The read · 2026-08-17
The top is settled, and it's not lazy
The Events Calendar holds roughly a quarter of all installs in this category, sitting above 600K, and it shipped a release 12 days ago. That combination is what makes this category hard to enter. Dominant plugins usually get slow, and this one hasn't. Amelia pushed a release three days ago, Simply Schedule Appointments six days ago, Bookly and Event Tickets both within ten. Across the twelve biggest plugins here, only MotoPress's Timetable has gone quiet, at 55 days since its last release, and even that isn't neglect by most standards.
Appointment scheduling is the one place where the order still looks unfinished. LatePoint is over 100K and Amelia is close behind at 90K, both actively maintained and both rated well by users. Neither has the runaway position The Events Calendar enjoys on the events side, so that's where a genuine contest is still running.
The churn is all happening in the basement
Everything moving this quarter is tiny. Shore Booking Widget went from around 800 installs to over 2K, the largest real climb on the board, and it still sits 113th. The rest of the risers are plugins going from 40 installs to 100, or from nothing to 200. On the other side, RepairBuddy slipped from 500 to 400 and a handful of niche booking tools dropped from 70 to 50. None of it changes anything at the top.
Four plugins left the directory outright. Booking calendar, Appointment Booking System closed on 31 July with 3K+ installs, vcita's scheduling plugin closed the same day with 1K+, Tourfic closed on 5 August with 2K+, and Rdv360 closed on 4 August. wp.org recorded no reason for any of them.
Well-served, and shrinking
Demand looks thin against the field. 976 plugins share about 2.5K downloads each per month, and category downloads are down 45.7% since mid-May. A drop that steep over three months is real, though the data doesn't show what's behind it.
This is a moat, not an opening. Openings appear when incumbents are weak, and these ones aren't: 562 of the tracked plugins are in good shape by our maintenance measures, and the leaders are among the healthiest. A newcomer here would have to beat well-maintained software in a market that's buying less of it.
The top is settled, and it's not lazy
The Events Calendar holds roughly a quarter of all installs in this category, sitting above 600K, and it shipped a release 12 days ago. That combination is what makes this category hard to enter. Dominant plugins usually get slow, and this one hasn't. Amelia pushed a release three days ago, Simply Schedule Appointments six days ago, Bookly and Event Tickets both within ten. Across the twelve biggest plugins here, only MotoPress's Timetable has gone quiet, at 55 days since its last release, and even that isn't neglect by most standards.
Appointment scheduling is the one place where the order still looks unfinished. LatePoint is over 100K and Amelia is close behind at 90K, both actively maintained and both rated well by users. Neither has the runaway position The Events Calendar enjoys on the events side, so that's where a genuine contest is still running.
The churn is all happening in the basement
Everything moving this quarter is tiny. Shore Booking Widget went from around 800 installs to over 2K, the largest real climb on the board, and it still sits 113th. The rest of the risers are plugins going from 40 installs to 100, or from nothing to 200. On the other side, RepairBuddy slipped from 500 to 400 and a handful of niche booking tools dropped from 70 to 50. None of it changes anything at the top.
Four plugins left the directory outright. Booking calendar, Appointment Booking System closed on 31 July with 3K+ installs, vcita's scheduling plugin closed the same day with 1K+, Tourfic closed on 5 August with 2K+, and Rdv360 closed on 4 August. wp.org recorded no reason for any of them.
Well-served, and shrinking
Demand looks thin against the field. 976 plugins share about 2.5K downloads each per month, and category downloads are down 45.7% since mid-May. A drop that steep over three months is real, though the data doesn't show what's behind it.
This is a moat, not an opening. Openings appear when incumbents are weak, and these ones aren't: 562 of the tracked plugins are in good shape by our maintenance measures, and the leaders are among the healthiest. A newcomer here would have to beat well-maintained software in a market that's buying less of it.
