Rooster One vs OpenStation

One plugin instead of dozens. 554 tools, and they agree with each other. Rooster One does the work that would otherwise take dozens of separate plugins, and it does it from one place, on one set of numbers. Dozens of plugins means dozens of different vendors, dozens of renewal dates to keep track of, dozens of update cycles that have to keep working alongside each other, and a different support desk to write to depending on which part has gone wrong. One plugin means one licence, one update, one place to ask, and one thing for WordPress to load on every request instead of dozens. What is actually in it: a full SEO engine that replaces Yoast or AIOSEO. Product recommendations built from your real sales. Role, wholesale and tiered pricing. Meta, Google Ads, GA4 and TikTok measurement, sent server-side so an ad blocker cannot silence it. Sixteen couriers with vouchers, labels, tracking and daily closings. Marketplace feeds and order import for Skroutz, Shopflix, eMAG, Etsy, Amazon and more. Side cart, wishlist, back-in-stock waitlist, quote requests for catalogue shops, swatches, trust badges. Popups and scheduled announcements. Abandoned-cart recovery, email and web push campaigns, audiences. Surveys, competitions and events. Invoices, packing slips and credit notes. A GDPR consent banner with a cookie scanner. The EU withdrawal button that Directive 2023/2673 now requires. And an AI assistant that answers from your own catalogue rather than making things up. That is 188 pages and the 554 tools inside them, and there is a written description of what every one of them is for. Why one plugin rather than dozens Because separate plugins cannot see what the others know, so they disagree, and each one works the same thing out again while your customer waits. Rooster One measures your whole business on a schedule instead: every product, page, customer, order and session, written into flat tables. Which products sell and which never do, which pages are read, who bought and who nearly did. The SEO engine, the recommendations, the audiences, the ad ROI report and the AI assistant then all read those same tables. That is why they agree, and why the plugin gets faster to use as you switch more of it on: the heavy work already happened, before the request arrived. The trade-off is timing and we would rather say so plainly. A figure is only as new as its last run. And it is one plugin to load, not dozens This part has nothing to do with how well any plugin is written. WordPress loads every active plugin on every request, before it knows whether that request needs it: a file to read from disk, hooks to register, options to fetch, a translation catalogue to load. That toll is paid on the home page, on every admin screen and on every REST call, by every plugin, including the ones that will do nothing at all on that particular request. A site carrying a hundred of them pays it a hundred times before a single line of useful work happens. Rooster One is one plugin, and the parts you have not switched on register nothing. On Pro, the storefront is served by a separate lightweight runtime rather than the admin half, so your customer’s page load carries the code that draws the page and not the code that runs the shop. Everything is off by default. It installs beside your current SEO plugin, pixel manager and consent tool and changes nothing until you switch a piece on. Rooster One runs on your own server. Everything it ever sends to an outside service, and what triggers it, is listed under “What does Rooster One send to an outside service, and when?” in the FAQ below. The free version is a complete product, not a demo: 754 of the 1,268 screens, tools and actions are in it. Pro adds the operational half and the separate front-end runtime plugin. Who builds it Rooster One is built by Oxford Metadata Ltd, whose organisation is approved under Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program for dual-use security work such as penetration testing and vulnerability research. That is the same discipline the plugin’s own defensive features come out of: the bot filtering, the form captcha, the consent and proof-of-consent log, and the login hardening. The AI features run on Anthropic Claude for chat and reasoning and Voyage AI for embeddings. It reads your site for what it is Shop — sales and add-to-carts are the measure. Catalogue — products published but not sold; engagement is the measure. Content — no WooCommerce; visits, engagement and forms are the measure. Auto-detected, overridable in one click. Scoring, cornerstones and applicable signals all follow from it. You can find all of it Ctrl+K reaches 742 places: 188 pages and the 554 tools