The Booknetic WordPress Plugin allows you to manage appointments from right within your WordPress dashboard. With its quick setup, easy-to-use interface, and ability to customize bookings, the plugin makes appointment management simple. Plus, customers can easily manage their own bookings through the plugin’s customer-facing portal. Read our full review below to learn more about how this plugin works and what it excels at.
Booknetic WordPress Plugin: The Good and the Bad
WordPress plugins like Booknetic can add a lot of functionality to your site. Booknetic, in particular, helps you keep track of your upcoming appointments, customer preferences, payments, and more. Still, there are a few areas where we believe it has some room to grow. We’ll cover all the strengths and weaknesses of the Booknetic WordPress plugin below.
What Booknetic WordPress Plugin Is Good At
We’ll start our Booknetic WordPress Plugin review with the top benefits you can get by using this booking plugin. Not only is it easy to navigate from the backend, but it also simplifies the process of appointment setting for both you and your customers.
Back-end calendar: The core feature you want from appointment booking software is an easy way to manage and organize bookings. The Booknetic WordPress Plugin stands out with its user-friendly calendar module that keeps track of both appointments and your employees’ schedules. Having everything on one calendar that you can also sync with Google Calendar is invaluable when keeping an eye on your daily to-do items.
Switch between monthly, weekly, or daily views to get the view of tasks and appointments you need. The calendar module also lets you add, edit, and approve appointments straight from your WordPress dashboard. Booknetic simplifies everything to make booking management easy.
Customer discounts: The Booknetic WordPress Plugin includes features that can keep your customers coming back, like customer discounts and coupons. From the dashboard, you can add new promotions, specify the services they’re for, and apply a usage cap if necessary. The plugin supports percent-off or dollar discounts for customers to use when they book an appointment with you, as well as expiration dates for time-sensitive promotions.
Multi-language support: Booknetic’s plugin features a visual translator module that lets customers book appointments with you in their preferred language. Site visitors simply use a drop-down menu to select their language of choice and you can add language files for ones that aren’t already included. The plugin even works well with languages read right-to-left. Unlike other plugins that require additional plugins for this support, this is built into Booknetic’s base offerings.
Payment deposits: When you create a service through the Booknetic WordPress plugin, you can specify whether that service requires a payment deposit. For instance, a high-price appointment might require you to block out a few hours of your day, and a deposit can help ensure that the spot remains booked. This is helpful for customers, too, to hold their spot on your calendar. You can set the amount for a deposit, and your customers will have access to the same payment methods to pay for it as they would for full bookings.
Lifetime license: When you buy the Booknetic WordPress Plugin, you pay a one-time fee for a lifetime license. Therefore, you don’t need to budget for a monthly or annual subscription, and you can access all updates to the plugin for free. That’s a huge differentiator, since so many other WordPress plugins use a subscription-based payment model.
Feature suggestions: Booknetic, as a company, is quite responsive to its users’ needs and wants. The company has a full page of its website dedicated to suggestions from its customers. Anyone can suggest a new feature, upvote a suggestion they agree with, and comment on an already-made suggestion. Plus, if you need immediate help or feedback, you can log into your Booknetic account and easily submit a ticket for quicker assistance.
What Booknetic WordPress Plugin Is Lacking
We thoroughly appreciate the Booknetic WordPress Plugin for its dedication to its customer needs and the flexibility it gives the plugin so that business owners can provide a functional booking service to their customers. However, there are a few ways we believe the plugin could improve.
Built-in advanced features: Booknetic packs a decent number of features into its plugin that are included in the regular license, like its organized calendar, group appointments, and deposit payments. However, there are also many features you might want to include in your license that cost extra, available as add-ons ranging from $19 to $49 each.
For example, custom booking forms, online invoicing, and coupon discounts are only available with paid add-ons. One feature we were especially surprised to learn was only available as an add-on is email notifications, which send confirmations and reminders of booked appointments to your inbox. This is a feature that booking software usually includes for no additional cost. That being said, at the time of this writing, the email notification add-on has been discounted to free (it’s usually $19), which is something you should take advantage of if you choose to add Booknetic to your WordPress site in the near future.
Free trial: Free trials or limited free versions are essential for customers to make a buying decision, especially with plugins that could affect a client base. Unfortunately, Booknetic’s plugin is only accessible after you pay for a license. The silver lining is that the regular license for Booknetic’s basic features isn’t pricey, and you can always use it for a while before buying add-ons if you find you need them.
