12 Best WordPress Calendar Plugins (Google Calendar Sync)

Effective calendar management is one of the best and oldest ways to build brand awareness and visibility.

A well-organized calendar helps you schedule activities, manage appointments, and engage your audience.

Take Apple, for example.

Their product launch calendar is so well-known that millions of people add it to their calendars months in advance for the annual iPhone reveal.

Apple creates excitement, media buzz, and global anticipation by sticking to a predictable schedule. This ensures their reputation as a leader in tech continues to grow.

Other major brands like Nike, Coca-Cola, and Red Bull also use calendars strategically.

Their marketing calendars are packed with product launches, campaigns, and engagement events, ensuring they stay top of mind all year.

At IsItWP, we recognize the value of smart calendar management in branding and daily operations.

For example, our founder, Syed Balkhi, follows a carefully planned calendar schedule, especially at WordCamp events, which are community-driven conferences focused on WordPress.

These calendar events have helped establish WPBeginner and IsItWP as trusted names in the WordPress space.

While in-person events provide great networking opportunities, managing them can be challenging without the right tools.

Coordinating multiple schedules takes time and effort, making an efficient calendar system essential.

For small businesses with limited resources, you might wonder: How can you use calendars to improve your branding and marketing?

The answer is WordPress calendar plugins.

A good calendar plugin helps you plan and manage both online and offline events with ease.

Beyond scheduling, these tools improve time management by automating bookings, setting up webinars, selling tickets, and coordinating meetings—all in one place.

In this article, we’ll share our handpicked list of the 12 best WordPress calendar plugins. The following list has both free calendar plugins as well as premium plugins for you to try.

Best WordPress Calendar Plugins

Our founder and team have used calendars to excel in branding and marketing, not just with WordCamp.

Another great example is WPBeginner Engage.

Unlike WordCamp, WPBeginner Engage is an online summit featuring live sessions and presentations from top WordPress professionals. It also includes Q&A sessions where attendees can interact directly with speakers.

These online events have allowed the IsItWP team to test different calendar plugins extensively. We wanted to see which worked best for scheduling, event registrations, and attendee management.

Through this hands-on experience, we evaluated key features like ease of use, integration with other tools, automated reminders, and the ability to handle large-scale events.

We also tested how well these calendar plugins supported different event formats. We tested live webinars and workshops to ticketed sessions and multi-day schedules for this.

Most importantly, we looked at which online calendar plugins synced best with Google Calendar.

This process has helped us identify the most reliable and efficient calendar plugins. These are ones that not only simplify event planning but also enhance user experience and engagement and connect easily with Google Calendar.

We know you may not have time to review the entire list. To help you with this, check out the simple table listing the top 3 best calendar plugins below.

In this table, you can also see key features and pricing to help you make an informed decision quickly.

1. Sugar Calendar

Sugar Calendar is the best calendar plugin for WordPress. We use this calendar plugin in many of our online event scheduling because it offers a simple interface. As a result, it is a top choice for beginners and experts alike.

The Sugar Calendar plugin is lightweight and optimized for speed, which is a big plus in terms of SEO-friendliness.

Despite its simplicity and lightweight nature, it gives us all the features we need to manage our events, bookings, and schedules.

Once you activate the plugin on your site, you’ll get access to create events with start and end times, multi-day events, and recurring events. You can even create categories and time zones.

What is the best part?

You can sell tickets using a Stripe or WooCommerce integration.

To make things even easier for you, there’s an option to duplicate events with a single click. This will save you a whole lot of time as you won’t have to rebuild your events from scratch.

For more information, you can check out our easy guide on how to manage events and schedules using Sugar Calendar.

Sugar Calendar has a lite version of this plugin that is free in the WordPress repository. So you can get started with zero investment. Then, you can even take advantage of free addons to extend Sugar Calendar’s abilities. Some of these addons include:

…and more.

We do recommend checking out the premium version of this plugin. It starts at just $49.50 per year and gives you access to advanced features, priority support, and even more addons, making it totally worth the price!

Pros:

• Simple interface that is not only beautiful to look at but also easy to use
• Custom date formatting tailored to your or the user’s preference
• Translation ready so you can offer your calendar in other languages
• Time zone conversions to instantly update the event time according to the visitor’s location
• Repeating and recurring events by day, week, month, year, and custom dates
• Best user experience with effortless frontend display
• Calendar Feeds addon to sync with Google Calendar, iCal, Gnome Calendar, and more

Cons:

• The Lite version has fewer features compared to the Pro version.
• The developers keep the plugin lightweight by using addons. But, installing additional addons can be overwhelming for beginners.

