6 Best WordPress Event Plugins for Calendars, Tickets and Registrations

There are many WordPress event plugins, which one works for you depends on your requirement.

In our comparison, Sugar Calendar came out as the best WordPress event plugin for most sites, The Events Calendar proved to be better for large event sites needing many addons, and Charitable Events covers nonprofit fundraising.

For this article, we tested top six event plugins on a live site to compare their features and find out how far you can get with the free versions.

This guide breaks down what each plugin offers, which features require an upgrade, and whether the price is worth it for your needs.

💡Best WordPress Event Plugins Compared

Event Plugin	Best For	Pricing
Sugar Calendar	Calendar, tickets and RSVPs in one plugin	Free + paid from $49.50/yr
The Events Calendar	Large event sites with many add-ons	Free + paid from $399/yr
Charitable Events	Nonprofit galas, runs and fundraising events	Requires Charitable Pro, from $199/yr
WPForms	Custom event registration forms	Free + paid from $49.50/yr
Events Manager	Free bookings	Free + paid from $89/yr
Smash Balloon Facebook Feed Pro	Showing Facebook events on your site	Free + paid from $49/yr. Events Sync needs Elite, $149/yr

Which Kind of Event Plugin Do You Need?

There are four jobs an event plugin can do, and the right pick depends on which one you need.

To show what’s coming up on a calendar, use Sugar Calendar. You can compare more options in our guide to the best WordPress calendar plugins.

Sugar Calendar also lets you sell event tickets, letting you manage your events and ticket sales in one place.

To take registrations with your own questions attached, use WPForms and its drag-and-drop builder.

And to raise money from an event, use Charitable Events, which turns every ticket into a donation against a campaign goal.

How We Test and Review Event Plugins

We go beyond feature lists to see how each event plugin performs in real situations. For this update, we installed all six plugins on a test site and tried four common tasks.

• Selling tickets to a paid event. We created a ticket, completed a purchase, and checked the checkout experience and confirmation email.
• Managing free RSVPs. We checked whether guests could confirm their attendance without paying or connecting a payment provider.
• Scheduling recurring events. We tested whether each plugin automatically generated dates for events that repeat on a schedule.
• Checking in attendees. We looked at how each plugin handles guests arriving at the venue.

If a feature required a paid upgrade, we’ve explained that in the relevant plugin review so you know what’s included before you commit.

Why Trust WPBeginner?

At WPBeginner, we have been helping people start their WordPress websites since 2009. We have used a bunch of different event plugins to help you pick the best option.

Our recommendations are the result of extensive testing, personal experience, and regular user feedback collection. For more details, see our editorial process.

1. Sugar Calendar – Best for Running the Whole Event in One Plugin

Best For	Sites that want a calendar, ticket sales and an attendee list without connecting separate plugins
Pricing	Free Lite version. Paid plans from $49.50 for the first year (renews at $99/yr).
Pros	• Works with Charitable Events and Smash Balloon • Paid plans start cheaper than the other premium options in this list • The free version is fully functional, so small venues can run events without paying
Cons	• RSVP settings and a second ticket type appear in the event editor, but both require a separate paid addon • You must connect a payment method before setting ticket prices because the Price field stays locked

Sugar Calendar gives you the tools to run events in one place. You can manage your calendar, sell tickets, and keep track of attendees without having to piece together different plugins.

That makes it a good choice for most websites.

The free version does more than most free event plugins. You can publish a calendar, take registrations and sell tickets through Stripe straight away. Sugar Calendar adds a 3% service fee per order on the free plan, on top of Stripe’s own fee.

That fee goes away with the Event Ticketing addon, which comes with the Plus plan and above.

Our Experience

We started by checking whether Sugar Calendar’s free version sells tickets, and it does.

Without connecting Stripe, our test event still displayed a working ‘Buy Tickets’ button with the price set to Free, and checkout opened normally.

That makes it a good fit for free workshops and community events, too.

You can also limit ticket availability. We capped our test event at 80 tickets, and the event page displayed “80 available” beneath the ticket selector.

Registration forms let you collect more than names and email addresses. We added a dropdown for volunteer roles and a text field for access needs, and both appeared at checkout as expected.

We especially liked that each attendee can submit their own answers. Someone buying four tickets can provide details for all four guests.

Recurring events, however, require a paid plan.

We set up a weekly class, and Sugar Calendar generated ten dated occurrences over the next three months, with each one appearing as its own calendar entry.

Sugar Calendar also supports two-way Google Calendar sync and one-click Google Meet links for online events.

Another useful addition is Gia, an AI assistant that creates events from a sentence, edits existing events, and answers questions about registrations.

