Contents
On this page
- Price
- Booking on your site
- Fleet, marinas and ways to sell
- Prices and discounts
- Payments
- At the dock
- Messages and connections
- Running the business
- Staff, branding and developers
- How the two editions differ
- What the unlimited sites licence changes
- Moving between editions
- From free to Pro
- From Pro back to free
Free vs Pro - Plugixa Boat Rental
The free edition is a complete booking desk for a boat rental business, not a trial. You describe your fleet and your marinas, set your prices, take bookings online and at the desk, record payments and send the customer their booking summary. Nothing in it is time-limited, and there is no limit on boats, marinas or bookings.
Pro is the same plugin plus a pro/ folder. Whether a feature exists on a site is decided
by whether its code is there. Most Pro features are apps that you switch on and off in the
App manager.
Price
| Licence | Price |
|---|---|
| Pro, single site | EUR 59 a year |
| Pro, unlimited sites | EUR 89 a year |
Both licences contain the same Pro apps. A few features are sold only with the unlimited sites licence, which the plugin calls the Agency tier. In the tables below they are marked unlimited sites in the Pro column. Everything else marked “yes” works with either licence.
Booking on your site
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
Step-by-step booking widget, as the [plugixa_boat_rental] shortcode and a block |
yes | yes |
| Booking forms you build yourself: the steps and fields a customer goes through | yes | yes |
| Search form, boat grid, a single boat and a marina map, as shortcodes and blocks | yes | yes |
| A public page for every boat | yes | yes |
| Elementor widgets for search, the boat grid, a single boat and the booking form | yes | yes |
| Live availability, checked again under a lock when the booking is written | yes | yes |
| The customer’s booking summary page, with the ways to pay | yes | yes |
| The customer’s account: their bookings, and cancelling one | yes | yes |
| Right-to-left layouts, translation-ready strings, WPML and Polylang | yes | yes |
| Request to book: you approve a booking before anything is paid | - | yes |
| Refund rules on cancellation, and paying or rebooking from the customer’s account | - | yes |
| Customers moving their own booking to other dates | - | yes |
| Verified reviews from guests who sailed, shown on boat pages and in search | - | yes |
| Unfinished booking follow-up: one email that reopens the form with the customer’s choices | - | yes |
Pages: Booking forms, Shortcodes and blocks, Boat pages and search, Elementor widgets, Multilingual, Request to book, The customer’s account, Verified reviews and Messaging.
Fleet, marinas and ways to sell
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Boats with a category, capacity, cabins, berths, engine power, fuel and licence rule | yes | yes |
| Marinas, each with its own timezone, opening hours and closures | yes | yes |
| How many boats of each kind a marina has | yes | yes |
| Buffer time before and after each booking, per boat | yes | yes |
| Three booking modes: fixed departures, free duration by the hour, and full day | yes | yes |
| Prices per hour, half day, day, week or seat, and a price per departure | yes | yes |
| Numbered units: individual hulls, so a booking can name the boat it gets | - | yes |
| Multi-day and weekly charters, with a check-in day and a minimum of nights | - | yes |
| Shared trips sold by the seat, with a minimum to run and child fares | - | yes |
| Departures timed from sunset, worked out for each day | - | yes |
| Skippers and crew: profiles, schedules and run sheets | - | yes |
| Timeline: drag a booking to move it, block out time a boat cannot be sold | - | yes |
Pages: Marinas, Boats, Units, Booking modes, Multi-day charters, Shared trips, Sunset departures, Skippers and Booking calendar.
Prices and discounts
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| The prices you set on each boat | yes | yes |
| Pricing rules: seasons, weekends and other conditions that change the rate | - | yes |
| Customer groups that pricing rules can treat differently | - | yes |
| Coupons, with a log of their use | - | yes |
| Extras a customer can add to a booking | - | yes |
| Fuel included, sold as a package, or charged on return | - | yes |
| Tax rates charged on top of a booking | - | yes |
Pages: Pricing rules, Extras and fuel, Coupons and Tax and PDF invoices.
Payments
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Pay on arrival, and bank transfer with your own instructions | yes | yes |
| Record a payment or a refund at the desk | yes | yes |
| A payment link for a booking, which opens its summary page | yes | yes |
| Card payments through Stripe Checkout, and a security hold on the card | - | yes |
| PayPal | - | yes |
| Mollie, Adyen and Klarna | - | yes |
| Deposits: part of the price now, the balance later | - | yes |
| Monthly payments before departure, through Stripe | - | yes |
| Gift cards and store credit spent on bookings | - | yes |
| Selling gift cards on your site | - | yes |
| PDF invoices | - | yes |
| Paying through your WooCommerce cart and checkout | - | unlimited sites |
Pages: Payments, Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, Adyen and Klarna, Deposits and balance, Gift cards and WooCommerce checkout.
