WPLift is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

12 Best WordPress Event Calendar Plugins to Revolutionize Your Event Planning

Last Updated on December 26th, 2023

Tags: , , ,

Do you need to add a calendar to your website to publicize events or capture bookings, but the thought of all that coding or employing expensive software experts is putting you off? Fear not, as WordPress event calendar plugins allow you to do that without any programming skills and at a very reasonable cost. Heck, there are even tons of free options.

This article some of the best WordPress event calendar plugins available for 2023.

What Can Calendar Plugins for WordPress Do?

Event calendar plugins allow you to display upcoming events on your WordPress websites, such as concerts, sporting events, or meetings. Many plugins also allow you to capture bookings and reservations and issue tickets or automatically generate emails. Some also enable site users to submit their events for inclusion in your calendar.

There are many calendar plugins for WordPress, ranging from very basic to those with all bells and whistles. Which you ultimately choose depends on what you need it to do. For example, some sites might just need a basic calendar to showcase events, while others may require the ability to accept bookings, payments, and issue tickets.

Here we conclude the list of the 12 best WordPress event plugins for 2023. All have been updated within the last three months and tested up to WordPress version 5.7.2. We have not listed the plugins in any order of preference.

Sugar Calendar

If you are looking for a lightweight solution to your site’s event calendar needs, this plugin might be right up your alley. Sugar Calendar is an easy-to-use, reliable, and powerful event calendar plugin for WordPress. This user-friendly plugin helps you add new events to your calendars, and view or edit your existing events easily. 

The free version of Sugar Calendar is packed with the following key features: 

  • Simple Event Management 
  • Beautiful Admin Interface 
  • Ajax Enabled Calendar View 
  • Customize the date and time format or display 
  • Events Custom Post Type 
  • Event Calendar Custom Taxonomy 
  • Simple Event Configuration 
  • Easily Set Event Dates 
  • Easily Set Event Start and End Time 
  • Events Archive, Listed by Start Date 
  • Widgets for displaying calendars and event filters 
  • Shortcode for showing the calendar of events 
  • Large and small calendar views 

If you are looking to further extend the functionality of this event management plugin, you can avail its premium features and pro-addons. The full version of Sugar Calendar starts at $49 a year for a single-site license.  Users gave this plugin a commendable 4.5 stars rating on the WordPress directory,

Get Sugar Calendar

The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar is a free plugin that allows you to add a calendar of in-person or virtual events to your website. With over 800,000 downloads in existence, it is hugely popular, and users have given it an average score of 4.4/5.0 stars.

Article Continues Below

Despite being free, you get plenty of great features:

  • Plug and play or customizable via skeleton stylesheet, partial template overrides, template tags, hooks, and filters
  • Rapid event creation
  • Save venues and organizers
  • Month (with/without tooltips), event list, or day views
  • Block editor support
  • Event search engine
  • Google maps integration
  • Upcoming events list (widget)
  • Mobile responsive
  • Events taxonomies
  • Export to Google Calendar or iCal
  • Numerous extensions available for added functionality

A premium version is also available. Annual subscriptions for that start at $99 and give you the following extra features:

  • Location search
  • Custom event fields
  • Elementor integration
  • Recurring events
  • Week, photo, and map view
  • Calendar shortcodes
  • Additional widgets
  • Venue and organizer pages
  • Premium support and updates

Get The Events Calendar

Modern Events Calendar

Available in free ‘Lite’ and paid ‘Pro’ versions, Modern Events Calendar is a comprehensive plugin that allows you to integrate responsive events calendars into your WordPress website. It is highly loved, with over 80,000 downloads running worldwide and a user rating of 4.4/5.0.

You will find the following features on the free Lite version:

  • Detailed settings and options, including over 50 event display layouts
  • Users can submit events
  • Full calendar, day, week, grid, countdown, etc. views
  • Shortcodes
  • Schema ready
  • Recurring events and multiple locations
  • Custom archive skins
  • Event status in the submission form
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Import from Meetup
  • Wide range of addons for extra functionality (free and paid)

Pro prices start from $75/year for a single site license and add the following features:

  • Additional views (agenda, yearly, grid, etc.)
  • Email customization
  • Ticketing and bookings
  • Booking calendar
  • Weather module
  • Payment gateways
  • Premium support

Get Modern Events Calendar

Events Manager

Events Manager WordPress event calendar plugin

Events Manager is another free offering that provides excellent features for no money. One cool feature of the latest update is the ability to make events and locations into custom post types. Other features include:

Article Continues Below

  • Single-day, recurring, and multi-day event registration
  • Bookings management and multiple tickets
  • MultiSite support
  • Multiple location types: physical and virtual events including Zoom webinar and meeting integration
  • BuddyPress support
  • Guests or members can submit events
  • Assignable event locations and Google maps
  • Event categories and attributes
  • Widgets for events, locations, and calendars
  • Easy to modify templates
  • iCal and RSS feeds
  • Export to Google Calendar
  • Time zone support
  • Advanced permissions for user management
  • GDPR compliant

A Pro version is also available for added functionality and premium support, which will cost you between $75 and $150, depending on how many sites you have. Pro adds the following:

  • Advanced email features such as event-specific emails, reminders, etc.
  • iCal email attachments
  • Coupons and discount manager
  • Transaction history
  • Customizable forms
  • WooCommerce integration
  • reCaptcha spam protection
  • Payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, etc.
  • Enhanced event import and export features
  • Premium support

Over 100,000 downloads of Events Manager exist, and users rate it 4.3/5.0 stars on average.

