The read · 12 Oct 2026
The Events Calendar has events sewn up
On the events side there isn't much of a contest. The Events Calendar sits at 600K+ installs, about a quarter of everything in this category, and its last release was 12 days ago. A leader that keeps shipping is the hardest kind to dislodge.
Its weak spot is its own Event Tickets add-on. It has 90K+ installs but the lowest reviews in the top ten, around 3.6 stars. That suggests many of those installs ride along with the calendar, and it's the one place where a better ticketing tool could find unhappy users.
The top of the ranking also holds two activity log tools, WP Activity Log and Simple History, at 300K+ each. They swell the category's totals without competing for anyone's bookings, so the real booking market is smaller than the headline 2.5M installs.
Appointment booking is crowded, and nobody's coasting
The real competition is in appointments. LatePoint leads at 100K+, with Amelia at 90K+, Bookly at 60K+ and Simply Schedule Appointments at 50K+. Every one of them shipped a release in the last three weeks, and LatePoint and Simply Schedule Appointments are rated close to 4.8 and 4.9 stars. These leaders are still working hard on their products, which makes a general-purpose appointment plugin a hard pitch for a newcomer.
The small plugins that are growing seem to have worked that out. The biggest climber, AllCoach, went from 60 to 300 installs by targeting coaching businesses. Host Domination's booking engine went from 10 to 100 with calendar sync for rentals. The numbers are tiny, and both picked a niche over a head-on fight with LatePoint.
The exits are in hospitality
Three hospitality closures stand out. SimplyBook.me, with 30K+ installs, was closed on 2026-09-10. Hotel Booking (nd-booking), with 4K+, followed on 2026-10-01, and Easy Hotel, at 900+, on 2026-08-17. None of the three has a recorded reason.
That leaves tens of thousands of sites running reservation and hotel plugins that no longer get directory updates. Category downloads rose 7.5% over the window, at roughly 2,400 a month per plugin, so demand isn't the problem. Events and general appointments look like moats, with strong leaders that keep shipping. Hospitality looks like an opening, because the established players there have dropped out. The data doesn't show yet whether those users will move to the big appointment tools or to vertical newcomers.