At the dock
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Dock app: check-out and check-in on a phone, checklist, fuel, engine hours, photos, signature | - | yes |
| Walk-up sales and damage reports at the dock | - | yes |
| Waivers, ID and licence collected before departure, and a passenger manifest | - | yes |
| Self check-in codes for a key box or a lock | - | yes |
| Maintenance: engine hours, service intervals and time off sale | - | yes |
| Weather: wind and wave forecast per marina, warnings, cancelling for the weather | - | yes |
| A link to each boat’s GPS tracker page, for staff | - | yes |
Pages: The dock app, Walk-up sales and damage reports, Waivers and documents, Self check-in codes, Maintenance and Weather.
Messages and connections
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Booking and payment emails, with a calendar file attached | yes | yes |
| A log of every message sent | yes | yes |
| The reminder before a booking starts, and the daily report | - | yes |
| Desktop alerts with a sound when a booking or payment comes in | - | yes |
| SMS, Telegram and WhatsApp | - | yes |
| Calendar sync (iCal) with booking sites | - | yes |
| Webhooks to Zapier, Make, n8n or your own system | - | yes |
Pages: Emails and alerts, Messaging, Calendar sync and Webhooks.
Running the business
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard | yes | yes |
| Bookings list with filters, CSV export and a trash to restore from | yes | yes |
| Booking calendar by month or week, by marina and boat | yes | yes |
| Export bookings, customers, payments and boats as CSV | yes | yes |
| Import boats, marinas and bookings from a CSV file | yes | yes |
| App manager to switch features on and off | yes | yes |
| Reports: revenue, how busy each boat was, skipper hours, holds and gift cards | - | yes |
| Agent sales: referral links, an agents’ page, commission and monthly statements | - | yes |
| Boat owners: owners’ shares, payouts with statements, and an owners’ page | - | unlimited sites |
| Boat clubs: membership plans and members who book out of their included hours or days | - | unlimited sites |
Pages: Dashboard, Bookings, Import and export, Reports, Agent sales, Boat owners and payouts and Boat clubs.
Staff, branding and developers
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| The plugin’s capabilities, to grant with any role editor | yes | yes |
| Staff access: which WordPress roles may open the app, with which capabilities | - | yes |
| Roles and permissions: what each person may see and change | - | yes |
| Roles limited to some marinas, and more than four roles | - | unlimited sites |
| Dark appearance for the admin app | - | yes |
| Demo data: three ready-made businesses in one click, removed in another | - | yes |
| White label: your own name, menu icon, logo and footer in the admin | - | unlimited sites |
| Each site of a WordPress network kept separate | yes | yes |
| Network sites page listing every site with its bookings | - | yes |
| Copying one site’s settings to another on a network | - | unlimited sites |
REST API under pbr/v1, and actions and filters |
yes | yes |
| API keys for outside apps | - | unlimited sites |
Pages: Roles and staff access, White label and multisite, Demo data, REST API and API keys and Hooks.
How the two editions differ
At start-up the plugin looks for its feature modules in two places:
includes/Modules/<Name>/Module.php every edition
pro/includes/Modules/<Name>/Module.php Pro only
The free download does not contain the pro/ folder, so the second search finds nothing and
the Pro apps are never loaded. That has a few visible consequences.
- Pro screens are not in the free admin app. There are no greyed-out menu entries or locked pages, and the Pro apps do not appear in the App manager of a free site. Instead, the free edition has one page, Configuration -> Upgrade to Pro, that describes what Pro adds. Only people who may manage the settings see it.
- Pro REST routes do not exist in free. A request to a Pro route on a free site gets WordPress’s ordinary “no route” answer.
- Pro data has nowhere to live in free. The tables of the Pro apps are created when Pro first loads.
What the unlimited sites licence changes
The features marked unlimited sites ask the licence before they take on something new. Below that licence nothing you already set up is hidden or switched off. Roles keep being enforced, owners keep earning, members keep booking, branding stays and existing API keys keep working. What is refused is new use: a new owner or payout draft, a new membership plan or member, a new API key, a new marina limit on a role, new WooCommerce checkouts, changes to the branding other than clearing it, and copying settings between sites. The screens say so with a notice.
Moving between editions
From free to Pro
Pro installs as a second copy of the plugin beside the free one. Activate the Pro copy from the Plugins screen. Both copies use the same tables and settings, so there is nothing to migrate: your boats, marinas and bookings are there the moment Pro is active.
If both copies are active, only one runs, and a notice on the Plugins screen says that two copies of Plugixa Boat Rental are active and only one can run. Deactivate the copy you no longer need. Your bookings are shared and stay as they are. See Privacy and uninstall before you delete a copy.
From Pro back to free
Nothing is deleted. The data of the Pro apps stays in the database, but no code runs it:
- Boats and bookings are unchanged, including totals that Pro pricing, tax or extras made.
- Settings of Pro apps, such as payment keys, stay stored and are not used.
- The Pro shortcodes, such as
[plugixa_boat_rental_owner_portal], are no longer shortcodes, so WordPress prints the tag as plain text. Take them off your pages. - The online payment methods are no longer offered. Payments already recorded stay on their bookings.
Reinstall Pro and everything is live again, with each app as you left it in the App manager.
See also Troubleshooting.
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