Mobile access: Currently, you can only manage and view appointments from a computer or mobile browser via the WordPress dashboard. While the Booknetic dashboard is easily accessible from the WordPress dashboard, a mobile app for administration would be a welcome addition, making it more convenient for managers to organize and track bookings while they’re out of the office.
Booknetic WordPress Plugin Pricing & Options
Booknetic offers both its WordPress plugin that we’ve reviewed in this post and a separate SaaS service for companies that book appointments for other companies. Since we’re just focused on the Booknetic WordPress Plugin review we’ll break down their license price and some of the optional add-ons for enhancing and customizing your plugin.
Booknetic WordPress Plugin Pricing
The Booknetic WordPress Plugin runs $79 for a regular license. The regular license includes six months of support and all future updates at no extra cost. Because it’s only a one-time fee, you won’t need to budget for future subscription payments. You can also extend support to 12 months for an additional one-time fee of $27.75.
The plugin’s built-in features include:
- The booking widget
- Customizable workflows
- A company calendar for bookings and staff
- Local payments and payment links
- Support for multiple company locations
- Deposit payments
- Integration with ReCAPTCHA.
The Booknetic WordPress Plugin can be tailored to your company’s needs through add-ons, which require additional one-time payments on top of the $79 license. Let’s go into some of the key add-ons you can bolster Booknetic’s WordPress booking plugin with.
Booknetic Payment Gateway Add-Ons
Booknetic’s payment gateway add-ons are $19 each. These options let you add additional payment methods to your bookings, giving customers more convenient ways to pay for your services. Booknetic includes add-ons for Razorpay, Square, Mollie, Stripe, and PayPal.
Local payments and credit cards are included in Booknetic’s base cost. However, modern businesses may prefer choosing one or two payment gateways to assist customers who use other preferred payment methods. You can also create convenient payment links to send to customers to use with your add-on payment methods.
There is a separate add-on of $29 for integrating the Booknetic plugin with WooCommerce, if that’s the ecommerce platform you’re running your business and online store on.
Booknetic Workflow Add-Ons
Your business can sync the Booknetic WordPress Plugin with your workflows for better visibility.
These come in two flavors currently: add-ons for getting notifications via certain channels and a webhook add-on.
Add WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS notifications to Booknetic for $19 a piece. Email notifications are normally $19 as well, but are able to be added to the plugin for free at the time of this post’s writing (which may be a limited-time offer).
The webhook add-on runs $39 and lets you unlock custom integrations built through Zapier or IFTTT. It’s actually really easy to build HTTPS requests using this feature, opening up a ton of possibilities for syncing Booknetic with other platforms in your company’s tech stack.
Booknetic Customer Management Add-Ons
Several customer management add-ons are available for between $19 and $29. They run a wide gamut from customer engagement to incentivization and invoicing.
The Waiting List add-on is among the most useful, adding a feature that keeps customers on a waiting list for their preferred appointment if that slot is already booked. The Zoom integration can also be helpful for creating an appointment waiting room for virtual appointments. Both cost $29.
If you want to give customers a way to manage their appointments and set up profiles for recurring service, you can add the customer panel feature for $29. You can also add the ability for them to rate and review your service for the same price.
Gift cards and coupons have to be unlocked via add-on. The former costs $19, letting you create digital vouchers for customers for use on a current or future booking. This also adds a gift card payment option to the checkout screen that allows a customer to take the amount of the gift card off the booking cost.
Additionally, Booknetic’s coupons and donation features are each $29. The donation add-on lets customers donate money for a service, similar to adding a tip or even offering monetary appreciation for a free service. The coupon add-on allows custom coupon codes with dollar or percent-off discounts for customers to use on bookings, letting you run promotions to boost bookings.
Many companies may benefit from the tax add-on, which connects to the booking system to add multiple types of taxes needed for various locations. It costs $29 and automates some of the process of calculating and adding sales and service taxes to your booking payments.
Invoices for Booknetic are available as a $19 add-on. This feature creates invoices for your booked appointments automatically, with the option to save, print, or send them to your staff or customers.
Summary
The Booknetic WordPress Plugin can help small businesses, freelancers, and entrepreneurs manage their clients’ service bookings straight from within their WordPress dashboard. The plugin’s multi-language support and ability to meet customer needs through custom booking processes, discounts, and payment methods make it stand out among competitors. Although the add-ons can drive up the price tag, we believe they will really help some business owners design a custom plugin that truly fits their appointment setting and management needs.
