether you’re a busy professional, a small business owner, or even a student juggling multiple responsibilities, a tool that assists you in arranging and managing customer appointments will be a “light” for your business. It can also help customers feel satisfied when using services at your business, they will not need to wait or worry about prices and service information because it will be displayed fully on the booking page, saving a lot of time for both businesses and customers.
Picktime is quite a famous software in this field, you can consider leveraging its features to enhance your business. However, to develop a website for your business on WordPress, Picktime is still not the optimal choice, it does not have a version that supports setup and use directly from WordPress.
So, in this article, we will explore some of Picktime’s key features together. Besides, we will also provide some plugins considered Picktime alternatives for WordPress, and especially they are completely free for you to use.
Let’s delve into our article!
Table of Contents
Exploring The Key Features of Picktime
Seeking software that can help you set up a schedule and appointment system will be very easy, because understanding customer tastes, the market has launched many support tools. However, to find software that provides all the optimal features and is also free for businesses to use, Picktime is a software worthy of your consideration.
Let’s find out why we say so!
First of all, as we all know, Picktime is a powerful scheduling tool designed to help you streamline your appointment booking process and maximize efficiency.
With Picktime, we not only use it to provide a scheduling system for customers but it is also used to support businesses with internal management. Such as scheduling meetings/work sessions with staff, scheduling internal events, or setting recurring appointments.
Using the free version of Picktime will allow businesses to add up to 2 business locations to manage. It will also automatically support time zone conversion if your customers come from multiple locations, based on the client’s location detection feature.
To minimize the no-show rate and keep everyone on track, Picktime has the ability to automatically remind previously scheduled appointments with your business via email or SMS. Furthermore, you can also control your business situation with detailed reports on any aspect, and this software provides valuable insights into your booking patterns. Picktime will update continuously and help you organize them by month, week, day, or custom date range to easily adjust business strategies.
This appointment booking software offers a range of customization options, allowing you to tailor your booking page to match your brand and preferences.
One of the standout features of Picktime is its ability to sync with popular calendars such as Google Calendar, Office 365, iCloud, and Outlook. This means that any appointments booked through Picktime will automatically be added to your existing calendar, ensuring you never miss an appointment or double-book your time.
Thus, with just a few clicks, Picktime assists in setting up your account, creating your personalized booking page, starting taking bookings and accepting many different payment methods.
However, this software is not supported for use on WordPress. As a WordPress fan, we always prioritize developing our website on WordPress, as well as the booking pages. Therefore, we have researched and recommended some Picktime alternative plugins, which are totally free for you to use. Let’s slide to that section!
Top 8 Picktime Alternatives for WordPress
Bookster – WordPress Appointment Booking Plugin
The very first plugin in this list is Bookster. If you have learned about WordPress booking plugins, you will probably feel quite strange about this plugin and why we ranked it first.
Don’t let you think too long, we will provide you with convincing reasons right here. Although it was only released earlier this year, with its outstanding features, Bookster is expected to become “a colossal” in this field.
With a stunning, easy-to-use interface, we will easily create and manage a real-time booking system for our WordPress website on the Bookster dashboard. Whether your business offers a large number of services or is a hybrid business with many agents, don’t worry about how to fully display them on your booking page, this powerful WordPress booking system allows you to add unlimited services and agents.
Similar to Picktime, to increase revenue and traffic rate for your business, Bookster also provides in-depth reporting and accepts payments via various methods.
Besides, if you want to improve the style of your website, you can use the premium version of Bookster to fully customize the look of your booking page and reminder emails, increasing your business recognition rate and customer satisfaction.
On the front end, this plugin will allow you to display full information about the services and agents that the business provides, customers can approach the business and make an appointment quickly, saving a lot of time for both your business and customers.
Key Features:
- Can add unlimited locations, services, and employees.
- Provides flexible booking calendar.
- Automatically receive bookings and send out email & SMS notifications.
- Support accepting of many payment methods.
- Integrated with 3rd party services and all major WordPress themes.
Thus, Bookster deserves to be ranked first in the Picktime alternative list.
