Amelia books appointments. Do you run events?

What Amelia is, and who it suits

Amelia is a WordPress booking plugin. Its site describes a step-by-step wizard in which a customer picks a service, a staff member, a location, a date and a time, then pays. Staff schedules and shared resources such as rooms or equipment limit which slots appear.

It also has an events module. According to its own pages, events can be shown as a list or a calendar, can have more than one ticket type, and can take deposits. Its site says waiting lists for events come with higher plans, and that events can recur.

It suits businesses that sell time: salons, clinics, tutors, studios, consultants. If that is you, you are shopping for the wrong thing in an events plugin. Read on only if the events are the main job.

The real difference: a slot or a seat

An appointment is a slot. One customer, one provider, one time, and the plugin’s job is to stop two people taking the same slot. An event is a seat in a shared room. Many people attend the same thing at the same time, and the job is to count them, cap them and tell them when to arrive.

That changes what the software spends its effort on. A booking tool puts work into availability rules, buffers and staff calendars. An events tool puts work into recurring dates, headcounts, waitlists, reminders and a public page people can share.

Amelia can stretch toward events, and Eventonomy cannot stretch toward appointments. We say that plainly because it is the first question to settle. Decide which side of that line your business sits on before you compare features.

Where the two models overlap

Some services look like events. A group class has one date and a capacity. A workshop has a fixed start and a ticket price. Amelia handles those through its events module, and Eventonomy handles them as its main job, so for these you can use either.

The difference shows up in what surrounds the class. If you also need staff availability, rooms that cannot be double-booked and a customer account for rebooking, a booking tool is the better base. If you need a public calendar, shareable pages, a series, a headcount and a mailing to everyone who signed up, an events tool is.

The cost of guessing wrong is real. Be wary of buying a booking suite only for its events module, or an events plugin only to fake appointments. Each ends in a workaround you maintain forever.

How an event runs in Eventonomy

Follow one weekly class through the plugin, with the tier at each step.

1. Create the event. Title, description, venue, organizer and cover image in the editor. Free.
2. Set the repeat. Weekly, every week, ending when you choose to stop. Daily, weekly and monthly are free; yearly and “the last Friday” rules need Pro.
3. Take sign-ups. Visitors RSVP going or maybe, with a guest count if you allow one. They can be guests or members. Free.
4. Set the room size. Capacity applies to the event, and overflow joins a waitlist that promotes the next person when someone cancels. Free.
5. Ask what you need to know. Custom questions such as experience level or dietary needs. Ten answer types, off until switched on. Free.
6. Remind them. A day before and an hour before, automatically. Pro adds custom timing and SMS.
7. Welcome them. Pro checks people in at the door from a QR ticket.

If one session is cancelled, you cancel that date and the rest of the series carries on. You cannot move a single date to a new time; cancel it and add a one-off event instead.

Showing the events to visitors

Visitors can browse the same events as a grid, a list, a month calendar or an upcoming list, all in the free plugin. They are native blocks, so they pick up your theme’s fonts and colors. Pro adds week and day grids, a map view and geocoding.

Free also publishes a calendar feed that people can subscribe to, and every event has an add-to-calendar link. If your classes run online, an event can carry a join link that registrants see near the start time.

Selling tickets, and who pays whom

In the free plugin you can define free, donation and paid ticket types, but a paid checkout needs Pro. Until then a paid event shows a plain notice that online sales are not available yet, rather than a button that goes nowhere.

With Pro, the buyer picks tickets in the same panel as the RSVP, sees a live summary, and is sent to a hosted payment page: Stripe, PayPal, or your WooCommerce checkout with whatever methods you have there. Pro also does coupons, early-bird pricing, tax, booking fees and PDF invoices, with full refunds from the attendee screen.

We take no fee per ticket. You pay your gateway’s normal charges and your Pro licence. Amelia’s payment story is geared to bookings, with deposits and several gateways on its paid plans, which is a good fit for services and a different shape from event tickets.

If several hosts sell tickets

Pro can track a platform fee and an earnings ledger per organizer, with manual payout exports or opt-in Stripe Connect. That suits a site where hosts sell their own tickets and you keep a share.

Letting members and hosts submit events

Many sites that outgrow an appointment tool do so because other people want to list events. Eventonomy has a front-end member dashboard in the free plugin. A host adds an event, edits it, duplicates last month’s event, and sees who signed up, without ever seeing wp-admin.

You control the door with a minimum role, a cap on events per person and an approval queue. In approval mode every submitted event waits as pending, and approving or rejecting it emails the host. Your own events are never held.

Pro goes one step further for hosts who already keep a calendar elsewhere. A member can connect an iCalendar address, or an Eventbrite account with their own token, and the events flow into the site on a schedule, going through your approval queue if you use one.

Amelia’s site describes customer panels for managing bookings. A host-facing flow for adding listings was not described when we looked, so check the vendor if you need one. For a studio with visiting teachers or a community with many organizers, this is the feature that settles it.

