Choosing the Best WordPress Event Calendar Plugin

Are you looking for a WordPress event calendar plugin that fits your needs?

When choosing a WordPress event calendar plugin that is suitable for you, it’s necessary to first examine its features, user-friendliness, and pricing.

Some WordPress event calendars have basic features such as simple event creation, while others come with advanced features such as event ticketing and front-end event submission. The advanced features are used on dedicated event organization websites. For example, events ticketing (for event payments) and the front-end event submission features allow community members to post their events from their end.

Choosing a WordPress calendar that is easy to use and within your budget is paramount.

In this blog post, we’re going to look at some of the WordPress event calendar plugins and their functionalities.

Sugar Event Calendar

One reason that Sugar Event Calendar is the best WordPress event calendar is its ease of use. The free Sugar Calendar (Lite) comes with all the features that you need for simple event creation, such as:

1. Integration with Google Maps and Ninja Forms (download)
2. Simple Event Management                                                  9.  Easily Set Event Dates
3. Beautiful Admin Interface                                                    10. Easily Set Event Start and End Time
4. Ajax Enabled Calendar View                                              11. Events Archive, Listed by Start Date
5. Customize date and time format/display                            12. Large and small calendar views
6. Event Calendar Custom Taxonomy                                    13. Events Custom Post Type
7. Widgets for displaying calendars and event filters
8. Shortcode for showing the calendar of events

Sugar Event Calendar paid version features include priority support, recurring events, pro add-ons (advanced recurring, event ticketing, frontend event submissions, calendar feeds, and event URLs). The price start from $49.

The best part of using the Sugar Event WordPress calendar

Whether you use the free or paid version of Sugar Event WordPress Calendar, you can integrate it with Ninja Forms and enjoy all the benefits that come with Ninja Forms, such as:

• Accept payments for your event using a variety of payment methods: 
  Stripes, Paypal, Authorize.net, Recurly, Elavon, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.
• Allow your event attendees to upload any format and size of files to the form.
• Easily connect the form to your favorite CRM and convert your event attendees to leads.
• Export the event attendee’s form submissions as PDFs, Excel files, or even Google Sheets.
• Use conditional logic to respond conditionally to attendees’ choices on your form.

Step 1: Install the Sugar Events Calendar and Ninja Forms plugins

The first thing you do is to install the free Sugar Calendar (Lite) and the free Ninja Forms.

Next, let’s look at the three steps for installing and embedding a Sugar Event WordPress calendar with Ninja Forms.

Step 2: Create a Sugar Event Calendar

When the Sugar Calendar (Lite) and Ninja Forms have been successfully installed, the Calendar and Ninja Forms buttons will also appear on the dashboard menu.

Click Calendar > Calendars > Add Calendar.

Name the calendar, fill in other details (these are optional), such as the slug name, color, and description, and then click the Add Calendar button.

With that, you have created one calendar, and you can create as many as you wish.

Step 3: Create the events.

Click Event > Add Event. The dialog box that appears will allow you to fill in your event’s details, such as:

* name
* duration (days and time)
* location, other details,
* and event’s image.

Fill in the details that are appropriate for your event. Then,  choose the calendar you want your event to be saved as.

Now, to embed the Ninja Form to your WordPress calendar, click the Add Form button, and pick your WordPress form.

Timely All-in-One Events Calendar

Timely All-in-One Events is a WordPress calendar plugin that can create and manage events. The WordPress Calendar has a free package and customized paid tailored packages for small, medium, and large organizations.

The Timely All-in-One Events WordPress calendar features include:

• Allow or disallow your audience to subscribe to your calendar.
• Search box to search for events by keyword, as well as by date, month and year.
• Filtering events by categories, tags, organizers and venues.
• Duplicate events.
• Set the timezone of your events, and display it on either yours or your website visitors’ timezone.
• Single day, multiple days, all day, never end events, and recurring events, including complex patterns.
• Display your public calendar on week, month or agenda views.
• Social share buttons, so your audience can share events directly from your calendar.

My Calendar

My Calendar is another WordPress event calendar plugin that comes in both free and paid versions. The paid version comes with advanced features, and pricing starts at $59.00 per year.

My Calendar features include:

• Calendar grid or list views of events
• Month, multi-month, week, or daily view.
• Widgets: today’s events, upcoming events, mini calendar, event search
• Customize templates for event output
• Limit views by categories, location, author, or host
• Editable CSS styles.
• Edit or add single dates in recurring events
• Rich permissions handling to restrict access to parts of My Calendar
• Email notifications when events are scheduled or drafted
• Post to Twitter when events are created (using WP to Twitter)
• Manage locations
• Fetch events from a remote database. (Sharing events in a network of sites.)
• Multisite-friendly
• Shortcode Generator to create customized views of My Calendar

The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar comes in both free and paid versions. The paid version, which comes with advanced features, starts at $99.00 per year.

• Widget: Upcoming events list
• Event search, Events Taxonomies (Categories & Tags)
• Google Maps integration
• Google Calendar and iCal exporting
• WP REST API endpoints
• Completely ajaxified for super smooth browsing
• Completely responsive from mobile to tablet to desktop
• Internationalized and translated

Which WordPress calendar will you pick?

There you have it. Today, we’ve discussed the benefits and features of some of WordPress’s most popular event calendar plugins, including our favorite, the Sugar Event Calendar.

Not only is the Sugar Event Calendar easy to use, but it also comes with a free version, Sugar Calendar (Lite), which comes with all the basic features you need to create an event.

Furthermore, you can easily embed your Sugar Event Calendar with our free Ninja Forms core plugin. The free Ninja Forms core plugin comes packed with a bunch of awesome features like calculations, unlimited submissions, submission management, spam protection, and more.

Check out all the features that come included for free in the Ninja Forms core plugin!