inside them, each one openable directly. All Features lists every one, with pinnable favourites, and prints the figure for your own install. Every page carries a written description of what you can do there, and that text feeds the search. What gets measured Computed on a schedule, stored flat. Everything below reads these. Product vitals — velocity, out-of-stock history, price history, basket role, returns, and a 0–100 demand score. Content vitals — reach, engagement, freshness and a content-demand score for every post, page and custom type. Customer vitals — an omnichannel profile: purchases, affinities, lifecycle stage, survey answers, return risk. Session and attribution rollups — engagement joined to conversion on one session id, with landing page, campaign and five UTMs. Effective prices — every price rule resolved ahead of time into one row per product per audience. The features AI chat & semantic search Chat widget on Anthropic Claude, grounded in your catalogue — only real, in-stock items with exact links. Semantic search on Voyage AI embeddings across products, posts, pages and terms. A knowledge base you control, with identity guardrails so it cannot mis-describe you. Chat analytics — what was asked, how it was rated, which questions found nothing, which chats ended in an order. Related content on articles, guides, listings and products, from the same index. Added automatically to the content types you choose, or placed by hand with the AIEO Related content block or the [aieo_semantic_related] shortcode; either can be narrowed to one kind of content, so a listing recommends listings rather than products. SEO engine A drop-in replacement for AIOSEO, Yoast or Rank Math. Stays gated behind your current SEO plugin until you switch over; a read-only importer for all three and a head-parity check are included. Head, canonical, robots, Open Graph, Twitter and JSON-LD, assembled once into a cache. Commerce schema from the same tables — ProductGroup + hasVariant, per-variant colour, gtin, brand, shipping and return policy. AI titles and descriptions written against the live SERP. Drafts await approval, or run on Autopilot. Opportunity grid — traffic × conversion: hidden gem, intent mismatch, defend, prune. Rank tracking (optional DataForSEO, under your spend cap). Redirects and 404s, slug monitor, static sitemap, robots.txt, alt-text filling, EU Omnibus history, hreflang, Local SEO. Selling more Recommendations — up-sell, cross-sell and same-need alternatives from your real sales patterns. Rails you order by drag-and-drop, block and classic themes, with custom slots. Pricing engine — role and wholesale prices, brand discounts, loyalty tiers, points, free gifts. Stacked, resolved ahead of time. Merchandising — swatches, labels, trust badges, payment logos, galleries, layout builder, custom tabs, one master button style. Lift measurement — the incremental orders and revenue the engine adds. Cart, checkout, recovery Side cart, sticky add-to-cart, wishlist, back-in-stock waitlist. Quote requests for catalogue shops — an ask-for-a-price card on products you do not sell online, a quote basket the shopper grows as they browse, and the browsing trail behind each request. Booked as valued leads per campaign, so a catalogue stops scoring EUR 0.00. Saved and abandoned carts — share and resume, cookieless restore that survives CDN caching. Checkout tuning — distraction-free checkout with A/B assignment, minimum order, and business-invoice fields. Full block and classic parity. Reaching customers Audiences — top, lapsed, lookalike, abandoned-cart, reactivation, competition entrants. Recomputed nightly. Automated campaigns — abandoned cart, win-back, birthday, back in stock, post-purchase. Email and web push, quiet hours honoured. Social posts from your catalogue, competitions on any Gravity Form, surveys scored into NPS and voice-of-customer. Knowing what worked Server-side measurement you own — Meta CAPI, GA4, Google Ads Enhanced Conversions, TikTok Events API. Deduplicated, sent after the order is saved, with a daily safety net. Consent / GDPR CMP — first-party banner, Consent Mode v2, proof-of-consent log, cookie scanner. ROI Wizard — orders, revenue, cost, net, ROAS and ROI by engine, offer, channel, campaign or creative. Ad spend typed, by CSV, or nightly from Google Ads / Meta / TikTok. Conversion goals for non-shops. Insights Chat — ask your shop questions in wp-admin. Customers pseudonymised, no data export. Running the shop Marketplace order import — Skroutz, Shopflix, eMAG, eFood, Wolt, Etsy, Amazon → native WooCommerce orders. The catalogue importer runs it in reverse. Streaming feeds — ready-made templates for Amazon Inventory Loader, BestPrice, eBay