What each costs to run

Both are WordPress plugins on your own hosting, so you carry hosting, updates and backups. Amelia’s site shows only paid tiers on its own pages, with annual and lifetime options, and its wordpress.org listing offers a free edition that holds some features back. Check those details before you budget.

Eventonomy’s core is free, and Pro is a paid yearly licence. If you let it lapse, your site keeps working and Pro features keep running; updates and support stop, and the mobile app connection needs an active licence. See Free vs Pro for the split.

The bigger cost is attention. A booking tool needs you to model every service, staff member and rule. An events tool needs you to publish dates and answer attendees. Pick the work you would rather do.

Attendee data and privacy

All registrations and orders live in your own WordPress database, in the plugin’s own tables, not scattered across posts and comments. You can export attendees to CSV from the admin screen, and organizers can export their own events from the front end.

Privacy requests are handled by the standard WordPress tools. Exporting personal data includes a person’s RSVPs and orders. Erasing anonymizes the RSVPs while keeping the seat, and keeps financial order records for tax reasons.

Each email includes an unsubscribe link, and suppression is respected afterwards. Removing all plugin data on uninstall is an opt-in setting, off by default.

Messaging the people who signed up

Appointment tools send a confirmation and a reminder per booking. Events need a different kind of message: one note to everyone coming, such as a room change, a parking tip or a cancellation.

From the attendee panel an organizer can email everyone registered for an event. Confirmation emails go out when someone registers or cancels, and the reminders above go out on their own. Pro adds custom email templates and SMS through Twilio.

Delivery depends on your host’s mail setup, so test it before launch. Our docs include a short guide to email deliverability, and a transactional mail service is a sensible habit for any site that sends reminders.

Moving events over from Amelia

There is no Amelia importer. Our one-click importers read The Events Calendar, EventON, Events Manager, WP Event Manager and Sugar Calendar from your database, and we also take CSV and iCalendar files. Amelia is not on the list, so say plainly to your team that this is a manual move.

Your realistic routes:

• Rebuild. Best if you have a dozen upcoming events or fewer.
• CSV. Export event rows to a spreadsheet and import them in the free plan. Only a title is required.
• A developer script. Someone can create events through the REST API. That is custom work, not a feature.

Bookings, customers, appointments and payments stay in Amelia. We do not carry them across, and you should not delete Amelia until you have exported what your records require.

Launch checklist

1. Decide which pages stay with Amelia (appointments) and which move (events).
2. Install Eventonomy on a staging copy and add a calendar to a test page.
3. Recreate your next month of events and compare dates and time zones.
4. Test an RSVP as a guest, as a member and on a full event.
5. If you charge, connect a gateway and run a real test order and refund.
6. Check the member dashboard with a non-admin account if hosts will submit.
7. Review everything at phone width before you go live.
8. Link the old events page to the new one.

Running next to the rest of your site

Eventonomy is one of several separate, optional plugins from one team. They run on the same WordPress site and the same login, and you install and update each yourself.

The two real connections are narrow. The BuddyPress connection ships in Eventonomy Pro and adds an events tab to groups and profiles when BuddyPress is active. The BuddyNext connection ships in BuddyNext Pro and needs only free Eventonomy: members can RSVP from the feed card. See the ecosystem page.

For everything else we only say that they run side by side, not that they are wired together. That includes Jetonomy for forums and Q&A, Learnomy for courses, Listora for directories, WP Career Board for jobs, WP Sell Services for a services marketplace, WB Gamification for points and badges, and the BuddyX Pro and Reign themes.

If you already run a booking plugin, the sister products matter less to you than the fact that two plugins can share one login and one theme. Keep the appointment desk where it is and add events beside it, then judge after a month whether both earn their place.

None of these is required, and Eventonomy runs fine on a site that has only WordPress, a theme and itself. Add the others one at a time, and only when you can say what job each will do.

That is a real trade. A hosted booking suite is one bill and one login. Separate plugins give you more choice and more to maintain, and you own all the data.

Other alternatives worth a look

• Tickera is built around selling tickets and scanning them, with no appointment layer.
• Event Espresso goes deep on registration forms and group orders.
• Events Manager is a free events plugin with bookings built in.
• The Events Calendar is calendar-first and widely used.
• Eventbrite is a good fit when strangers should find a public event.
• Meetup wins for a group that needs a network to find members.

The side-by-side table is on Eventonomy vs Amelia.

What Eventonomy does not do, and who should stay

We are not an appointment or staff scheduling tool. There is no service catalog, no per-staff availability, no buffer time and no slot picker. We do not sync a staff calendar, and we do not rebook an attendee to a different time slot.

Within events, a ticketed waitlist is manual, refunds are whole-order, and there is no Amelia importer. Check-in is Pro, and it works through a QR link opened on a signed-in staff phone.

Stay with Amelia if your revenue comes from bookings, if your team lives in its staff calendars, or if events are a side line to a service business. Choose Eventonomy if the thing you sell is a gathering. Many sites will want both: an appointment plugin for the desk and an events plugin for the room. See the events plugin overview for what you would be adding.