Booked Scheduler alternatives: where the open-source version went

If you went looking for the Booked Scheduler download this year, you already know how this article starts. There isn't one. The site is still up, it still says Booked, and there is no tarball, no install guide, and no GitHub link — just a free trial button and a monthly price.

This confuses a lot of people, because Booked was for years the default answer when an office, a lab or a makerspace needed to let people reserve things. If you're running it now and wondering whether you're on a dead branch, the short answer is that you're probably fine and the project you actually want has a different name.

What happened to Booked

Twinkle Toes Software, which maintains Booked, moved it to a hosted-only model. The pricing page is unusually direct about it: "Booked Scheduler is now a fully-hosted solution. Nothing to download. Nothing to manage." One price, $15 a month with an annual agreement, unlimited users, resources and reservations, and every feature turned on — including Stripe and PayPal with custom pricing rules, floorplans and maps, an API, and SSO with MFA.

For a lot of organisations that's a reasonable deal, and I'd say so plainly. Fifteen dollars a month is less than the electricity for the box you were running it on, never mind the hour a quarter you spend patching PHP. If your objection to Booked-as-SaaS is philosophical rather than practical, fine, but be honest with yourself about which one it is before you spend a weekend on this.

The practical objections are real too, though, and they're the usual ones: your reservation data leaves your network, an annual agreement is an annual agreement, and a single-vendor hosted product can reprice or shut down in a way that a GPL codebase on your own server cannot.

The fork is called LibreBooking, and it's the one that's alive

LibreBooking describes itself without ambiguity: a fork of Booked Scheduler based on Booked's last open-source version, released in 2020, which has diverged substantially since. GPL-3.0, about 800 stars, and — the number that matters more than stars — v5.3.0 shipped on 3 August 2026, following 5.2.0 in July, 5.1.0 in June and 5.0.2 in May. That's a monthly cadence held for most of a year, with commits landing this week. For a self-hosted PHP project inherited from an upstream that walked away, that's a healthy signal, and it's rarer than it should be.

It has also modernised rather than just kept the lights on. Bootstrap 5 interface, PHP 8.2 or newer, MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.6 as the floor, published Docker images, documentation on Read the Docs, and a public demo that resets every twenty minutes so you can poke at it without installing anything. The feature set is recognisably Booked's — multi-resource booking with waitlists, role-based access control, quotas and credits per user, granular usage reporting, ics feeds for Outlook and Thunderbird — because that's what it forked.

The clearest sign of where the community landed: github.com/effgarces/BookedScheduler, which is where most old bookmarks and blog posts point, now redirects to the LibreBooking repository.

Work out which one you're actually running

Before planning anything, find out what's on the server. Three or four years of drift means people often aren't running what they think they are.

Why people move off it anyway

Having watched this category for a while, the reasons cluster into three, and they're worth separating because they lead to completely different places.

The stack is the problem. PHP and MySQL on a box you maintain is a real ongoing cost, and LibreBooking raising its floor to PHP 8.2 turned a lot of "I'll deal with it later" installs into a project. For some teams the honest answer is that the software is fine and the hosting isn't, in which case the $15 hosted plan or a Docker deployment on managed infrastructure solves it without changing tools at all.

The shape is wrong. Booked was built for internal resource reservation — staff and members booking rooms, equipment, lab time, vehicles. People keep trying to use it as a customer-facing appointment system for a business, and it fights them, because it assumes accounts, roles and quotas rather than a public booking page with a checkout.

Money. Booked and LibreBooking are scheduling systems, not commerce systems. The hosted version added Stripe and PayPal; the fork's strength is quotas and credits rather than payments. If you need a customer to pay a deposit at the moment they book, you're outside what this family of software was designed to do.

Matching the reason to the replacement

The one I'd steer most people toward is the last row, which is a boring recommendation and I think the right one. Booked users who leave usually leave because of the server, not because of the scheduler, and swapping to a different self-hosted PHP application solves nothing. Easy!Appointments is the genuine exception: if you were always trying to make Booked act like a public appointment page, it does that natively and does it well, and it's the most active project on the list by community size.

For meeting rooms and hot desks specifically, we went through those two categories in detail already — the open-source room booking comparison and the desk booking one both cover ground I won't repeat here.

Getting your data out is where this stalls

This is the part that isn't in the other comparisons, and it's the part that kills migrations.

I could not find a maintained importer for Booked or LibreBooking's schema into any of the projects above. That's a statement about my search, not a proof of absence — but I looked, and if one exists it isn't advertised anywhere obvious. What that means in practice is that moving means a MySQL dump, some scripting against a schema neither project documents for this purpose, and a decision about how much history you actually need.

That decision is usually the way out. Users and resources are small tables and can often be re-entered by hand in an afternoon. Recurring reservation series are where it gets ugly, because every system models recurrence differently and there is no clean mapping. Historical reservations are usually the largest table and the least useful — most organisations discover they need them for reporting, not for operations, and a CSV export sitting in a folder satisfies that requirement completely.

If you need to take money, none of this is the answer

I build Opencals, so treat this section accordingly, but the boundary is worth drawing because a chunk of people searching for Booked alternatives are in the wrong category entirely.

Every project above is a scheduling system: who booked what, when, and were they allowed to. If your actual requirement is a customer choosing a service, seeing a price, and paying for it — a studio hiring out rooms by the hour to the public, a workshop selling machine time, a clinic taking deposits — then you want commerce with a calendar underneath, and that's what we built. Opencals is a hosted booking API with a storefront, checkout, deposits and invoicing on top, and MIT-licensed Next.js templates and a TypeScript SDK if you want to build the front end yourself.

And the honest boundary in the other direction: Opencals is not a replacement for Booked in Booked's own territory. We have no internal resource-approval workflow, no per-user quotas or credits, and no LDAP or Active Directory integration. If your requirement is "engineering staff may book the test rig, twenty hours a month each, subject to a manager approving it," LibreBooking does that and we do not. We're also not open source ourselves, only the templates and the SDK are — we wrote up why, and where the line sits, because it's a fair thing to be annoyed about if you came here from a search with "open source" in it.