Contents
Free vs Pro - Plugixa Car Rental
The free edition is a complete rental desk, not a trial. You describe your fleet, set your locations and rates, take bookings online and at the desk, record payments and issue invoices. Nothing in it is time-limited or switched off, and there is no limit on cars, locations or bookings.
Pro is the same plugin plus a pro/ directory. Whether a feature exists on
a site is decided by whether its code is there, never by a check made while the
feature runs.
Price
| Licence | Price |
|---|---|
| Pro, single site | €39 a year |
| Pro, unlimited sites | €59 a year |
Booking on your site
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Step-by-step booking form: search, choose a car, extras, details, done | yes | yes |
Placed with the Car rental booking block or the [plugixa_car_rental_booking] shortcode |
yes | yes |
| Live availability, checked again by the server when the car is held and when the booking is made | yes | yes |
| A car held for the customer while they fill in their details | yes | yes |
| Extras such as a child seat or an additional driver, priced per rental or per day | yes | yes |
| Coupon codes, percentage or fixed | yes | yes |
| Your own questions on the booking form, such as a flight number | yes | yes |
| Colours and look of the form, under Booking form style | yes | yes |
| Customer booking page: open the booking from the emailed link, find it by reference and email, cancel it under your rule | yes | yes |
| Printable invoice for the customer from their booking page | yes | yes |
| Pay online by card through Stripe | - | yes |
| Pay through PayPal | - | yes |
| Pay part now, the rest at pickup | - | yes |
| Book and pay in other currencies, at exchange rates you set | - | yes |
| Driver’s age asked, cars kept to drivers old enough, young and senior driver surcharges | - | yes |
| Delivery to and collection from the customer’s address, priced by road distance | - | yes |
Start the form at a desk with a link ending in ?pcr_location= and the desk’s ID |
yes | yes |
Map: a locator page of your desks with [plugixa_car_rental_map], and a map to choose the pickup desk in the form’s first step |
- | yes |
| Invoice as a PDF on the customer’s booking page | - | yes |
| Sign the rental agreement on screen and download it as a PDF | - | yes |
Fleet and locations
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Vehicle categories | yes | yes |
| Vehicle models with seats, luggage, gearbox, fuel, image, deposit, minimum driver age and mileage limit | yes | yes |
| Vehicles: each physical car with its plate, VIN, colour, odometer and home location | yes | yes |
| Duplicate plates refused however they are typed | yes | yes |
| Any number of pickup and return locations | yes | yes |
| Weekly opening hours with split shifts, a timezone per location | yes | yes |
| Closures for a date or a range of dates | yes | yes |
| An after-hours fee for handovers outside the opening hours | yes | yes |
| A turnaround time between two rentals of the same car | yes | yes |
| Vehicle inspections at pickup and return: damage map, photos, fuel and odometer | - | yes |
| Calendar sync: feeds for your own calendar, a feed per car for other booking sites, and their bookings read back in | - | yes |
Prices
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Daily rates per vehicle model | yes | yes |
| Length-of-rental brackets, such as 1-2, 3-6 and 7+ days | yes | yes |
| A rate for every location, or one for a single location | yes | yes |
| A grace period before a late return costs another day | yes | yes |
| Pricing rules: seasons, weekdays, length of rental, how far ahead it is booked, models and locations | - | yes |
| Pricing calendar showing the daily price of each model | - | yes |
| Tax rates per pickup location, added to the price or included in it | - | yes |
Payments and documents
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Pay at pickup | yes | yes |
| Bank transfer, with your own bank details and instructions | yes | yes |
| Record a payment taken at the desk | yes | yes |
| Record a refund | yes | yes |
| What is paid and what is owed, worked out from the payment record | yes | yes |
| Numbered invoices, issued when a rental is completed, never changed once issued | yes | yes |
| Invoices printable by your desk | yes | yes |
| Card payments and refunds through Stripe Checkout | - | yes |
| PayPal payments and refunds | - | yes |
| PDF invoices, downloaded from the booking and emailed when issued | - | yes |
| Signed rental agreements kept as PDF files | - | yes |
Messages
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmation email to the customer | yes | yes |
