WordPress Plugins for Recurring and Multi-Day Events
Here is the test that separates event plugins, and it takes four minutes. Create a weekly series running for a year. Open the eleventh occurrence, change its start time by an hour, and save. Then check occurrences ten and twelve. If they moved too, or if the series has quietly become 52 unlinked events, you have found the failure that will cost you an afternoon in November.
Recurrence breaks more event software than any other requirement, because a recurring series is a promise about the future that has to survive being edited in the middle. This article covers why that is genuinely hard, the specific failures to test for, and how the main plugins price, including one whose free tier takes 3% of every transaction.
Verified August 2026. Prices confirmed against vendor pages.
Why recurrence is the hard part
There are two ways to store a repeating event and both have a cost. You can store a rule, “every second Tuesday”, and generate occurrences as needed, which keeps the database small and makes editing the whole series trivial. Or you can materialise every occurrence as its own record, which makes individual edits and per-occurrence ticketing natural and makes changing the series a bulk operation over hundreds of rows.
Most plugins pick one and then bolt on the other, and the seams are where things break. A rule-based system struggles to let you cancel one week; an occurrence-based system struggles to let you move all the remaining ones. Neither approach is wrong, but knowing which you have bought explains every quirk you will meet.
Then there is the part almost nobody gets entirely right: time zones and daylight saving. A class at 7pm every Thursday must stay at 7pm local time when the clocks change, which means the stored UTC time shifts twice a year. Systems that store fixed offsets rather than named zones drift by an hour for half the year, and the symptom appears months after you built the series.
The 6 options compared
1. Sugar Calendar
The one that treats recurrence as a first-class feature rather than an add-on, and it shows in the patterns it supports: not merely weekly and monthly but “every second Tuesday” and “the last Friday of the month”, which is the vocabulary real schedules use.
Crucially, recurring events are available across all tiers, so you are not forced up a ladder to get the thing you came for. Pricing runs Basic at $49.50 a year for one site, Plus at $99.50, Pro at $199.50 for three sites and Elite at $299.50 for ten, at an introductory discount against regular pricing of $99 to $599. Ticketing is included throughout, with Basic limited to Stripe and the higher tiers adding WooCommerce and multiple ticket types; RSVP management starts at Plus. There is no free version, and a 14-day money-back guarantee applies.
- Price: $49.50 to $299.50 a year, 1 to 10 sites
- Recurrence: All tiers, with complex patterns
- Best for: Classes and schedules with awkward repetition
- Watch out for: No free version; RSVP needs Plus
2. The Events Calendar
The most-installed ecosystem in this space and the one with the deepest recurrence handling, at a price that reflects it: Essentials $259 a year, Pro $399, Elite $599. Pro is the tier that also removes ticket commission fees; Elite adds email marketing and custom seating maps.
What the money buys is the infrastructure around recurrence rather than recurrence itself: venues, organisers, filtering, multiple calendar views, and a long history of edge cases already found by somebody else. For a site whose identity is its calendar, a school, a venue, a membership organisation with a weekly programme, that maturity is worth the difference. For three events a year it is not, and the free Event Tickets plugin from the same team covers simple ticketing without a calendar subscription.
- Price: $259 Essentials, $399 Pro, $599 Elite, a year
- Recurrence: Deepest handling and most mature edge cases
- Best for: Sites that are fundamentally an events calendar
- Watch out for: The most expensive option here by some way
3. Eventin
The best value in the category if you need more than one site. Standard is $89 a year for two domains, Premium $149 for a hundred and Agency $299 for unlimited, with lifetime licences at $109 single site, $299 for a hundred domains and $499 for unlimited.
Read the free-versus-paid line carefully, because recurring events are a Pro feature. The free version covers unlimited event creation, basic ticketing, speaker management, email automation, attendee registration and WooCommerce integration, which is a generous free tier that happens to exclude the exact thing this article is about. If recurrence is your requirement, price the $89 Standard tier directly rather than trialling free and being surprised. At that price it is less than half of most alternatives, and the hundred-domain Premium tier at $149 is difficult to beat for an agency.
- Price: $89/yr for 2 domains; $149 for 100; lifetime from $109
- Recurrence: Pro only, not in the free version
- Best for: Agencies and anyone running several sites
- Watch out for: The free tier will not do what you need here
4. Event Espresso
Registration-oriented rather than calendar-oriented, which suits training providers and anything where the form matters more than the listing. Core is $129 a year and All Access $399, both for one live site plus staging, with recurring events and check-in apps included in both.
The number to notice is on the free tier. Decaf is free and charges a 3% platform fee per transaction, while Core and All Access are explicitly 0% pay-as-you-go. On £10,000 of registrations that fee is £300 a year, so Core at $129 costs less than the free version the moment you pass roughly £4,300 in sales. It also excludes recurring events and check-in entirely. Decaf is a genuine free option for a small unpaid programme and an expensive one for anything selling seriously.
- Price: Decaf free with a 3% fee; Core $129; All Access $399
- Recurrence: Core and above, not in Decaf
- Best for: Course and training registration
- Watch out for: The 3% free-tier fee overtakes Core quickly
5. Modern Events Calendar
A free Lite version covering calendar views and event listings, with Pro at $99 a year for one site, $199 for five and $999 for unlimited. Recurring events, bookings and tickets all sit in Pro.