It comes with the free plugin as well as the paid plans, needs WordPress 6.9 or newer, and only works on a live site that Sugar Calendar’s service can reach.

We tested Gia by typing one sentence that asked for a free beginner photography walk this Sunday afternoon. Gia asked us to pick a title, then showed a summary with the right date, time and location.

Once we approved the summary, Gia saved the event as a draft for us to review and publish.

We also asked for a 30-person limit, and Gia told us it couldn’t enforce one without the RSVP addon. It added the limit to the event description instead, and each event we created used about 26 of the 5,000 monthly AI credits on the Elite plan.

One limitation caught us out. The RSVP tab displays settings for capacity, phone numbers, and attendee lists, but none work until you install a separate addon. The only indication is a small install link at the bottom of the panel.

Despite that, Sugar Calendar is the plugin we’d choose first for most websites. See our full Sugar Calendar review for a closer look.

Set Up Sugar Calendar in 5 Steps

First, install and activate the Sugar Calendar plugin. If you need help with that part, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once it’s active, create a calendar by going to Events » Calendars and clicking ‘+ Add Calendar’. Then, give it a clear name that visitors will recognize, such as “Workshops” or “Community Events.”

If you create more calendars later, visitors can use these names to find and switch between the events they want to see.

Next, add your first event from Events » Add New.

Enter the name, then set the start and end times under the ‘General’ tab, and add a location if the event happens somewhere physical.

Then, to sell tickets for that event, open the ‘Tickets’ tab inside the event and toggle the switch to on. You can set a price here if you’ve connected a payment method, and switch on ‘Limit Capacity’ if the room only holds so many people.

Finally, put the calendar on your site. Open the page where you want it, add the ‘Events Calendar’ block, and choose which calendars it should display.

After that, click the ‘Publish’ button to store your settings. Your event will now be live on your site.

2. The Events Calendar – Best for Large Event Sites

Best For	Sites running many events across multiple venues and organizers
Pricing	Free core plugin. Pro $399/yr, Elite $599/yr.
Pros	• The most established option on this list, with plenty of support resources • Works with Charitable Events, so nonprofits can keep their existing calendar • Includes venue and organizer pages in the free version
Cons	• Paid plans start at $399 per year, the highest entry price on this list • Ticketing always needs a second plugin alongside it, on the free and paid plans

The Events Calendar is the biggest event plugin in the WordPress ecosystem, with more than 600,000 active installs.

It gives every venue and every organizer its own page, which matters when you run events across several locations and want each one to have a findable home on your site.

Your visitors can also subscribe to your calendar in their own apps.

Our Experience

The Events Calendar focuses on managing your events, so if you want to sell tickets, you’ll need its free companion plugin, Event Tickets.

We installed it alongside The Events Calendar on our test site and found that it supports payments through Stripe, PayPal and Square.

The catch is that the free plan charges a 2% commission on ticket sales processed through Stripe and Square, which Pro removes. You’ll also need to keep both plugins updated.

Paid plans bring more features, but they come at a higher price. The Events Calendar offers Pro at $399 per year and Elite at $599 per year. This does not reduce the number of plugins you run.

Instead, Pro gives you commission-free ticket sales, WooCommerce integration, event imports from Google Calendar, Meetup, and iCalendar, plus support for recurring, virtual, and hybrid events.

You also get seven calendar views with filters, community event submissions, custom attendee registration forms, and QR code check-in. This lets volunteers scan a code on each attendee’s phone at the door.

Elite adds assigned seating with a seat map builder and hold timers, plus email promotion campaigns with audience segmentation.

There’s also a four-plugin bundle from Liquid Web that includes The Events Calendar, LearnDash, Give, and Kadence. It starts at $350 per year for one site, which costs less than buying The Events Calendar on its own.

If you only run a few events each year, Sugar Calendar offers a more affordable way to manage them.

However, The Events Calendar makes more sense for larger event operations with multiple venues, several organizers, and more complex scheduling needs.

For a closer look, see our full The Events Calendar review.

3. Charitable Events – Best for Nonprofit Fundraising Events

Best For	Nonprofits running galas, runs and ticketed fundraisers
Pricing	Included in the Charitable Pro plan, $199 for the first year (renews at $399/yr).
Pros	• Works out the tax-deductible amount of each ticket for the receipt • Works with your existing calendar instead of replacing it • Pairs with the free version of Sugar Calendar, so you don’t pay for the calendar itself
Cons	• Requires Charitable Pro, $199 for the first year (renews at $399/yr) • Best suited to fundraising events. Other plugins are cheaper for straightforward paid events

Charitable Events treats every ticket sale as a donation toward your campaign goal, keeping your event revenue and fundraising totals in one place.

