11 Best PHP Event Calendar and Booking Scripts... and 3 Free Options

In this article, I'll review 11 of the best PHP calendar scripts. Whether you need an appointment booking script, an event calendar script, or a PHP calendar reservation system, you'll find something on this list.

There are lots of reasons you might need a PHP calendar script. If you’re a service provider, you need an appointment booking system that allows customers to see your availability and select an appointment time and date that is best for them. This makes it easier for customers to book and cuts down on needless calls to your business.

Online calendars are also handy for organisations of any size to help team members share events and tasks and keep track of what everybody is working on.

Their usefulness isn’t just limited to companies, however. Artists, writers, performers, bloggers and anyone else with an active public life could make good use of PHP calendar scripts to let followers and fans know the whens and wheres of public appearances.

What Type of PHP Calendar Script Do You Need?

When it comes to PHP event calendar and appointment booking scripts, choosing the right one can be hard. They can take dozens of forms, and finding the right one for you can be a daunting task.

To help narrow the solutions down a bit, here are a few questions to ask yourself before you get started:

Do I need to focus on events, which occur at specific times, with a large number of tickets to sell? Or on bookings, with a smaller number of services that could occur at any time?
Will I need to support only my business? Or are there others that will be included in my listings? For example, a business cooperative might need to handle bookings for multiple service providers.
Will there be a single entity that events or bookings are attributed to, or several—as in a hair studio, with several stylists available?
Do I need a script to embed into a current site, or do I need something that stands on its own?

PHP Event Calendar and Booking Scripts on CodeCanyon

There are currently almost 50 PHP event calendar and booking scripts available on CodeCanyon. Some of these scripts address very specific use cases like cleaning and laundry services. Others are more general-purpose scripts used to book all kinds of events.

All of these scripts offer the basic functionality you expect in a booking system. Some of them also have a unique set of features that includes things like generating invoice PDFs or sending booking alerts through SMS.

After you purchase any of these scripts, you will get six months of free support to help you set things up. You also become eligible for free lifetime updates.

The Best PHP Event Calendar and Booking Scripts on CodeCanyon for 2020

With all this in mind, we’ve compiled ten of our best PHP calendar, booking and event scripts available for download today at CodeCanyon. This post will help you choose the one that’s right for you.

1. Cleanto

Cleanto is ideal for many different types of service companies looking for a reliable way to provide clients with full-featured online booking.

Standout features:

PayPal, Authorize.Net, and Stripe payment methods
email reminders
auto-confirm bookings
ability to add breaks in schedule
and more

User Crossera says:

“Amazing customer support. These guys came back to me within a day with a fix for all the problems I faced. The plugin can be customized to whatever your needs are.”

2. Appointo—Booking Management System

An end-to-end solution for booking, Appointo Booking Management System takes the heavy lifting off your CMS or static site. This script provides a front-end calendar and booking system that can be easily used to mark appointments or events. Then, on the administrative side, you can manage the events and services that are available, and keep track of customers or attendees.

Standout features:

front-end booking calendar
ability to manage services and booking
point-of-sale support
customer management
support for both PayPal and Stripe

Appointo PHP Booking Management System Admin Dashboard — Appointo's admin dashboard in action

User moffei says:

“Cool and Clean Customer Support. The fastest customer support I've ever had on CodeCanyon, plus a better script for the job. I definitely recommend it.”

3. Vacation Rentals Booking Calendar

The Vacation Rentals Booking Calendar is an online vacation rental booking calendar script that allows property owners or management agencies to create and manage rental availability calendars for their vacation rental properties.

Standout features:

highly customizable
email notifications to site owner or administrator
XML and JSON availability feeds
export calendars to iCalendar format
and more

User Craignic says:

“Great product and quick support given when I had a query.”

4. NodAPS Online Booking System

The NodAPS Online Booking System promises to help you manage your appointments more easily. You can create unlimited accounts with administrative, assistant, and staff permission, and add unlimited languages to the system. You can also change the booking time and date with a drag-and-drop feature.

Standout features:

multi-provider system
seven different booking type forms
multilingual
easy to install
and more

User Jam79 says:

“Very simple to use. Fast and effective support!”

5. Laravel Booking System

The Laravel Booking System with live chat offers a great online system for booking and making appointments. Users can buy credits as a payment option and view available services, total transactions, their total credits, and administrator contact information via their dashboard.

From the administrative side, the system administrator can manage all things system related: general settings, payment settings, and user management. Admins can also manage bookings and respond to inquiries from their dashboard.

Standout features include:

live chat
multi-language support
booking and transaction history
PayPal integration
and more

User brentxscholl says:

“This plugin works great. Great code. Customer service is fantastic. We asked for extended features and they were delivered for a reasonable price.”

6. Ajax Full Featured Calendar 2

Ajax Full Featured Calendar 2 is a highly customizable personal calendar designed to help you keep organized. This is a best-selling update of another popular script, the Ajax Full Featured Calendar.