You really don’t need to look further than Sugar Calendar. As you can see, it’s at the top of the list for good reason.

Why Sugar Calendar is Our Top Choice: As mentioned, We have used Sugar Calendar extensively for our online event scheduling and calendar events. From our experience, it has consistently delivered a smooth and hassle-free experience. Its lightweight design ensures our site remains fast, which is crucial for SEO. Plus, the ability to sync with Google Calendar and sell event tickets directly through Stripe or WooCommerce makes it a complete event management solution.

Pricing: Plans start as low as $49.50 per year.

Check out the latest Sugar Calendar review here.

Get Started with Sugar Calendar Here!

2. WPForms

WPForms is the best form builder for WordPress. It isn’t your conventional calendar plugin but has powerful features to help you manage your events and bookings with ease.

This makes it one of the most used WordPress tools across the IsItWP properties.

First, you’ll find 2,000+ ready-to-go form templates. This list contains templates for event planning, appointments, bookings, registrations, and more. WPForms is so high on this list of the best WordPress calendar plugins because of how easy it is to use.

All you have to do is select a template, customize it to match your goals, and publish it on your site.

WPForms is built to be easy for anyone to use, so you’ll never need to have coding or design skills. You can add the form to any WordPress page or post with just a click.

Also, you can sync your form with a calendar app like Google Calendar. Then, when someone submits the form, an event will automatically be created on your calendar so you can stay on top of your schedule.

Check out the full tutorial on How to Add Appointments to Google Calendar From WordPress Forms for more information.

You’ll now have the option to create customized events for your calendar. There are plenty of ways for you to tweak each day or event. You can create a custom start time and date, give the event a title, and even upload a promotional image so everyone can see a visual representation of the occasion.

Pros:

• 2,000+ templates to create any kind of form you need
• Intuitive drag and drop form builder
• Payments integrations with Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.Net
• Plenty of add-ons to extend the functionality
• Zapier integration so you can connect to 3,000+ apps like Zoom and Google Meet
• Automated email notifications and confirmation messages
• Built-in spam protection

Cons:

• WPForms is not a Traditional Calendar Plugin. It lacks built-in calendar views for displaying events directly.
• Requires Zapier for Advanced Scheduling. For full Google Calendar syncing, you need Zapier.

Why We Chose WPForms: While WPForms isn’t a traditional calendar plugin for WordPress, its Google Calendar integration and dozens of calendar and events form templates make it an excellent choice. Plus, its user-friendly interface and powerful form-building capabilities make it easy for us to manage events and bookings.

Using WPForms with Zapier, we can automatically add form submissions as events in Google Calendar without coding. Every time someone book an appointment or registers for an event, their details are instantly logged into our schedule. This helps us stay organized without any manual input.

Pricing: WPForms has a free version as well as a pro plugin. Its paid plans start as low as $39.60 per year.

Check out the latest WPFroms review here.

Get Started with WPForms Here!

3. StartBooking

StartBooking is an excellent calendar tool designed for both solo entrepreneurs and businesses with a full team. If you’re a business owner who is always on the move, this tool is extremely beneficial.

You can easily create a calendar from the ground up and schedule meetings, events, classes, company holidays, and more. As your customers start booking appointments, it’ll become obvious that they are more than mere numbers.

StartBooking allows you to build unique customer profiles so you can build the optimal on-site experience for your customers and easily track upcoming events at a glance.

When you consider the ability to add notes to events, set reminders to your smartphone device, and the option to integrate Google Calendar in just a couple of clicks, it’s no wonder more businesses are using StartBooking for their scheduling needs.

Pros:

• Reminders and notifications are available on smartphones, making StartBooking mobile-friendly
• Offers personalized customer profiles and flexible scheduling options
• Offers appointment tracking to monitor and manage events and appointments easily
• Optimized for speed and performance
• Easy to use and navigate
• Capture important customer info

Cons:

• Only one bookable service is allowed with the free plan
• No direct payment option requires integration

Why We Chose StartBooking: StartBooking is so high on this list because it offers a great user experience with flexible scheduling options. The integration with Google Calendar and mobile notifications makes managing appointments simple and effective. We recommend it to both solo entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Pricing: The free version allows you to create appointments for one bookable service. The basic plan starts at $79 per month, much more expensive than other plugins on this list.

Get Started with StartBooking Here!