That single difference is why a nonprofit should look here first rather than at a general event plugin.

You can create as many ticket types as the event needs, and each one gets its own price and its own capacity, so a gala can offer a VIP table and general admission from the same page.

Setting a ticket’s price to zero gives you a free RSVP ticket for supporters who want to attend without paying.

Our Experience

One feature we really liked was the ‘fair market value field’ for each ticket type. This lets you record the value of what attendees receive in return for their payment, such as dinner at a gala.

Charitable uses that amount to calculate the tax-deductible portion of the ticket. For example, if a gala ticket costs $200 and dinner is worth $75, the receipt shows $125 as the deductible amount.

Supporters can also add an extra donation at checkout. Since they receive nothing in return for that contribution, the extra amount is fully deductible.

We also found that each attendee gets a unique QR code on their receipt. Volunteers can check guests in using a link on their phone, without needing a WordPress account.

If someone accidentally shares a link, you can cancel all outstanding links at once.

The calendar integration was another useful surprise. When you enable ‘Show on Calendar’ for a Charitable event, it appears on Sugar Calendar or The Events Calendar while tickets and receipts remain in Charitable.

You can also turn an existing calendar event into a fundraiser. We found a ‘Charitable Fundraising’ panel in the Sugar Calendar event editor on our test site.

If your events are primarily for fundraising, Charitable Events is the strongest fit. It’s the only option we tested that treats ticket purchases as donations and calculates the deductible portion for receipts.

You can learn more in our Charitable review.

4. WPForms – Best for Custom Event Registration Forms

Best For	Events that need specific questions answered at signup
Pricing	Free WPForms Lite. Paid plans from $49.50 for the first year (renews at $99/yr).
Pros	• Flexible signup forms with custom questions • Embed forms on any page without adding a calendar • Used across our own brands, so we have the most first-hand experience with it
Cons	• No built-in calendar for displaying event schedules • Payments on the free plan and the two lower paid plans carry a 3% platform fee, which only Pro and Elite remove

WPForms is our top pick when the registration form matters more than the calendar.

It comes with event registration templates you can start from, and the drag-and-drop builder means you can add whatever fields your event needs without touching code.

At WPBeginner and our other brands, we use WPForms for our own contact, registration and job application forms.

Our Experience

We built a registration form that asked for dietary requirements, volunteer preferences and session choices, which is well beyond the name and email most event signups collect.

WPForms’ AI form builder can make the process even easier. Instead of adding every field manually, you can describe the registration form you need in a prompt, and the AI builder creates a form with relevant fields.

You can then review the result and customize it to suit your event. If you prefer a quicker starting point, WPForms offers pre-made form templates that you can customize.

You can take ticket payments through Stripe, Square or PayPal on every plan, including the free one. On WPForms Lite, Basic and Plus, WPForms adds a 3% platform fee on top of the card processor’s fee.

Pro and Elite remove that fee. They make sense once ticket sales grow.

Overall, we’d choose WPForms when customized signup questions matter more than displaying an event schedule. You can learn more in our WPForms review and our guide on how to create an event registration page in WordPress.

Alternative: If you need a calendar view of your registrations, Formidable Forms is worth considering. It can display form submissions on a calendar, although this feature requires at least the Plus plan at $89.55 for the first year, which renews at $199 per year. See our Formidable Forms review for more details.

5. Events Manager – Best Free Plugin for Taking Bookings

Best For	Sites that need real bookings with no budget at all
Pricing	Free plugin. Events Manager Pro $89/yr on the current sale (regular price $129/yr).
Pros	• Offers more free features than any other plugin on this list, with no time limits • Actively maintained, with 60,000 sites using it
Cons	• Free version only suits events with in-person payments or no payments • Less beginner-friendly interface, with settings spread across multiple screens

Events Manager is the most generous free event plugin we tested.

Its free version handles the whole booking flow rather than stopping at a calendar, which is rare in a plugin that costs nothing.

Our Experience

We tested the free version of Events Manager to see how much we could do without upgrading and were pleasantly surprised.

For example, you can create several ticket types for the same event, each with its own price and booking limit. This is useful if you want to offer different ticket options or limit how many people can book each one.

The biggest hurdle is payment collection. If you want to accept payments online through PayPal, Stripe, or Square, you’ll need Events Manager Pro.

The same goes for custom booking form fields and QR code check-in, which can be helpful when you need to collect extra details from attendees or manage arrivals at the door.

We appreciated that the plugin clearly lists these limitations instead of making the free version sound more capable than it is.

If you need a feature-rich booking system on a budget, then Events Manager is the right pick.