WordPress Online Booking and Scheduling Plugin – Bookly
The next plugin on this list is Bookly, with over 70,000 installations in WordPress, let’s see what this plugin has to offer!
Bookly is a free plugin that allows users to set up a reservation system and reserve tables for customers. This is a plugin suitable for all types of businesses, it helps optimize your business by providing a Booking Admin Panel to manage booking calendars, services, and client base.
This WordPress booking plugin allows users to configure the appearance of the booking form to their desires. When using the free version of this plugin, users will be able to add 5 services to the booking form.
Bookly will help enhance customer experience by automatically detecting the client’s time zone to display available time slots and display the website well on any device.
All information businesses provide customers and notifications will be translated into 40+ languages because Bookly is integrated with the WPML plugin.
Although this powerful schedule plugin has a lot of customer complaints about its customer support, the features it can provide for your business are worth giving this plugin a try.
Key Features:
- Can create unlimited booking forms.
- Manage booking, customer list, and appointment calendar online.
- Customize the SMS and email notifications.
- Customize the appearance of the booking form with no coding.
- Integrated with multi-language plugins, third-party services, and page builders.
This plugin also offers a premium version with interesting features. You can refer to it for your business if you need more advanced features.
Appointment Booking Calendar — Simply Schedule Appointments Booking Plugin
The next potential plugin on this list is Appointment Booking Calendar, loved by many WordPress users and rated 5 stars. This plugin helps users set up the appointment scheduling calendar system in just under 5 minutes.
The user base of this plugin is very popular, no matter what field you work in, this powerful plugin can also support, for example, Client Meeting Booking, Event/Service/Visitor Booking, Class Lessons or Tutor Scheduling, Simple Reservations, and much more. Furthermore, its UI is snappy, and highly responsive to bring a fun experience to users.
Completely free to use, Simply Schedule Appointments allows users to configure unlimited booking calendars and freely customize the style of notifications to match your brand and website.
After creating appointment booking calendars, users can embed them in pages or posts to make them available to customers, because this plugin works well with page builder plugins.
Key Featured:
- User-friendly and accessible booking system.
- Create unlimited booking calendars.
- Can customize booking calendars and email notifications.
- Support to translate into Spanish, German, French, and more.
- Integrated with page builder Block editor, Elementor widgets, Beaver Builder modules, and Divi modules.
- Deeply connected with WordPress plugins.
Also provides a Premium edition for booking appointments, and users can experience more advanced features with Simply Schedule Appointments.
BookingPress – Appointment Booking Calendar Plugin and Online Scheduling Plugin
Next, a plugin that helps businesses set up a complete booking system without coding or design skills, this is the ideal plugin for all fields such as health, wellness, salon, lifestyle, fitness, medical, education, and much more. That powerful plugin is BookingPress.
BookingPress provides UX and UI for users to easily set up and manage the appointment scheduling system. To bring better experiences to customers, this plugin provides easy and quick configuration options for booking pages and email notifications.
Users can track their business in a super handy dashboard. BookingPress also helps protect your business with a free in-built captcha anti-spam facility.
Key Features:
- Great UX/UI for the booking system.
- Seamless integration with the website.
- Accept online payment with PayPal and offline payment.
- Support to translate.
- Integrated with page builders such as Gutenberg, and Elementor.
If you want to experience more features of this plugin, you must purchase the premium version of BookingPress.
WP Booking System – Booking Calendar
WP Booking System is also a suitable plugin for service businesses. It offers a beautiful booking system with full customization features for the booking calendar form, which is easily accessible to customers and allows them to book in just a few minutes.
After creating calendar booking forms, businesses can generate shortcodes and paste them into posts/pages to publish to customers. Gutenberg will support this.
Businesses will reach many international customers using WP Booking System because it supports multiple languages.
Key Features:
- Easy-to-use dashboard.
- Can be used for any rental business.
- Can be used from mobile devices with ease.
- Customers can receive email confirmations and reminders.
- Can manually manage the calendar’s availability.