Standout features include:

PHP and JS versions with PHP classes and object-oriented programming
ability to auto-embed YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, or SoundCloud media
ability to export calendar or events to iCal format
supports recurring events
and more

User sv_fr says:

“Great script. Practical uses. Helpful support.”

7. Event Calendar

Built with jQuery FullCalendar and integrated into Bootstrap’s grid layout, the Event Calendar plugin allows users to organise and plan their events.

Standout features:

create new types of events
ability to add fields such as title, colour, description, link, and photo
Google Fonts and Font Awesome icons
and more

User teddyedward says:

“Really enjoy using your script—it's perfect for my needs. It's also well documented and easy to use.”

8. eCalendar

Quite simply, the eCalendar script is designed to keep individual users or companies organised with a calendar that allows users to add as many events as needed, as well as updating details like the event title, location, or time.

Standout features:

choice of two designs
cross-browser compatibility (IE8+, Safari, Opera, Chrome, Firefox)
events are saved in your MySQL database
fully responsive design
and more

User levitschi says:

“Everything works perfectly! Support was better than I ever expected!”

9. Laundry Booking and Management

This Laundry booking and management script serves a very specific purpose. This is good news for anyone who wants to create their own laundry and dry cleaning business. It has some great features, both for users of the service and for the business owner.

Users can book orders for services like washing, dry cleaning, ironing, etc. The user interface allows them to pick the number of different types of clothes like trousers, shirts, etc.

The business owner can get paid through a lot of payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net, among others. They will also get booking alerts via SMS.

Here are some other additional features of the script:

multiple SMS and email templates for users
guest checkout for orders
generate invoices in PDF format
staff dashboard to easily manage everything from one place

This fantastic script offers a lot of other features that you will find useful. If you are serious about starting a laundry business, you should definitely consider giving it a try.

10. BookingWizz Booking System

The BookingWizz System script has been around for over ten years now. It was added to CodeCanyon in February 2010 is still updated regularly today. And it has been receiving good reviews from its buyers all this time! So you can rest assured that it is a great booking plugin that will serve your needs well.

BookingWizz offers features like discount coupons with unique codes and expiration dates. All your sales stats are available for you to see in the dashboard. The design is also fully responsive and looks great on all kinds of devices and browsers as old as IE9.

Here are some of its other features:

unlimited calendars and events
hourly and daily bookings
integrated PayPal payments and offline payments
multilingual support
automatic booking reminder
printable PDF schedule
and more

You should try out some of its features in the live preview of the script and see if it does what you want.

11. Rezervy—Online Appointment Scheduling

Rezervy is a great online appointment scheduling and reservation booking script. It was added only recently to CodeCanyon, but the numerous five-star ratings of the script are proof of its quality.

Rezervy comes with both single-step and multi-step booking form features. The script creates a fully responsive booking system, so it looks great on large screens as well as smaller mobile devices.

There are many amazing features in this script, like:

support tickets
guest checkout
coupon discounts and recurring discounts
support for multiple currencies
manual booking
referral codes
rating and review for each appointment
and a lot more

Just try the live preview of the script, and you will be amazed by its design and functionality.

Free PHP Event Calendar and Booking Scripts

Creating a great PHP calendar script is hard. As a result, it can be hard to find quality scripts—especially for free!

That's why our recommendation is to try one of the CodeCanyon scripts mentioned in the article. They all offer a lot of features, and you will get six months of support and free lifetime updates.

Most of the free PHP calendar and event booking scripts either have a very limited feature set or have not been updated in a long time. There are some good options out there, though. Here are three of the best:

1. phpmyreservation

This is a very basic reservation plugin that you can use to take bookings for a single item like appointments with a dentist or a conference room. You can control the pricing of each reservation.

2. laravel-booking

This is a simple room-booking system based on Laravel 5.6. Laravel is a free, open-source PHP framework for creating web applications. So you need to be familiar with both PHP and Laravel to set it up.

3. laravel-google-calendar

This is yet another free PHP script based on Laravel. It allows you to easily create, delete or update any events in Google Calendar.

Tips for Using Event Calendars and Booking Scripts

Here are a few tips that you should remember when starting a business that's based on booking products and services.

1. Make Sure That the Booking System Is Responsive

People almost always have their smartphones with them. They usually also prefer to do things like booking reservations on their smartphones. If your booking system has a responsive layout that provides an amazing user experience, you will have a big advantage over your competition.

2. Don't Cram Too Much Information on the Screen at Once

Depending on the type of business that you operate, it might not always be possible to just ask users a couple of questions and book their slots. In such cases, use simple layouts that guide people throughout the booking process without overwhelming them. One great example would be the booking system by Rezervy.

Other PHP Scripts on CodeCanyon

These PHP event calendar and booking scripts just scratch the surface of what's available at CodeCanyon. There are over 4,000 PHP scripts available in the marketplace, covering everything from calendars and forms to social networking and shopping carts.