BookingPress vs. Amelia: Which Is the More Affordable Booking Plugin?

Searching for the most reliable and budget-friendly solution for appointment scheduling on WordPress?

Then BookingPress and Amelia have definitely caught your eye as two of the most discussed and often chosen WordPress booking plugins.

But which one is more user-friendly, powerful, and – highly important – affordable?

We’ll help you find out in this BookingPress vs. Amelia review and comparison. Super detailed and well-researched – tune in!

What is BookingPress?

BookingPress is a robust WordPress scheduler plugin for different kinds of events and service providers who sell their time, including coaches, clinics, and groomers. Highly optimized for hourly bookings, smooth payments, and service upselling, BookingPress has been used by thousands of WordPress sites for 5+ years.

What is Amelia WP?

Amelia WP is another popular choice when it comes to scheduling your time as a business, selling tickets to events, or boosting service automation. As they promote their product, it’s an ‘enterprise-level’ solution, making it clear that they are ready to target big teams, totally covering their needs.

BookingPress vs. Amelia: Types of Appointments Supported

First of all, you want to be sure that the workflow in these booking plugins and the appointment types suit your business needs.

Let’s find out which types of bookings you can sell.

Booking type	Amelia	BookingPress
Hourly appointments	Yes, customizable duration	Yes, customizable duration
One-on-one meeting booking	Yes	Yes
Group bookings	Yes	Yes
Online meetings	Yes, integration with Zoom and Google Meet is available from the Standard plan and higher	Yes, integration with Zoom and Google Meet is available in all Pro plans
Event tickets	Standard plan and higher	No
Daily bookings	Limited to one day	Limited to one day
Subscriptions (monthly, yearly, etc.)	No	No
Recurring appointments	Standard plan and higher	Professional and Enterprise plans
Package of services booking	Pro and Elite plans	Professional and Enterprise plans
Booking period available in advance	Yes	Yes
Waiting lists	Starting with the Pro plan	Free in all plans
Services with buffer times	Free in all plans	Free in all plans

As you see, their capabilities are quite similar: these scheduling plugins are not designed for hotels or multi-day bookings, even though they can work with exceptions. 

However, any hourly service business can totally entrust bookings to either plugin!

It’s worth noting the difference in group booking handling: Amelia offers a dedicated event selling feature that lets you manage availability and sell seats or tickets to group members who can book individually as long as spots remain; while BookingPress focuses on group bookings where a single person makes the booking for the whole group, selecting the total number of attendees during the booking process.

If you are looking to sell gym subscriptions or something like that, that’s not what the plugins are made for. However, both support recurring bookings, which can be used as a workaround for some cases.

In BookingPress, the process is the following: users select a service and schedule multiple sessions by choosing the start date, time slots, number of sessions, and frequency (dates and times can be adjusted even later). Afterward, customers review their details and total payment before completing checkout.

In Amelia, you set what type of recurring appointments you want to create – daily, weekly, or monthly. Customers can choose how many times they want to have that appointment repeated and pay only for the first appointment or for all at once (based on your settings).

If you do need to sell memberships with recurring payments, consider another plugin from the BookingPress creators – ARMember.

Booking Forms & Wizards Compared

A booking form for making appointments is crucial because it influences how your customers experience your business online.

Can you make it yours with the features available in BookingPress and Amelia? Let’s compare key facilities to draw conclusions.

Feature	Amelia	BookingPress
Form type	Step-by-step wizard, structured	Step-by-step, flexible/customizable
Customization	Styling via shortcode parameters + color, text, font visually	Full color, font, label, and field visibility customization
Flow control	Fixed steps, can preselect	Rearrange flow (service/staff first), hide/show steps
Sell extras in the form	Supported	Supported
Form embedding in WordPress	Shortcodes (Elementor, Gutenberg, etc.)	Shortcodes (Elementor, Gutenberg, etc.)
Post-booking actions	Redirect URL, add to calendars, customer panel	Custom redirect or in-page message on success/failure
Custom fields	Standard plan and higher	Extensive, add/remove fields, and conditional visibilityFree in all plans
Front-end look	Modern clean UI	Fully customizable clean UI

Amelia, as one of the key options, uses a step-by-step wizard for bookings with modern UI, structured multi-step flow (service, employee, time, extras, payment, confirmation), and built-in payment integrations. You can brand and customize the focus using shortcode configurations and employee/service-specific forms. The more expensive plans (Pro/Elite) have features for advanced flows.

BookingPress has a similar experience, offering flexible booking form customization, which allows you to hide/show steps and fields, reorder selection flow, customize labels and colors, add/remove custom fields, and adjust booking redirection. It is heavily front-end customization-oriented. It gives you awesome control of what comes first in the form instead of a fixed wizard flow.

Notifications & Extra Integrations

The booking system should send automated messages to clients – otherwise, it doesn’t perform its basic functions.

In addition to that, it’s better to have access to some third-party tools in an easy way.

Let’s sum up what we have here.

BookingPress has lots to offer for various aspects of your service business:

• Notifications: Emails, SMS, WhatsApp, and Telegram.
• Email marketing: Mailchimp, AWeber, Omnisend.
• Calendar apps: Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple Calendar.
• Video meetings: Google Meet, Zoom.
• More: ARMember, Zapier, Conversion Tracking.