4. The Events Calendar

Need a calendar that can handle some serious traffic? The Events Calendar plugin is right up your alley. This slick, easy-to-use plugin comes out of the box ready to use. It’s possible to set it up and have it operational in about 5 minutes!

If you’re a hardcore developer and enjoy custom options, rest easy. You can dig into the developer tools that come with countless ways to make your event calendar one of a kind. It comes with a skeleton spreadsheet so you can build your planner from the ground up. But they didn’t stop there.

The Events Calendar also comes with the ability to add/edit hooks and filters, change the template tags, or choose from a feature-rich collection of extensions to make your calendar the ultimate event planner.

They proudly boast that their plugin easily handles networks that get a staggering 25 million unique views a month. Now that’s sturdy!

Pros:

• Forever free plan
• Easy to set up. Takes less than five minutes to get started.
• Month, list, and day view
• Customizable and developer friendly
• Import/export events
• Time zone support

Cons:

• Many advanced features require technical knowledge
• You’ll need to integrate with other tools to handle payments

Why We Chose The Events Calendar: We love The Events Calendar for its simplicity and scalability. The free version is a solid starting point, which allowed us to test it extensively before purchase. While its ability to handle massive traffic ensures reliability.

Pricing: A basic site license for 1 site starts at $149 per year.

Check out this updated review on The Events Calendar.

Get Started with The Events Calendar Today!

5. BirchPress

If you’re looking for a calendar that offers complete freedom to customize it to your liking, BirchPress might just be the one for you. This developer-friendly tool is quickly becoming a favorite in the eCommerce market.

The simple drag and drop builder lets you build your own custom calendar in minutes. They offer thousands of options to make your scheduling platform one of a kind.

BirchPress allows you to add a payment form if you want to allow customers to pay for their appointments upfront. The default payment option is PayPal. But, you can add other payment methods through Woocommerce integration.

It doesn’t matter if you’re working for a college, a spa, a healthcare clinic, a call center, or a gym. BirchPress will make scheduling a breeze.

Pros:

• Build customized booking forms
• Embed booking forms using shortcodes
• Take bookings directly on your WordPress site
• Sync with calendars you already have
• Configure email notifications and reminders

Cons:

• The many customization options may overwhelm new users
• Does not offer as many integrations as some other plugins on this list

Why We Chose BirchPress: We selected BirchPress because of its robust customization options and ease of embedding booking forms on our site. Its ability to integrate payment methods, including WooCommerce, makes it a great choice for businesses like ours that need flexible booking and payment systems.

Pricing: You can get started with the free edition. Access to premium features starts at $99 per year.

Get Started with BirchPress Here!

6. WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments

WooCommerce Booking and Appointments by Plugin Hive is the go-to calendar for those who want to book services and make appointments while still selling physical products on a storefront. This tool allows you to have access to the best of both worlds without sacrificing quality.

You can customize this calendar tool so that it fits perfectly within your business model. For example, you can set a buffer time between appointments so you can have time to prepare for your next meeting. There’s an automatic tool that prevents people from creating appointments too close together.

On that same note, you can also take multiple bookings for the same time slot. Many personal trainers and spas love this feature because it allows them to maximize their profits in the short time that they are open.

Finally, WooCommerce Booking and Appointments integrates seamlessly with Google Calendars and your smartphone for instant scheduling that’s constantly up to date.

Pros:

• Seamless WooCommerce integration. Perfect for businesses selling digital and physical products
• Single-day and multiple-day bookings
• Flexible start and end dates
• Recurring bookings
• Dynamic booking cost calculation
• Manage bookings, cost, and availability

Cons:

• You must use WooCommerce to access all features, which may be an issue for non-eCommerce sites
• No free version available

Why We Chose WooCommerce Booking and Appointments: We recommend WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments due to its quick integration with WooCommerce. This makes it ideal for businesses that want to handle both product sales and service bookings in one platform. The added flexibility for managing bookings and pricing is a huge benefit.

Pricing: You can sign up for $149 per year. There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get Started with WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments Here!

7. Calendarize it!

Calendarize it! is a flexible and feature-rich calendar solution for your WordPress site. It’s packed with lots of free and paid addons so you can choose what features you want to add to your calendar.

If you use the Gutenberg editor or WPBakery, you’ll find it incredibly easy to integrate the form on your site. For all other page builders, you can use shortcodes and attributes to add the calendar to your site.

The plugin comes with a visual CSS editor to customize the calendar without any coding knowledge. You can change colors, styles, and fonts to make your calendar unique to your brand.

