We’re building Ever Works in public. Some things may be incomplete, missing, or broken while we continue improving the platform.We’re building Ever Works in public — expect a few rough edges.
Compare · Store builders
Open-source WordPress commerce engine
WooCommerce is the open-source commerce engine for WordPress — a free core, no revenue share, self-hosted, and assembled by you. Ever Works researches the niche, writes the content, generates the site into repositories you own, and keeps working on a schedule. Its Store kind is still coming soon, so this compares an engine with a workforce.
WooCommerce is the open-source commerce engine for WordPress: a GPLv3 core that costs nothing, with unlimited products, orders and API calls, 0% revenue share, no plan tiers, 140 region-specific payment gateways, live carrier rates, print-at-home labels and automated tax — plus subscriptions, bookings and memberships through paid extensions, and a first-party processor in WooPayments. It is installed on more than seven million sites, and it is deliberately a toolkit rather than a builder: it ships you the software and you assemble the rest — the host, the theme, the extensions, and every word of product copy. There is no generation step, and no first-party AI writing for you today; the merchant assistant, Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol are all labelled coming soon and all arrive as extensions, while the MCP adapter and Abilities API are in core and self-described as beta. Ever Works comes at the problem from the other end: its agents research a topic, write the content, generate the site from a template into repositories you own, deploy it, and re-run on a cadence under budgets, quality gates and a merge policy. Be clear about the state of play before reading the table — Ever Works does not ship commerce today. The Store Work kind is coming soon, its chip is inert, none of the four website templates is a storefront and there is no product, price or inventory model, so every store-specific row below reads Planned; today the two are closer to complements than substitutes, with WooCommerce as the store engine you own and Ever Works as the workforce that would decide what to sell, write it, and keep it fresh.
WooCommerce ships management surfaces, not authoring. It will hold, price, tax and ship whatever catalog you give it, and nothing inside it decides what to sell or writes a word of the copy — there is no generation step, and no first-party AI doing that work today. The merchant assistant is coming soon and is explicitly planned as an extension rather than core, agentic checkout and AI shopping discovery arrive the same way, and product-description writers reach a Woo store through third-party plugins. Ever Works treats that half as the job: its pipeline analyses the domain, discovers entries through web search, extracts and deduplicates them, assigns categories and tags, validates the sources, then writes the descriptions and SEO metadata — reading the Knowledge Base’s style, brand and persona documents on every run. Two honest limits: that pipeline is deepest for directory-shaped content today, and the catalog research a store needs — suppliers, cost and margin signals — belongs to the planned Store builder, not to what ships now.
A WooCommerce store does what it was configured to do and no more. First-party automation stops at transactional email — a post-purchase review request, for instance — and anything further is a workflow plugin you install. Restocking, rewriting stale descriptions, refreshing categories and chasing conversion are jobs for a person or an agency, and so are the host, the backups, the security patches, the plugin-conflict debugging and the version treadmill underneath it all (the floor is WordPress 7.0 and PHP 7.4, and it moved as recently as this year). Ever Works makes the loop the default: scheduled updates on seven cadences from hourly to monthly with a 15-minute retry and auto-pause after repeated failures, Agent heartbeats on a cron, Missions that keep proposing Ideas, and auto-build, once the Work agent is switched on. Around that loop sit the controls unattended work actually needs — spend caps enforced before an AI call runs, quality gates that send red work back to the Agent instead of to you, and a merge policy that starts conservative, with Agents opening pull requests and people merging.
This is the comparison where the values line up, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. WooCommerce is GPLv3, forkable on GitHub, self-hosted by definition, and your store data lives in your own database with no revenue share and no penalty for a third-party gateway. AGPLv3 is not more permissive than GPLv3, and Ever Works will not claim it is. The two distinctions that do hold are these. First, gating: every Ever Works capability is in the AGPLv3 runtime with nothing behind a commercial tier, and it runs on the AI provider you choose across eleven provider plugins including local models, self-hosted on Docker Compose or Kubernetes or on our managed cloud. Second, substrate: Ever Works creates repositories in your own GitHub account for every Work — a data repository holding content, assets, the works.yml configuration and the Knowledge Base, a website repository holding the template code kept aligned with upstream, and a readable Markdown index — so an overnight run is a diff you can review and revert. A Woo store’s content moves by export or REST API; it does not arrive as commits.
WooCommerce is one store on one WordPress install; a second one means doing the assembly again. Ever Works is built around a portfolio: a Mission keeps proposing Ideas, accepted Ideas become Works generated from prebuilt templates, and named Agents with their own budgets, heartbeats and permission flags — every flag off by default — keep each Work moving, organised into Teams with an org chart alongside human Work Members holding Manager, Editor and Viewer roles, all reading a per-Work Knowledge Base that compounds instead of starting cold. The Store Work kind is where that model is heading, and it is not there yet: the Store chip is inert, there is no store entry in the Work-kind vocabulary, none of the four website templates is a storefront, and there is no product, price or inventory model. The planned shape — a Merchandiser, a Copywriter and an Analyst Agent working against a commerce backend you choose, including a self-hostable open-source one — is documented as a roadmap, which is precisely how the store rows below are marked.
Ever Works vs WooCommerce, head to head.
| Feature | Ever Works | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt → working app/site | ✓ | Install, then assemble |
| Researches the topic for you | Web research; item-shaped today | – |
| Writes the content (copy, posts, SEO) | Items pipeline today | You write it |
| Generated code from a template base | ✓ | WordPress theme, not generated |
| Ongoing autonomous maintenance | Scheduled | You maintain it |
| Content version-controlled in Git | ✓ | Your database; export or API |
| Code in your Git | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | AGPLv3 | GPLv3 |
| Self-hostable runtime | ✓ | Self-hosted only |
| No vendor lock-in | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cart, checkout and orders | Planned | ✓ |
| Product, variant, price and stock model | Planned | ✓ |
| Payments, tax and shipping | Planned | 140 gateways; 0% platform fee |
| Agent-readable store data over MCP | Platform API, not a catalog | In core, in beta |
Choose WooCommerce whenever you need to take money. It is the right answer if you already run WordPress and want to sell from the content and SEO you have built there, if you want a free core with no revenue share and no plan tiers, if you want the store’s code and data on infrastructure you control, or if your requirement is a real cart, refunds, automated tax, shipping labels, subscriptions or in-person payments — none of which Ever Works has. Be blunt about the gap: Ever Works ships no commerce today. The Store Work kind is coming soon, the Store chip is inert, none of the four website templates is a storefront, and there is no product, variant, price or inventory model. The generated directory site can take money — plan subscriptions, sponsored placements and promo codes through Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar or Solidgate — but that is subscription revenue on a content site, not a catalog with a cart. WooCommerce is also the better pick when you want an off-the-shelf extension and an available freelancer for almost any commerce requirement, provided you accept that the assembly, the hosting and the upkeep are yours, that Woo Express is gone and the nearest first-party managed route is now a WordPress.com Commerce plan, and that independent cost analyses put a realistic production store nearer $1,800–$3,000 a year and up than the $0 on the pricing page.
Visit WooCommerce ↗Ever Works already researches a topic, writes the content, generates the Next.js code, deploys it, and keeps re-running on the cadence you set — all in your own Git. The Store builder (storefront, catalog, checkout) is on the way, and the sites the runtime generates today already carry subscription checkout, per-plan gating, sponsor ads and promo codes.