However, if your business operates with many services, and you want to add unlimited booking forms to your website, the free version of this plugin is not supported yet, you need to choose the premium version.
Appointment & Event Booking Calendar Plugin – Webba Booking
Whether you run a wellness business, salon, any sport or rental business, events, consulting, medical clinic, or any business that relies on appointments, events, and service booking, Webba Booking can be a suitable choice for your business. With this plugin, you will have easy setup and seamless schedule management.
Make your business’s booking page look great with fully customizable scheduling options. No coding requested, you can add as many bookable services/events as you want.
Your business will become more flexible as this plugin allows pricing based on time, day, and set number of time frames, which means you can update prices yourself continuously. You can also set rules suitable for your business for the booking page.
Key Features:
- Manage bookings and schedules with ease.
- Can customize email notifications and reminders.
- Provide powerful booking logic.
- Offers built-in translations and WPML compatibility.
- Your website will looks good on all devices.
This plugin offers most of the great features in its free version, so you can create a stunning booking page for your website without spending any money.
Appointment Hour Booking – WordPress Booking Plugin
Another great plugin on this list is Appointment Hour Booking. With visual design, users can easily set up schedules and manage data for businesses. To specify reservations for customers, this plugin supports determining working days, holidays, working hours and some other additional information.
To help optimize business revenue, this plugin allows customers to choose multiple services per booking and also avoid double-booking. For international customers, businesses can meet their demands because the calendar is available in more than 53 languages.
Key Features:
- Easy to use interface.
- Determine specific business days and hours of operation.
- Prices can be specifically determined for each service.
- Supports automatic price calculation.
- Customizable emails and notifications for admins and users.
- Work well with Elementor and Gutenberg.
- Support in multi-language, multi-page calendars.
The version available on WordPress provides full functionality for accepting appointments for businesses. With more professional features, businesses should choose the premium version of Appointment Hour Booking.
WP Booking Calendar
The last plugin on this list is WP Booking Calendar. With a modern, user-friendly design, this plugin helps with the process of managing your business’s booking system. The features that WP Booking Calendar will bring all match your specific booking needs.
Businesses can customize the calendar’s interface and automatically update empty calendars continuously to optimize the number of customers coming to the business. In particular, the calendars that businesses set up will display amazingly on any device, because this plugin displays well on phones.
Businesses can customize booking forms to send to customers. These forms can support attaching CAPTCHA to prevent spam-sending. In addition, this plugin is also synchronized with other services, to streamline the business process.
Key Features:
- Modern and clear Booking Listing panel.
- Sync with Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway, TripAdvisor, VRBO, FlipKey, and any other calendar that uses the .ics format.
- Can approve, decline, or edit specific bookings.
- Configure email notifications.
- Provide a timeline view.
- Support in multiple languages.
For larger, more professional businesses, choose the premium version of this plugin to experience even more interesting features.
Key Features of Top Picktime Alternatives Plugins for WordPress
We have introduced 8 plugins that are considered the best Picktime Alternatives on the WordPress platform. Each plugin offers powerful features that allow businesses to schedule appointments for their services.
Through the comparison table we have researched the essential features of the booking plugin below, you can consider choosing the right plugin for yourself.
| Plugins \ Features | Unlimited appointments | Unlimited services/ agents | Customizable booking form | Multi-language support | Google calendar synchronization | Popular payment integrations | Sales analytics |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bookster | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Bookly | ✅ | ✖️ | ✅ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Appointment Booking Calendar | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| BookingPress | ✅ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| WP Booking System | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✅ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Webba Booking | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Appointment Hour Booking | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| WP Booking Calendar | ✅ | ✖️ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
Sum Up
So, through the above article, we have together learned and analyzed some features of Picktime – great software for setting up booking schedules for businesses, regardless of size. However, for businesses that want to build websites with WordPress, using Picktime is a dilemma. Businesses will want to look for plugins with similar features to Picktime that can be used well on WordPress.
Understanding that problem, we have provided the best plugins completely free, they have all the basic features so businesses can set up and manage booking systems easily.
Hopefully, this article will be useful to you!