Pros:

• Works well with Gutenberg, WPBakery, and other page builders.
• Multiple calendar views
• Upcoming events widget
• Customizable navigation
• Translation ready with GlotPress

Cons:

• Many essential features are locked behind paid addons
• Customizing without code knowledge might be challenging for beginners

Why We Chose Calendarize it!: We chose Calendarize it! for its affordability and flexibility. The plugin offers great value with its wide range of addons and customizable features. This allows us to tailor it to our specific needs without breaking the budget.

Pricing: A regular Calendarize it! license costs $25 (+taxes) with 6 months of support.

Get Started with Calendarize it Here!

8. EventON

EventON is a WordPress virtual event calendar plugin. If you love minimal clutter-free designs, EventON has the right interface for you. You can create beautiful event tiles and color code them to stay organized. This makes it easy to manage large volumes of events.

Plus, you can configure events to autoload at the preset start time.

The sheer amount of features pushed this plugin to rank #1 as the best-selling event calendar plugin at CodeCanyon.

Pros:

• Highly customizable repeating events
• Multiple event images
• Unlimited event creation
• Various calendar layout designs
• Control event access and post-event content

Cons:

• Additional features come at extra costs, making it pricier than other calendar plugins
• While customization is great, it may overwhelm users looking for a simpler setup

Why We Chose EventON: We like EventON because of its flexibility and customization options. This helps us manage and display events in a sleek, visually appealing way. features like unlimited event creation and multiple layout designs, made it one of the best fits for our diverse calendar needs.

Pricing: The plugin will cost you $19 + taxes for 6 months of support.

Get Started with EventON Here!

9. Modern Events Calendar

Modern Events Calendar, as the name suggests, aims to be the most modern way to organize and manage your WordPress event calendar. Inside, you’ll find a variety of features to set up events with ease. There are 50+ event display layouts along with an online booking calendar and ticketing features.

The plugin lets you configure settings to match your preferences. And you can give customers the option to make payments online through various gateways.

Pros:

• Easy to use interface
• Online ticket sales
• Multiple event display layouts
• Responsive and mobile friendly designs
• Front end event submission
• Third-party integrations

Cons:

• Customization options are limited unless you buy addons

Why We Chose Modern Events Calendar: We included Modern Events Calendar because of its modern approach to event management. This includes responsive designs and seamless integration with ticket sales. Despite the cost, its extensive layouts and front-end submission features provide great flexibility.

Pricing: A single license costs $99 with 1 year of support. There are also paid addons starting at $39 to extend functionality. So the one thing to keep in mind here is that it’s quite expensive for the features it offers.

Get Modern Events Calendar!

10. My Calendar

My Calendar is an excellent plugin for teams looking to work on the same planner with ease. As with most calendars, you can filter it by month, week, and day. However, what makes this plugin different is the way that you can filter through the events listed on the planner.

If you have multiple employees and want to see what one particular employee is doing during a week, you can filter the planner in seconds by the author’s name to see what they have planned. Small businesses love the ease of access and employees love the ability to create their own schedules.

You can easily go in and add notes for your employees, or they can leave you notes and requests for specific days or weeks. It’s never been easier to manage your team with My Calendar.

If your business works with public events, you can even schedule new events to pop up on your Twitter page when scheduled. It really is an “all in one” tool for the smart, time-conscious business owner.

Pros:

• Allows filtering events by employee or author, making it perfect for teams
• Allows adding personal notes to events, facilitating team communication
• Calendar, grid, and list view
• Mini calendar for compact displays
• Editable CSS styles and JavaScript
• Single and recurring events
• Email notifications

Cons:

• The interface is not as modern or visually appealing as other options
• Customizing the design may require technical coding knowledge

Why We Chose My Calendar: My Calendar provides an excellent balance of event management and team collaboration features. The ability to filter by employee and schedule Twitter posts makes it perfect for businesses that need detailed event tracking and external communication.

Pricing: A free plugin is available. A permanent license starts from $69.

Get Started with My Calendar Today!

11. Google Calendar Events

Google Calendar Events by Simple Calendar is a plugin for those who like life simple. There’s no hard coding required. This intuitive little plugin is ready to go out of the box and set to match your theme and color scheme.

Once you have it installed, you can make a few tweaks so that it blends in seamlessly with the rest of your site. Many people love using this tool because once it’s set up, you don’t have to update your WordPress site to update the calendar. That’s right; if you update the Google Calendar associated with the account it automatically updates your website. Aside from that, you can:

• Display events from public Google Calendar
• Get out of box designs that are fully responsive
• Combine multiple calendars into a single display

If you’re looking for a simple and free plugin, this one might be the right one for you. However, as you grow, you’ll want more advanced features that come in the form of paid addons.

