In our review we have found several free Appointment plugins that have offered some of our guideline features, but inevitably they have resorted to  extensions or 3rd party add-ons to fill in major scheduling gaps. In contrast, there is a new wave of tools that take advantage of AJAX UI methods  to cleverly automate choosing a service plus booking date and time for an appointment. Thus, the top Appointment  Schedulers are  two premium plugins that deliver a good portion of our guideline features. Here they are in alphabetical order.

Amelia Appointment Scheduling

Amelia is a premium plugin [$59US per site with unlimited updates] that delivers an easy to use front end  for booking  and  has a superior set of backend  layout setup  screens for creating the input booking forms and associated notifications, calendering and payments. In addition, Amelia has an Administration Dashboard that allows convenient central management of the overall Appointment schedules.

The frontend for clients shows flexibility in handling multiple locations – employees – services bookings. There are three methods for client entry of a booking:  The first is a Search screen for finding a specific service on a given date::Designers have custom control on colours and layout of this form which is particularly useful with websites with many services and specialists.

The second booking form  form ia a general Service Catalog which starts with a list of service and specialist:

This example shows a Beauty Salon but the form works well for a Dental Clinic or Consulting group – see here for some live demo examples.

The third client input is multi-step Booking Input Wizard which takes the customer through a series of 3 steps to make an appointment:

This is similar to the Bookly Input Wizard but shorter by 2 steps. Also Amelia allows for customization of all its Booking Input Forms with color, font type,  label changes along with added Custom Field Types. Finally the Input Form shortcodes used  by Amelia can be part of PageBuilder layout with background image, border, and other dramatic  stylings.

Amelia Backend Features

As a developer, I pay more attention to the backend features for 3 reasons. First, It is the backend that sets up the look and layout of the Booking Input Forms. It is important that these be as easy as possible to create and edit so that the client staff will be able to takeover and enhance the Client Booking Input Forms. Simply put,  customers expect  basic conveniences while making their Bookings. So the backend setup and operations of the appointment have to make it so.  Here is how Amelia’s routines and tables for  Services, Appointments, Notifications, Calendars setup those features.

Here is the setup of Services by category, label, image, duration of treatment and price. But there are many more optional settings including Buffer-time Before, Buffer-time After, Minimum no.served, Maximum no.served, Group attendees if Maximum Number-served is greater than 1. Employees Assigned is a required value; but Extras, their duration and costs are optional. Finally, once filled in the a Service can be edited by an admin or designated users, The edit command affords complete access to the Service setting A service can be copied and deleted but only by an administrator.

This is an example of the Appointment’s table:

and all the information that is available to administrators monitoring the daily appointments [ monthly, weekly and timetable views of this data are also available].. There are added ways to filter and sort data in the table

Also, linking in the Calendar, Notifications, and Payments  on a Booking  is critical to the success of an Appointments system.

This Notifications table  is typical of what Amelia has available for all aspects of Appointment Scheduling such as settings for Calendars, Employees, Locations,   and Finances/Payments.

The crucial admin feature is the Program Dashboard which summarizes for the Client all of the key trends in the shop. This is particularly valuable for multi-service, multi-employee, multi-location shops – let us see how the Amelia Dashboard is done.

There a variety of financial reports but my favorite is the trends in appointments as seen here:This report gives a clear idea when and how business is trending either by employee, service or location.
Then there is a group of  useful operational reports:
Again this is the strength of Amelia – showing relevant data about the Appoitments in many different ways – helpful organization andbreakouts.So lets look at how meets the Appointment Scheduling Guidelines.

Amelia meets all 4 of the Hire Characteristics – it could be used for hiring a person, a space or equipment with any duration. The one concern is delivery conideration but that might be picked up by Amelia’s Extras.
Amelia meets 2 1/2 of the Hiring Clients requirement. Amelia handles Single and Group clients well but does not directly address the first timers training or warranty issues directly.. Again, Extras are available for warranty and Custom Fields to alert employees of special requirements. As for Pricing Strategies, Amelia gives owners full capabilities in all 4 areas.
Amelia’s provision for Payments covers PayPal and Stripe but no other payment gateway. There is also provision for coupons, discounts,  partial payments and prepay but not in bulk.
Amelia’s Calendaring setup is robust . Through Google, Calendars listings are available for  Clients and Employee. At the same time  Backend Administrators. have a variety views by Month, week, day, and time table for appointments. And theis a calendar breakout by location or service. However, Amelia does not address mobile responsiveness directly and may be dependent on the PageBuilder used and/or PWA/AMP implementations. Also syncing with other calendar clients requires backend coding.
Amelia is also strong on Notification capabilities supporting both eMail and SMS confirmation , change in status and day-before reminders  Reschedules are posted to the Employees calendar. Finally, Amelia does provide a number of Special Services including Client can cancel/reschedule booking, location info shown on Google Map, Admin Dashboard Calendar master schedule, Employee Calendar updates for booking, rescheduling, or cancellation. But Amelia does not have  a library of extra cost extensions or add-ons. Instead, if you buy Amelia from CodeCanyon for $59US, for one website you will get all the plugin’s future updates. In sum, it is hard to go wrong with Amelia for Appointment Scheduling.