We build both of these plugins, which makes this an unusual comparison to write — there is no competitor to beat and no reason to oversell either one. What there is, instead, is a question we get often enough to be worth answering properly: two booking plugins, same platform, so which one is right for you?
The honest answer is that they are not really alternatives. They sit at opposite ends of what “booking” can mean. One is a scheduling widget; the other is the software a clinic runs on. Buying the wrong one is either overkill you will never grow into, or a ceiling you hit in month two.
The short version
- One person, one calendar, free consultations — CalNative Booking.
- Multiple staff, taking payments, keeping patient records — Alnora.
- If you need to charge for the appointment, the decision is already made — CalNative Booking has no payment layer at all.
What each one actually is
CalNative Booking is a Google Calendar booking widget. Your calendar is the database — availability is read live from its free/busy data, and every booking is written back as a calendar event. There is no separate schedule to maintain, because your calendar already is the schedule. Block out Thursday afternoon in Google Calendar and Thursday afternoon disappears from the widget. It is deliberately small: one host, one calendar, one thing done well.
Alnora is a practice-management system that happens to include booking. It has its own database of doctors, services, locations, patients and payments. The booking form is a multi-step wizard — location, then doctor, then service, then time — because a clinic has all of those things to choose between. Around that sit invoicing, medical records, a patient portal, and a GDPR toolkit. Calendar sync exists, but as an integration rather than the foundation.
That difference in architecture is the whole comparison. Everything below follows from it.
Side by side
| CalNative Booking | Alnora | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | One person | A clinic with staff |
| Price | $39/year, 1 site | Free tier; Pro $79/year, 1 site; Clinic $139/year, 3 sites |
| Source of availability | Google Calendar (live) | Its own scheduling engine |
| Staff members | One host | Unlimited doctors, own hours and breaks |
| Locations | — | Multiple branches |
| Services with prices | — | Yes, multiple per appointment |
| Taking payment | — | Stripe, PayPal, cash, deposits, refunds |
| Patient records | — | Encrypted records, prescriptions, portal |
| Reminders | Email confirmation + ICS | Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram |
| Video meetings | Jitsi, Zoom, Meet, static link | Zoom, Google Meet |
| Recurring appointments | — | Yes, payable as a course |
| Setup time | ~20 min (service account) | Longer — staff, services, payments to configure |
Reading a table like this, the temptation is to count the dashes and conclude Alnora wins. That would be the wrong lesson. Every dash in the CalNative column is a feature a solo consultant would have to configure and then ignore. Software you don’t need isn’t free — you pay for it in setup time and in every settings screen you scroll past looking for the one option you actually wanted.
Choose CalNative Booking if…
You are the only person being booked. Consultants, coaches, therapists in solo practice, photographers, tutors, solicitors taking initial enquiries. One diary, one person, no routing between staff.
Google Calendar is already how you run your day. This is the strongest signal. If your calendar is the thing you actually trust and check, a plugin that reads from it directly means there is no second system to keep in sync — and no way for the two to disagree. Everything you already do to manage your time keeps working exactly as it did.
The appointment itself is free. Discovery calls, consultations, intro sessions, viewings. If money changes hands later — after the call, on a separate invoice — that is a fine fit. If money has to change hands to secure the slot, it is not.
You want it live this afternoon. Create a service account, share your calendar with it, paste the JSON, drop in the shortcode. The only genuinely fiddly part is the Google Cloud setup, and that is a one-time twenty minutes.
Choose Alnora if…
Patients need to pick who they see. The moment there is more than one practitioner, you need per-person availability, per-person services, and a form that routes between them. That is a scheduling engine, not a calendar read.
You take payment or a deposit at booking. Stripe and PayPal, full payment or a percentage deposit, cash on arrival, itemised invoice PDFs, and admin-approved refunds. If no-shows cost you money, a deposit at booking is the fix, and it requires a plugin that handles money.
You hold clinical records. Encrypted patient records, prescription and diagnosis PDFs, private file storage, consent capture with timestamp and IP, export and erasure tools. If you are a healthcare provider handling special-category data, this is not a nice-to-have — it is the compliance baseline.
Missed appointments are a real cost. Automatic reminders over email, SMS, WhatsApp and Telegram, plus a waitlist that notifies people when a slot frees up. For a clinic with a full diary, that is revenue rather than convenience.
You want to try before paying. Alnora has a free version on WordPress.org — the honest way to find out whether the wizard fits your workflow.
The questions that actually decide it
If you are still unsure, three questions settle it faster than any feature list.
- Does the client choose a person? If yes, you need Alnora. A single-host widget has no concept of picking between practitioners.
- Does money change hands at the moment of booking? If yes, Alnora. CalNative Booking has no payment layer, and bolting one on with a third-party plugin means two systems disagreeing about whether an appointment is confirmed.
- Do you store health information about the people who book? If yes, Alnora — encryption, consent records, and erasure tools are the point.
Three noes means CalNative Booking, and the $39 is the right amount to spend. A single yes means Alnora, and the extra setup is buying you something you genuinely need.
A note on growing out of one
People ask whether starting small means a painful migration later. Worth being straight about this: there is no automatic migration path between the two. They store data differently because they model the world differently, and pretending otherwise would just produce a broken import.
In practice it matters less than it sounds. CalNative Booking keeps your appointments in Google Calendar, which is exactly where they would be if you had no plugin at all — so switching means installing Alnora, configuring it, and swapping the shortcode. Your history stays in the calendar you already own. Nothing is trapped.
Which is the real argument against buying for the business you might have in three years. Start with the one that matches how you work now.
