The question that sorts the category

Do your events already exist somewhere else?

If you type your events into your website and nowhere else, you need a good editor, sane recurring events, and a calendar that renders quickly. Most of the well-known plugins can do that, and the free tier of several of them — including this one — is enough forever.

If your schedule is maintained in Google Calendar, in Outlook or Microsoft 365, in Teamup, or on a manager's phone, then everything above is secondary. What you need is a plugin that subscribes to that calendar and keeps the site in step. Otherwise you are entering every event twice, and the website copy is the one that drifts out of date — because it is the copy nobody looks at while they are doing their job.

Why the feature tables mislead

Feature tables are written by the plugins' own marketing, and they list what is easy to list. What they do not list is the behaviour that decides whether you will be happy in eighteen months: whether occurrences become database rows, whether the ordinal recurrence rules are correct, whether a failed sync is visible or silent, and how quickly a support thread gets an answer.

That last one is measurable before you buy. Every plugin's WordPress.org listing shows how many support threads were opened in the last two months and how many were resolved. A plugin with sixty thousand installs, a paid tier, and a resolution rate under a third is telling you something specific: its author is one person, and that person is underwater. You will find out the day you need help.

What “best” means for a venue

For a venue, a gym or a course provider, the calendar is not decoration — it is the surface people plan around. The ranking that matters is: correct dates, correct times, visible when it fails, and cheap enough that it is not a decision. Everything else is preference.

By that ranking, the right shortlist is short. Pick the plugin whose recurrence engine survives the test above, whose free tier does what you need without a countdown, and whose author answers threads. Then check the sync question. That is the whole method.

Where this one sits

Free: a complete calendar, with the full recurrence set and per-event timezones, no limits and no upsell nag. Paid: incoming sync from any .ics feed, several calendars at once, and a sync status panel that says when it last worked and what failed. If your events are only ever typed into WordPress, the free plugin is the whole product and you should not pay us anything.