Amelia also has a nice list of integrations:

• Notifications: Emails, SMS, WhatsApp.
• Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Zoom, Google Meet, Outlook, Microsoft Team.
• WP plugins: MyCred, BuddyBoss.

Setting Prices for Services & Payment Gateways

Want to allow a customer to book an appointment at least five hours before the appointment? Or want to collect payments only on-site? Are you using a POS in your salon?

We’re also curious to discover how top WordPress booking plugins help you meet your real needs!

Pricing control and rules

First of all, let’s try to generalize the main things for editing prices, bookings, and rules that influence the cost of your services.

Payment control	Amelia	BookingPress
Offline payment (cash on site)	Yes	Yes
Online payments	5+ gateways integrated	20+ gateways integrated
POS support for offline payments	OliverPOS Integration in development	Stripe POS
Monetary deposit payments	From the Standard plan and higher	Free, all plans
Deposit %	Free, all plans	Free, all plans
Discounts via coupons	Free, all plans	Free, all plans
Dynamic (conditional) discounts	Yes	In Professional & Enterprise plans
Taxes	From the Standard plan and higher	Free, all plans
Invoices	From the Standard plan and higher	Free, all plans
Gift cards	No	In Professional & Enterprise plans
Refunds	Yes	Yes
Cart (multiple bookings)	Pro and Elite plans	Free, all plans

These booking plugins are rockstars in payment management. As you see, standard things like invoices and taxes are locked in the cheapest plan of Amelia. Now, let’s jump to the actual payment methods.

Payment gateways

Is there a local gateway that you can enable without a headache, like searching for solutions or developers? The easiest way to find out is to compare the choice of gateways in the plugins:

Payment method	Amelia	BookingPress
PayPal	From the Standard plan and higher	Free, all plans
On-site payments	Free, all plans	Free, all plans
Woo plugin integration for payments	From the Standard plan and higher	Free, all plans
Stripe	From the Standard plan and higher	Free, all plans
Square	Free, all plans	Free, all plans
Authorize.Net	No built-in	Free, all plans
Mollie	From the Standard plan and higher	Free, all plans
2Checkout	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
Razorpay	From the Standard plan and higher	Free, all plans
Braintree	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
Klarna	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
Skrill	Free, all plans	Free, all plans
PayFast	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
PagSeguro	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
WordPay	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
PayUMoney	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
Paystack	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
Paddle	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
Mercado Pago	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
ECPay	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
PayMongo	Only via Woo	Free, all plans
Airwallex	Only via Woo	Free, all plans

As a quick summary, it’s obvious that BookingPress offers more methods without the need to use WooCommerce (which is a must in Amelia if you need more). Even more so, if you do need WooCommerce, it’s free to use within any premium plan with BookingPress, while Amelia unlocks this integration only in the Standard plan.

Upselling tools

Want to sell more time and services/generate more revenue without needing to think about how?

An interesting fact is that plugins like Amelia or BookingPress have ready-made software solutions for this. You just need to choose what can work for your case!

BookingPress’ tools:

• Offer extras – sell more with related service suggestions.
• Set the special price of the day.
• Enable online tipping. 
• Sell services in bundled packages.
• Add ratings and reviews to add more trust to services.

Amelia’s tools:

• Sell services in packages.
• Sell extras.
• Offer private-only events (password or user role protected).

BookingPress vs. Amelia Cost

So, who is more affordable for small businesses and enterprises? Where do you get more issues solved for less money?

BookingPress offers various premium packages:

• Standard (1 site) – $79
• Professional (3 sites) – $129
• Enterprise (up to 20 sites) – $249
• Free plan – yes.

Amelia’s pricing structure is quite complex, with many features varying depending on the plan you choose. Keep in mind that the listed cost applies to just one website.

• Starter – $49
• Standard – $69
• Pro – $149
• Elite – $299
• Free plan – yes.

Also note that the Starter plan of Amelia doesn’t include basic tools like location management, customer notifications, or paying with a deposit. At the same time, BookingPress limits you only to non-critical features in cheaper plans, such as POS integration.

Concluding: BookingPress vs. Amelia?

The simplest conclusion is that Amelia and BookingPress offer very similar solutions!

However, the differences become apparent not so much in their features, but in their pricing structures and the number of domains covered by each plan, so make sure to pay attention to them before going deeper.

As for the differences in features, here are the conclusions of our comparison:

• Both plugins are designed for hourly service businesses. They are equally perfect at managing staff availability, selling time slots, and handling multiple bookings and services.
• BookingPress is more affordable, providing more crucial features already in the cheapest plan, as well as allowing users to use all premium features on up to 20 sites.
• Amelia deals better with events and group bookings, providing more robust tools for this.
• BookingPress includes more payment gateways than Amelia by default.
• BookingPress has more tools to upsell services, many already available in the Standard plan.
• BookingPress provides more third-party integrations available right from the start.

So, BookingPress vs Amela, what will you use today?

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• How to Create a Hairstylist Booking Website with WordPress