| Cancellation email to the customer | yes | yes |
| New booking email to your desk | yes | yes |
| Text messages to customers through Twilio or Vonage | - | yes |
| Telegram alerts to your team’s chat | - | yes |
Running the desk
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard: pickups and returns today, cars on rent, overdue returns, the last 30 days | yes | yes |
| Bookings list with search, filters and CSV export | yes | yes |
| Export CSV on every list, matching the search and filters on screen | yes | yes |
| Customers’ bookings in WordPress’s Export and Erase Personal Data tools | yes | yes |
| Booking detail with status changes from pending to completed | yes | yes |
| Taking a booking at the desk, priced and checked like one from the site | yes | yes |
| Unpaid holds that expire and free the car | yes | yes |
| Trash with restore | yes | yes |
| Command palette to jump to any screen | yes | yes |
| App Manager to switch features on and off | yes | yes |
| Reports: revenue, bookings and fleet utilisation by model and location | - | yes |
For developers
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
REST API under plugixa-car-rental/v1 |
yes | yes |
| Actions and filters, see Hooks | yes | yes |
| Capabilities to grant with a role editor | yes | yes |
| REST routes for Pro features: pricing calendar, reports, inspections, PDF invoices, calendar sync, delivery | - | yes |
The Pro pages are Pricing rules, Pricing calendar, Reports, Tax rates, Stripe, PayPal, Pay part now, Driver age, Currencies, Inspections, SMS and Telegram, Delivery, Calendar sync and Map. The PDF part of Invoices is Pro too.
How the two editions differ
At start-up the plugin looks for 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/ directory at all, so the second
search finds nothing and the Pro modules are never created. That has several
visible consequences.
- No feature asks for a licence before it runs. If
pro/is on disk, its features run. - Pro screens are not in the free admin app. There are no greyed-out menu entries and no locked pages. The Pro features also do not appear in the App Manager of a free site.
- Pro routes do not exist in free. A request to
/reports/rentalsor/pricing-calendaron a free site gets WordPress’s ordinary “no route” answer, not an upgrade message. - Pro tables are not created in free. Pricing rules, tax rates, inspections and calendar imports get their tables when the Pro modules first load.
- The Pro engines are not attached. Pricing rules, tax, driver age and delivery are listeners on the plugin’s own price filters. In free nothing is attached, so a booking costs the rate, the extras, any after-hours fee, less any coupon.
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 fleet, locations, rates and bookings are there the moment Pro is active.
If both copies end up active, only one runs, and a notice on the Plugins screen says “Two copies of Plugixa Car Rental are active. Only one can run”. Deactivate the copy you no longer need. Your rental data is shared and stays as it is.
Deleting the copy you no longer need is safe. Deleting keeps the data by default, and even with the erase switch on, nothing is erased while another copy of the plugin is still installed. See Privacy and uninstall.
From Pro back to free
Nothing is deleted. What changes:
| Pro data | What happens without Pro |
|---|---|
| Pricing rules | Kept in the database, but nothing applies them. New bookings use the rate brackets only. |
| Tax rates | Kept. No tax is added to new bookings. Existing bookings keep their tax lines. |
| Driver age, delivery | The settings stay stored. The form no longer asks for an age or an address, and no surcharge or delivery fee is added. |
| Currencies | The exchange rates stay stored. New bookings are in your main currency. |
| Stripe, PayPal, pay part now | The keys stay stored. Only the free payment methods are offered. Payments already recorded stay on their bookings. |
| Inspections | Kept, with their signed agreements. The screens to view them are gone. |
| PDF invoices | The invoices themselves stay, printable as before. Only the PDF file is gone. |
| Calendar sync | Feeds stop answering and imports stop. Cars blocked by imported bookings are free again. |
| Text messages, Telegram | The settings stay stored. Nothing is sent. |
| Map | The key and the map settings stay stored. [plugixa_car_rental_map] is no longer a shortcode, so WordPress prints the tag as plain text, and the booking form shows its desk menu without the map. |
| Existing bookings | Unchanged, including totals that rules, tax, surcharges or delivery changed. |
Reinstall Pro and everything above is live again.
See also Troubleshooting.