Get Events Manager

WP Simple Booking Calendar

WP Simple Booking Calendar

The stylish simplicity of WP Simple Booking Calendar makes it perfect for websites that don’t need masses of functions that are unlikely to be used. This makes it ideal for owners of vacation rental properties, equipment rental businesses, etc. The free version would be perfectly sufficient for those types of application as it includes the following functionality:

  • Create one calendar and display availability
  • Display a legend near the calendar
  • Easy to use interface
  • Responsive
  • Ability to add and save booking information for each day
  • Multi-language support
  • Backup and restore

If you crave more features, the Premium version costs from just $39 per year and will give you:

  • Unlimited booking calendars with a multi-calendar overview
  • Sync with sites that support iCal, e.g., Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway, etc.
  • Display multiple months, tooltips, week numbers, highlight the current day
  • Configurable first day of the week, and start month/year
  • Bulk editor
  • Create your own legend
  • User management
  • Hide booking history from your visitors
  • Shortcodes
  • Multiple calendar overview
  • Export data
  • Premium support and updates

Scoring an impressive 4.8/5.0 stars with users, more than 10,000 active downloads of WP Simple Booking calendar are in operation.

Get WP Simple Booking Calendar

My Calendar

My Calendar WordPress Event Calendar Plugin

My Calendar is a highly customizable event calendar plugin that is developer-friendly, allowing deep customization where necessary. With it, you can create multiple calendars displayed by category, location, or author, or you can show simple lists of upcoming events.

Article Continues Below

In its free form, you will get:

  • Grid, list, monthly, weekly, or daily views
  • Editable single or recurring events
  • Widgets for today’s or upcoming events, compact calendar, event search
  • Custom templates
  • Limit views by categories, location, author, or host
  • Editable CSS and JavaScript behaviors
  • User permissions to control access
  • Administrator email notifications when events are reserved or scheduled
  • Post created events to Twitter
  • Location management
  • Fetch events from remote databases such as network sites
  • Multisite-friendly
  • Integrated help page
  • Shortcode generator for customized views

My Calendar Pro costs $49 per year or $199 for life and will give you:

  • Site users can submit events (free or paid submissions)
  • Front end event editing for logged-in users
  • Create events when publishing blog posts and vice versa
  • Advanced search
  • Responsive mode
  • Import events (.ics or .csv formats)
  • REST API support for sharing events between multiple sites
  • Premium support and updates

Upwards of 30,000 active downloads of this plugin exist, which has attracted a user score of 4.7/5.0 stars.

Get My Calendar

WooCommerce Event Manager

WooCommerce Event Manager WordPress event calendar plugin

WooCommerce Event Manager will allow you to add events to your site and collect payments through WooCommerce. It can create any kind of event and is available as both free and paid Pro versions.

Despite the free version not costing a single cent, you get plenty of great features to get you started:

  • Collect payments using all gateways available in WooCommerce.
  • Cross-browser support
  • Responsive
  • SEO friendly.
  • Supports multilingual translations
  • Shortcodes for customizing events or adding them to webpages/posts
  • Manage ticket type, quantity, price, category
  • Google maps
  • Single or multiple start/end dates
  • View registered attendee list via WooCommerce order details
  • Multiple event templates for each event

The Pro version currently costs $75 and adds:

  • Attendee registration form
  • Event tickets by email or downloadable PDFs
  • Exportable attendee list
  • 24/7 priority support

Remember that your site needs to have WooCommerce installed and configured to use this plugin. The developer offers several (paid) addons to extend functionality further, so it is worth checking out their website to see if there is anything that matches your requirements.

WooCommerce Event Manager has scored a commendable 4.8/5.0 stars with users, for which there are around 8,000 so far.

Get WooCommerce Event Manager

Essential Addons for Elementor

Strictly speaking, Essential Addons for Elementor is not an event calendar plugin. It is, in fact, a plugin that adds a ton of great widgets and extensions to the popular page builder, Elementor. One of those widgets is an events calendar, which is in the free version of the plugin.

The events calendar includes:

  • Customization options for the calendar’s appearance
  • Weekday, date, events, and event popup configurations
  • Configurable first day of the week
  • Display Google calendar events
  • Add event details, links, and style every section
  • integrate with the most popular calendar tools

The great thing about Essential Addons for Elementor is it comes bundled with 43 handy widgets and three extensions for Elementor, all free of charge. You can add thirty more widgets and four extra extensions by upgrading to the Pro version, which costs a shade under $40 per year for a single site, although you don’t need the Pro version to get the events calendar.

