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
Hosted commerce platform with an agentic layer
Shopify runs the transactional stack — checkout, payments, orders, POS, B2B — and now syndicates catalogs into AI shopping surfaces on a plan that costs nothing per month. The Ever Works Store builder is coming soon; what ships today is the research, the sourced directory content, the generated code, and a schedule that keeps improving them, all in your own Git.
Shopify is a complete commerce operating system: storefront and themes, a conversion-tuned checkout, payments, orders and inventory, shipping and fulfilment, point of sale, cross-border selling, B2B catalogs, and a very large app marketplace around all of it. Across the 2026 Editions its AI stopped assisting and started operating — Sidekick plans multi-step work and builds workflows and apps, Campaign Autopilot runs standing marketing loops, Sidekick generates purchase orders that automatically create transfers, and Sidekick Pulse pushes recommendations nobody asked for. It is also early and credible on agentic commerce, and it made the on-ramp free: the Agentic plan launched on 2 April 2026 with no monthly subscription, aimed squarely at merchants who do not already use Shopify as their ecommerce platform and who do not want to migrate — you pay on a completed sale instead. Be equally clear about where Ever Works stands: the Store builder is coming soon, the Store chip on the create surface is inert today, and every storefront, checkout, orders, tax, B2B and agentic-protocol row below reads Planned. What ships today is the half in front of the till — agents that research a niche, write the directory content while dedicated post and landing-copy writers roll out, generate the site from a template, commit both content and code to your own Git, and keep improving them on a schedule under budgets, quality gates and a merge policy you set. The stated intent is to sit in front of a commerce backend of your choosing, Shopify included, so read this page as a comparison and a channel map at once: Ever Works competes on ownership, origination and portfolio scope, and never on card processing.
Shopify will help you write a description for a product you already chose; deciding what to sell, sourcing it and building the catalog stays your job. Ever Works is built the other way round: its pipeline researches a niche, validates and records a source per entry, writes the pages and the SEO metadata, and then generates the code to present it — the research is the deliverable, not an aide. Be precise about the limits today: that pipeline is deepest for directory-style content, Blog, Website and Landing Page Works ride the same items pipeline while dedicated post and landing-copy writers catch up, and a product SKU with variants, price and stock is not part of the model yet. Catalog research for a store — products, suppliers, margin signals — is where this motion is heading, and it is Planned rather than shipped.
It would be wrong to claim Shopify only assists: Campaign Autopilot, automated inventory and Sidekick Pulse are standing loops that run without a fresh prompt each time. The honest difference is where the loop runs and what constrains it. Ever Works re-runs its generation pipeline on a cadence you choose, and every agent run is bounded by per-Mission, per-Idea, per-Work, per-Agent and account-wide spend caps that stop a call before it happens, by quality gates that send failing work back instead of to you, and by a merge policy that decides whether an agent may land its own pull request. Shopify’s loops operate inside one store’s admin under staff permissions; Ever Works’ operate on repositories you own, under ceilings you configure.
Shopify’s Git story is better than it usually gets credit for: the first-party GitHub theme integration syncs in both directions, so theme code and theme-editor settings genuinely live in your repository, and the Hydrogen visual editor pushes component edits back as pull requests. The gap is store content — products, pages and blog posts are records in their CMS, not version-controlled files you own. Ever Works creates three repositories per Work — data, browsable markdown, and the website — so content and code are both yours, reviewable as diffs and portable on the day you leave. The runtime itself is open source under AGPLv3 with no paid feature tier, self-hostable on Docker or Kubernetes, and drivable from a CLI and an MCP server as well as the dashboard.
Shopify organises around a store, and Sidekick is a per-store assistant rather than a portfolio-level workforce. Ever Works organises around a goal: a Mission proposes Ideas, accepted Ideas become Works, and named Agents with a scope, a heartbeat and a budget keep each one moving — so one intent grows into a set of self-maintaining sites, with Stores and Companies on the roadmap. When the Store kind lands it is meant to connect through deployment plugins to a commerce backend of your choosing — a self-hostable open-source engine, a hosted provider, or your own — because replacing the payments stack was never the point. In the meantime the classic directory template Ever Works generates from already ships subscription checkout across four payment providers, plan gating, sponsored placements and promo codes, while the minimal template ships none of that. Either way it is monetising a content site, which is a different thing from running a catalog, and this page keeps the two apart.
Ever Works vs Shopify, head to head.
| Feature | Ever Works | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt → working app/site | Sites today; stores Planned | Themes + AI assist |
| Researches the topic for you | ✓ | You supply the catalog |
| Writes the content (copy, posts, SEO) | Directory data today; posts rolling out | Product copy via Sidekick |
| Generated code from a template base | ✓ | Themes + AI code edits |
| Ongoing autonomous maintenance | Scheduled | Standing AI loops |
| Content version-controlled in Git | ✓ | – |
| Code in your Git | ✓ | Theme code, two-way sync |
| Open source | AGPLv3, no paid tier | Platform closed; Hydrogen MIT |
| Self-hostable runtime | ✓ | – |
| No vendor lock-in | ✓ | Theme code yours; backend hosted |
| Storefront, checkout and payments | Planned | ✓ |
| Orders, tax, shipping, POS and B2B | Planned | ✓ |
| Catalog published to AI shopping surfaces | Planned | UCP (open, Apache-2.0) |
| Budgets, quality gates and merge policy on agent work | ✓ | – |
Choose Shopify whenever taking money is the job: it is the safest way to get a real storefront, a conversion-tuned checkout, payments, tax, refunds, shipping, inventory, point of sale, B2B catalogs and cross-border selling running now, with an app for almost every requirement and a large partner network to implement it. It is also the better pick if you want AI that acts on live order data — campaign optimisation, purchase orders, scheduled theme and checkout rollouts — or if you want your products discoverable inside AI assistants today. And it need not be an either/or: because the Agentic plan carries no monthly subscription and is aimed at merchants who are not on Shopify, an existing storefront can reach those AI shopping surfaces through Shopify without migrating, which makes it a channel alongside an Ever Works site rather than a replacement for one.
Visit Shopify ↗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.