6. Smash Balloon Facebook Feed Pro – Best for Facebook Events

Best For	Sites whose events already run on a Facebook Page
Pricing	Free Smash Balloon plugin. Events Sync needs the Elite plan, $149 for the first year (renews at $298/yr).
Pros	• Syncs Facebook events with your website, avoiding duplicate work • Displays Facebook posts, photos, and reviews beyond event listings
Cons	• Event syncing is locked to the top Facebook Feed plan, so a calendar is an expensive reason to buy it • Works alongside a calendar plugin rather than replacing one

We recommend Smash Balloon Facebook Feed Pro if you already manage your events on Facebook. It syncs those events to a calendar on your website, so you don’t have to create and update the same listings in two places.

Our Experience

We liked that Smash Balloon saves you from creating the same event twice.

We set up Events Sync on our test site with the Elite plan. Under Facebook Feed » Settings, open the Events tab and turn on Events Sync.

Smash Balloon detected both Sugar Calendar and The Events Calendar on our site, which means you can keep the calendar plugin you already use.

Before you can pick a Facebook Page, you need to connect it as an events source in the Feed Builder. After that, the plugin syncs every hour, twice a day or once a day, and a ‘Sync Now’ button runs it right away.

You can also import each event’s cover image along with the details. According to Smash Balloon, changes you make on Facebook update the calendar event, and events you cancel or delete on Facebook are removed from your calendar.

The main catch is the price. Event syncing requires Smash Balloon’s Elite plan, the top tier for the Facebook Feed plugin, at $149 for the first year. That makes it harder to justify if you only need a calendar.

Still, if your community already follows your events on Facebook, Smash Balloon makes it easier to bring those listings to your own website. See our Smash Balloon review for more details.

How to Show Upcoming Events on Your Site

A full calendar is useful for planning ahead, but visitors often just want to see what’s coming up next. Sugar Calendar’s Events List block gives them a simple list of upcoming events, making it a good fit for your homepage or sidebar.

To add one, insert the ‘Events List’ block into your page and choose which calendars to display. You can control how many events appear, group them by week, and enable or disable the search box and filters.

You can also turn on ‘Featured Events’ to show only events you’ve marked as featured. It’s useful when you want to highlight a few important dates instead of displaying every upcoming event.

For the best visibility, place the list near the top of your homepage or sidebar, where visitors can spot upcoming events without having to search for them.

If you run a nonprofit, Charitable also offers an Events List block for displaying fundraising events.

Which Is the Best WordPress Event Plugin?

For most websites, Sugar Calendar is the best WordPress event plugin, because it covers the calendar, the tickets and the attendee list on its own.

Larger event sites with multiple venues and organizers may get more out of The Events Calendar, which offers more advanced tools but comes with a higher price tag.

Nonprofits running fundraising events should consider Charitable Events. It treats ticket sales as donations and helps track them toward your fundraising goal.

For a custom registration form, WPForms gives you the most control, and payments work on every plan.

If you need bookings on a shoestring budget, Events Manager is the free option that goes furthest.

And if your events already run on a Facebook Page, Smash Balloon Facebook Feed Pro keeps them in step with your website without you entering anything twice.

WordPress Event Plugin FAQs

What is the best free event calendar plugin for WordPress?

Sugar Calendar Lite and Events Manager are the two strongest free options. Sugar Calendar Lite publishes calendars and sells tickets, but recurring events and RSVPs need a paid plan.

Events Manager takes real bookings for free, but online payments, custom booking questions and QR check-in all need Pro.

What is the best event registration plugin for WordPress?

WPForms is the best event registration plugin, because its drag-and-drop builder lets you ask the questions your event needs.

Payments work on every plan, with a 3% platform fee until you reach Pro. If you want registration attached to a calendar instead, Sugar Calendar’s registration forms cover that.

How do I sell event tickets in WordPress?

The easiest way is with Sugar Calendar, which sells tickets through Stripe from the same plugin that runs your calendar. The free version charges a 3% fee per order, and free tickets work with no payment provider connected at all.

For the full process, see our guide on how to sell event tickets using WordPress.

Can a nonprofit sell tickets as donations?

Yes, Charitable Events records every ticket as a donation against a campaign goal. Each ticket type carries a fair market value, which is the portion the donor gets something back for, and Charitable subtracts it so the receipt shows the correct tax-deductible amount.

It’s available on the Charitable Pro plan and up.

How do I show upcoming events in WordPress?

Add Sugar Calendar’s Events List block to any page or sidebar and choose which calendars it should display. For the block settings and where to place the list, see how to show upcoming events on your site above.

We hope this guide helped you find the right event plugin for your site. You may also want to see our picks of the best WordPress RSVP plugins and our expert pick of the best WordPress themes for events and conferences.

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