Essential Addons for Elementor is a very loved plugin, with a staggering one million downloads to date and an excellent user rating of 4.9/5.0. This is definitely one to check out of you are just looking for a basic calendar.

Get Essential Addons for Elementor

Event Organiser

Event Organiser wordpress event calendar plugin

Event Organiser is a free WordPress events plugin that does what it says on the tin. It extends WordPress’s ‘custom post type’ to allow for the easy creation and management of single or multiple events. Furthermore, you can add widgets for the calendar, a list of events, or an event agenda directly to your site.

With this plugin, you will benefit from the following features:

  • Single, multiple, or recurring events, including complex recurring patterns
  • Edit or delete events and occurrences, with the option to delete expired events automatically
  • Create and maintain event venues
  • Google maps support
  • Year, month, and day archive pages
  • Shortcodes
  • Relative date queries
  • Assignable categories (color-coded) and tags
  • Custom permissions
  • View events by venue.
  • iCal export and import
  • Users can subscribe to events, venues, or categories
  • Range of developer functions for advanced customization
  • Translations

If you need to add booking and ticketing capability to your site, you can always upgrade to Event Organiser Pro. That costs $50/year for one domain and adds advanced event & booking management capability, plus more shortcodes and widgets. For $90, you also get five domains and extensions for iCal sync, venue markers, and discount codes. The top-tier package costs $120 for ten domains and even more extensions. Of course, all paid subscriptions include premium support and updates

Event Organiser scored 4.7/5.0 stars with users, and 30,000 active downloads exist.

Get Event Organiser

Event Calendar

Event Calendar wordpress event calendar plugin

Event Calendar allows you to connect to your database and show your events in a calendar, with day, week, month, or resource views available. What’s more, it is possible to link each event to an external URL, and dates/times are easy to manipulate.

The free version of Event Calendar comes with the following features

  • 10 included themes
  • Add photos to events
  • Intuitive event labels
  • Range of customization possibilities
  • Use it as a date picker or a full calendar
  • Shortcodes
  • Unlimited single or multiple events, including multiple events for a single day
  • Configurable event start and end date/time
  • Insert calendar into a page or post using widget or shortcodes
  • Preview before setting live

The premium version of Event Calendar adds:

  • Three customizable themes
  • Recurring events
  • Selectable weekday start
  • Enhanced customization options
  • Support and updates

The Premium version costs $15 per year for one domain or $25 for five. The plugin has been downloaded over 3,000 times and scores 4.7/5.0 with users.

Get Event Calendar

XO Event Calendar

XO Event WordPress event calendar plugin

If you need a straightforward, basic calendar plugin for events, XO Event Calendar could be the one you need. It is entirely free, so functionality is limited, but that does not mean to say it is useless:

  • Add event custom post type and taxonomy
  • Supports custom post type template
  • Display public holidays on the calendar
  • Events and holidays widget

The resulting calendars are simple but clear and colorful.

Despite its limited features, over 7,000 downloads of XO Event Calendar are active, and users have given it top marks of 5.0./5.0.

Get XO Event Calendar

Simple Event Planner

Simple Event Planner - WordPress event calendar plugin

Like XO Event Calendar, Simple Event Planner is another completely free plugin that may be perfect if you want to keep things clean and simple. It allows you to display and manage various events within your website, either in list or calendar form. Features include:

  • Time zone settings
  • Unlimited event segments
  • Ability to show or hide the options for an event
  • List, grid, calendar views
  • Search event by title (list view) or location (calendar view)
  • Events categories including templating
  • Responsive
  • Translation ready
  • Customization options
  • Shortcodes
  • Google maps
  • Image enable/disable
  • Configurable time/date formats
  • iCal and Google calendar compatible
  • Templating
  • Events and holidays widget

That’s quite a lot of functionality for a completely free plugin!

Simple Event Planner has been downloaded over 2,000 times and has a 4.5/5.0 star rating from users.

Get Simple Event Planner

To clarify, when a paid subscription expires, it does not necessarily mean the plugin will just stop working. In most cases, it is only the premium support and automatic updates that expire, and the plugin will continue to function. If in doubt, check with the developer before purchasing.

What’s Your Favorite WordPress Event Calendar Plugin?

Many WordPress calendar plugins are available. Most have free versions, so you have nothing to lose by trying them before upgrading to the premium ones. If you just need a basic event calendar, you could manage perfectly fine with a free one. However, if you need booking or ticketing features, a paid plugin or extension will be necessary.

Do you have an event or other type of calendar plugin on your website? If so, which is your favorite? Or are you looking for one, in which case, will you try one of our suggestions? Do go ahead drop a message in the comment section below.

A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.