Its strength is the presentation layer. If your requirement is a calendar that looks like a designer built it, with a wide range of views and heavy styling control, MEC is the one people choose on appearance and keep for the same reason. The five-site tier at $199 is competitively priced; the jump to $999 for unlimited is steep against Eventin’s $299, so count your sites before assuming the ladder is comparable. Note also that Webnus does not offer lifetime licences on individual products, so this is a permanent annual cost.
- Price: Lite free; Pro $99, $199 for 5 sites, $999 unlimited
- Recurrence: Pro only
- Best for: Sites where the calendar’s appearance matters most
- Watch out for: No lifetime option; unlimited tier is expensive
6. Not using recurrence at all
Free, and the correct answer more often than it is offered. If you run a weekly class, you may not need a recurring series in software. You may need one page describing the class and a booking system for slots.
The distinction is whether each occurrence is genuinely a separate thing. A conference with a different programme each day needs distinct events. A yoga class that is identical every Thursday needs a single page, a schedule, and a way to book, which an appointment plugin does better and more cheaply than any calendar. Recurrence in event software exists to produce many listings; if nobody needs to browse a list of your Thursdays, you are buying complexity to solve a display problem you do not have. The same logic applies to a series of ten workshops: ten ordinary events, created once, avoid every editing hazard described above.
- Price: Free, or the cost of a booking plugin instead
- Recurrence: Sidestepped rather than managed
- Best for: Identical repeating sessions and short fixed series
- Watch out for: Manual creation gets tedious past about twenty events
Comparison table
| Plugin | Entry price | Recurrence tier | Sites | Free version |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sugar Calendar | $49.50/yr | All tiers | 1 to 10 | None |
| The Events Calendar | $259/yr | Paid tiers | Tier-dependent | Tickets only |
| Eventin | $89/yr, 2 domains | Pro only | 2 to unlimited | Yes, no recurrence |
| Event Espresso | $129/yr Core | Core and above | 1 plus staging | Decaf, 3% fee |
| Modern Events Calendar | $99/yr | Pro only | 1, 5, unlimited | Lite, no recurrence |
| Skip recurrence | Free | Not applicable | Any | Yes |
Test the series before you publish it
Every plugin here handles the simple case. Run these six checks on staging before you commit a year of dates to a live site, because each one corresponds to a real support thread somebody has already lived through.
- Edit one occurrence in the middle. Change its time, then check the occurrences either side. Did the change stay where you put it?
- Cancel a single date. A bank holiday, say. Confirm it disappears from the calendar without breaking the series or the ones after it.
- Change the whole series from a point forward. Move the time from January onwards and confirm past occurrences keep their original times, since attendees have those in their diaries.
- Cross a daylight saving boundary. Build a series spanning the clock change and verify the local time holds. This is the failure that surfaces months later.
- Sell a ticket to one occurrence. Confirm the attendee is attached to that date and not to the series, and that capacity is tracked per occurrence.
- Check the calendar and the feed. View the series in every layout you will use, then export to a calendar application and confirm it arrives as a series rather than as a single event.
For multi-day events, add one more: create an event running Friday to Sunday and check it appears on all three days in month view rather than only on the first, and that the listing shows a date range rather than a start time.
Related guides
Frequently asked questions
Can I sell tickets to individual occurrences?
In most paid plugins, yes, but confirm that capacity is tracked per date rather than across the series. Selling twenty places for a series when you meant twenty per week is a memorable mistake.
How many occurrences can I generate?
Practically, limit an open-ended series to a year or two. Occurrence-based systems create a database row for each date, and an indefinite daily series generates thousands of records that slow every calendar query.
What about events crossing midnight?
Test it specifically. A club night from 10pm to 3am is a common case that some calendars display across two days and others truncate. If it applies to you, it belongs in your evaluation rather than your launch.
Do recurring events hurt SEO?
They can, if every occurrence generates a near-identical indexable page. Check how the plugin handles canonical URLs across a series, and prefer one that treats the series as the canonical entity.
Can I import a recurring series from Google Calendar?
Sometimes, and the recurrence rule frequently does not survive, arriving instead as many separate events. Import a test series before migrating a real programme.
Which is best for a weekly class?
Consider a booking plugin rather than an event calendar. Classes are usually a scheduling problem wearing an events costume, and appointment software handles capacity, cancellations and reminders more directly.
The verdict
For recurrence specifically: Sugar Calendar from $49.50 a year, because complex patterns work in every tier and you are not paying for a calendar ecosystem to get them.
If you manage several sites: Eventin at $89 a year for two domains or $149 for a hundred, with a $109 lifetime single-site licence that undercuts everything here. Budget for Pro from the start, since the free version excludes recurrence.
If your site is genuinely a calendar: The Events Calendar from $259, where the maturity around venues, filtering and views justifies the price.
And if you are on Event Espresso’s free Decaf tier, do the arithmetic. That 3% per transaction overtakes the $129 Core licence at around £4,300 of sales, and Core is where recurring events and check-in live anyway.