But the biggest problem with free plugins like this though is that you won’t get good customer support when you need it. Plus, since it’s free, the developer may or may not maintain the plugin. If it hasn’t been tested with the last few major WordPress updates, it could cause compatibility and security issues on your site. This is why we recommend a trusted plugin like Sugar Calendar.

Pros:

• Automatically syncs with your Google Calendar for easy updates
• Can display multiple Google Calendars on one page
• No need for complex configurations; it’s ready to go after installation

Cons:

• If Google Calendar isn’t updated properly, the plugin might display outdated events.
• Lacks advanced booking calendar and event management features

Why We Chose Google Calendar Events: We chose Google Calendar Events for its simplicity and ease of use. The ability to automatically sync with Google Calendar without requiring regular updates makes it a great option.

Pricing: Free. Addons start from $99.

Get Started with Google Calendar Events Here.

12. All in One Event Calendar

All in One Event Calendar is a free WordPress events calendar plugin to create and manage events on your site.

It works for in-person, online, or hybrid events. Even though this plugin is free, it has a great user interface. It’s also easy to customize so you can easily create beautiful calendars for your site.

The plugin is beginner-friendly allowing you to create, duplicate, filter, color-code, and share events easily. You can get additional features with paid addons.

This plugin is a service created and provided by Time.ly. Once you install and activate the plugin, you have to create a Timely account to use it.

Pros:

• Beginner-friendly customization options for creating beautiful, branded calendars
• Works for in-person, online, or hybrid events, offering flexibility
• Easily create, duplicate, and filter events with a user-friendly interface

Cons:

• Requires creating a Time.ly account to use the plugin

Why We Chose All in One Event Calendar: We added All in One Event Calendar to this list because of its user-friendly design and the flexibility it offers for hybrid events.

Pricing: Free. But the pro version starts from $8.25/ Month.

We hope this article helped you discover the best WordPress calendar plugins. If you’re still undecided, here’s our pick of the top 3 calendar plugins.

Which is the BEST WordPress Calendar Plugin?

After comparing all the calendar plugins for WordPress, we have 3 top picks to help you create and manage calendars on WordPress:

1. Sugar Calendar: The most feature-rich and easy to use WordPress calendar solution
2. WPForms: The #1 plugin to build events and booking forms with a calendar integration
3. The Events Calendar: A good calendar plugin to manage events

If You have any more questions, check out the FAQs below.

FAQs: Best WordPress Calendar Plugins (Google Calendar Sync)

Can I sell event tickets with these plugins?

Yes, you can sell event tickets with WordPress event calendar plugins like WPForms. While WPForms is primarily a form builder, it is one of the best ways to sell event tickets. This is because, it integrates with payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe, allowing you to create event registration forms with ticket sales. For a more dedicated solution, Modern Events Calendar and WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments offer built-in ticketing and booking features.

What is the best WordPress event calendar plugin?

Sugar Calendar is the best WordPress event calendar plugin due to its simplicity and flexibility. It’s lightweight and integrates with popular plugins like WPForms and Gravity Forms. It also supports event ticketing, scheduling, and recurring events. Sugar Calendar is optimized for speed and won’t slow down your website.

What is the easiest WordPress event calendar plugin to use?

StartBooking is the easiest event calendar plugin to use, especially for businesses that need a streamlined scheduling system. It offers a clean, user-friendly interface that lets you create and manage bookings effortlessly. Plus, it integrates with Google Calendar and allows customer profile tracking. This makes it a great option for appointment-based businesses.

Which is the best free calendar plugin?

Sugar Calendar is the best free calendar plugin. The free version provides essential event management features while remaining lightweight and easy to use. Unlike many free plugins that lack support and updates, Sugar Calendar is regularly maintained and can be upgraded with premium addons for advanced functionality.

That’s all we have for you today. Next, you may be interested in targeting your website visitors with attractive popups to get them to book an appointment or event. OptinMonster is the best tool for that and can help you skyrocket your conversions, sales, and leads.

See our tutorial on How to Create a Popup Form in WordPress (Step by Step).

If you found this post helpful, then you’ll want to see our resources:

We’ve added an easy step by step tutorial to help you create a custom booking form for your site. The last 2 posts will give you the right themes and plugins to run and manage events online.