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 · Directory builders
WordPress directory plugin
Directorist adds a listing business to a WordPress site you already run — radius search, maps and reviews in the free core, claim flows, bookings and a native app as paid add-ons. Ever Works researches and writes the listings itself, ships the Next.js site, and keeps the directory growing on a schedule, with content and code in your own Git.
Directorist is a mature WordPress directory plugin: install it on a site you already run and you get listing types, a drag-and-drop form builder with conditional logic, filtered and radius search, maps, reviews and front-end submission with owner dashboards — and, through paid extensions, claim flows, paid and featured plans with expiry and renewal, bookings and business hours. Its free core is unusually complete, the extension bundles run roughly $100–$220 a year (lifetime options available), and the white-label mobile app, the hosted AI search and the listing importer are sold separately on top — all of it riding the entire WordPress ecosystem of hosts, themes, page builders and SEO plugins. What it does not do is fill the directory: nothing in Directorist researches a topic, writes listing descriptions, re-checks sources or grows the catalogue on a schedule — its AI feature builds the directory structure, and AI-written listings are still marked as coming soon. Ever Works starts from the other end: give it a topic and its agents discover, validate and write the listings, generate a Next.js or Astro site from a template repository you own, deploy it, and keep both content and code improving on a cadence, all committed to your Git under an open-source AGPLv3 runtime. Directorist is the better operations console for a human-run listing business on WordPress today; Ever Works is the runtime that researches and runs the directory for you.
Directorist’s AI generates the directory’s structure — fields, settings, a default layout and the search and submission forms — from a short description, and its separately sold AI Search adds hosted semantic search. The listings themselves come from business owners, your team, a CSV, or the paid importer that pulls up to sixty Google Places results per run; AI-written listings are still marked as coming soon. Ever Works treats the listings as the product: its research pipeline discovers candidates for the topic, extracts and deduplicates them, classifies them, captures screenshots and writes each entry with a source URL, then validates that source on two axes — whether it is reachable and whether it is actually a good, specific source for that entry — and generates researched A-vs-B comparison pages between them. For directories that research is the whole product today; dedicated blog-post and landing-copy writers for the other Work kinds are still rolling out.
In Directorist, growth is human-driven: owners submit, admins moderate, and the importer add-on can sync an RSS feed on an interval or pull Places results on demand. Ever Works re-runs its research pipeline on seven cadences from hourly to monthly, retries a failed run after fifteen minutes and pauses itself after repeated failures — finding new listings, refreshing stale entries and flagging dead or weak sources without a prompt. Community submissions arrive as pull requests the platform processes with AI, and every change an Agent makes passes quality gates and a merge policy before it lands.
Directorist stores listings as custom post types in the WordPress database; getting them out means CSV or the REST API. Its plugin core is GPLv3 on GitHub, but monetization, claims, bookings, business hours, chat, analytics, AI search and the importer are paid, license-keyed extensions, the AI Search runs on the vendor’s servers and the mobile app is built and submitted to the stores by the vendor. Ever Works creates three repositories per Work in your own GitHub account — data, Markdown and website — and keeps the template layer updated without touching a single item you generated. The whole platform, including moderation, admin and monetization, is open source under AGPLv3 with no paid feature tier: self-host it on Docker Compose or Kubernetes, choose among eleven AI providers including local models, extend it with 100+ plugins, and drive it from the CLI or an MCP server.
The classic Next.js template Ever Works generates already carries member accounts with OAuth and passkeys, a multi-step submit flow with a moderation queue and rejection reasons, reviews with star ratings, favorites, sponsor ads with approval and expiry, checkout across Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar and Solidgate, promo codes, maps with automatic geocoding and clustering, 21 locales with hreflang and RTL, structured data, feeds and llms.txt. Above the site sit Missions that propose Ideas that become Works, staffed by named Agents with scopes, budgets and heartbeats, so one goal grows into a portfolio of self-maintaining directories. Where Directorist is ahead today: a claim-listing flow, a radius filter and distance sort, a visual form builder with conditional logic, per-listing expiry and renewal, bookings and business hours, saved-search alerts and a native app — and several directory types on one install, where Ever Works runs one directory per Work. Store and Company builders are coming soon on the same model.
Ever Works vs Directorist, head to head.
| Feature | Ever Works | Directorist |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt → working app/site | ✓ | Structure only, on your WordPress |
| Researches the topic for you | ✓ | – |
| Writes the content (copy, posts, SEO) | Directory listings today; posts rolling out | Owners write it; AI listings coming soon |
| Generated code from a template base | ✓ | PHP plugin + themes |
| Ongoing autonomous maintenance | Scheduled | Manual; RSS sync add-on |
| Content version-controlled in Git | ✓ | WordPress database |
| Code in your Git | ✓ | Plugin source public; site in WordPress |
| Open source | ✓ | GPLv3 core + paid extensions |
| Self-hostable runtime | ✓ | Any WordPress host |
| No vendor lock-in | ✓ | CSV + REST export |
| Claim-listing flow | – | Paid extension |
| Radius / “near me” search | Maps + geolocation; no radius filter | ✓ |
| Per-listing expiry & renewal | Featured / sponsor expiry only | ✓ |
| Bookings & business hours | – | Paid extensions |
Choose Directorist when you already run WordPress (or are happy to), the listings will come from business owners, your own team or a CSV, and what you need is the operations layer of a listing business — claim flows, radius and nearby search, a visual form builder with conditional logic, per-listing expiry and renewal, bookings and business hours, saved-search alerts, several directory types on one install and a white-label mobile app — at a predictable yearly price for the extension bundle, with the mobile app and a couple of add-ons billed on top and the WordPress theme, page-builder and SEO-plugin ecosystem around it. Its reviewers do note a real configuration curve, add-on cost creep and slower performance as listings and extensions pile up, so plan for good hosting and caching.
Visit Directorist ↗Give Ever Works a topic and its agents research the listings, write the descriptions, deploy the site, and keep the directory growing — all version-controlled in your own Git.