File Exchange, eFood, EMAG, Etsy, Facebook Product Catalog, Facebook Marketplace, Google Shopping, Google Local, Google AdWords Custom Remarketing, Shopflix, Skroutz, Tolstoy and Wolt, plus Generic CSV and a fully custom builder. Sixteen couriers — vouchers, labels, COD, tracking, bulk printing, daily closings. ACS, BOX NOW, Courier Center, ELTA, Geniki Taxydromiki, Speedex, DHL Express, FedEx, UPS, USPS, Royal Mail, DHL Paket, Colissimo, BRT, Correos Express, Sendcloud — plus a manual carrier for one with no API. Order documents — invoices, packing slips, proformas, credit notes. Singly or merged across a date range. Delivery economics — real break-even free shipping from your carrier costs, per-carrier × zone P&L. Operational intelligence — stock recovery, missing hot sellers, out-of-stock predictor, branch stock, barcode scanning, optional ERP. The withdrawal button — Directive (EU) 2023/2673 Every EU distance seller must now give consumers a prominent, permanently available button to declare withdrawal electronically. No transition period. A real button, for the whole statutory period. 14 calendar days from receipt — computed from delivery, not the order date. Guests included. An account is offered afterwards, never required. No reason, no prior contact, partial withdrawal by item and quantity. Acknowledgement on a durable medium with content, date and time. Cancellation stays distinct from withdrawal — one you may refuse, the other you may not. Return vouchers checked by an operator before the customer sees them. Ships disabled. Content, blocks and regional selling Events with RSVP and self-registration, FAQ accordions, Store Pages, Food & Beverages option groups, Google reviews, Media Cleanup that quarantines before it deletes. Dozens of server-rendered blocks — store, product, recommendation, swatch, brand, category, blog, competition and event, plus Custom Slot regions. Regional checkout — COD by country or courier, “from X,XX €” labels before a postcode is entered, and per-country payment and shipping rules. Speed and resilience Pre-computed into flat tables; the storefront reads single cached rows. A thin front-end runtime plugin (Pro) serves the storefront even when the admin plugin is trimmed from the request. Self-healing jobs re-arm after updates, stay dormant until used, and collapse runaway third-party tasks. Tables are never dropped on update, activation or deactivation — only on explicit uninstall. Free and Pro GPLv3. The free version is a complete, working product — not a demo with the useful parts removed. GPLv3 throughout. There are three separate things here, and it is worth being precise about which is which, because two of them are called “Pro”. 1. This plugin, free. A complete, working product, not a demo with the useful parts removed: AI chat and semantic search, the whole SEO engine, pricing and merchandising, storefront features, measurement and consent, product feeds and marketplace feed export, courier fulfilment across all sixteen carriers, the block library, Ctrl+K — and the complete withdrawal button. That last is a legal obligation for every EU distance seller; charging for it would be a poor thing to do. 2. A Pro subscription (or the 14-day trial), activated by connecting the site to your Rooster One account. No per-feature keys. It unlocks the Pro screens whose code is already inside this download: Marketplace order import — Skroutz, Shopflix, eMAG, eFood, Wolt, Etsy, Amazon. Attribution and ROI — dashboard, ROI Wizard, ad-spend connectors, shipping cost against margin. Audiences and campaigns — audience builder, email and web-push flows, social posts, AI-suggested offers. Customer intelligence — customer lookup, surveys, cancellations and returns analysis, chat analytics. Insights Chat, events and competitions, Action Scheduler cleanup. 3. Two companion plugins, included with a Pro subscription and installed separately. A subscription on its own does not put their code on your server, so these screens ask you to install the plugin rather than pretending to work: Rooster One Runtime — serves the storefront, SEO head, sitemap and redirects without loading the admin half. The biggest single speed difference between free and Pro. Rooster One Pro — carries six engines this download does not contain: supplier invoice scanning, the accounting and ERP connectors (Entersoft, Galaxy, Soft1, Zoho Books, and Oxygen supplier sync), the catalogue importer for building a product source from a supplier feed, the product exchanger for sharing content between WP sites, the duplicate-product merge engine that auto detects simple products and converts them to variations, and semantic internal linking. Everything Pro-locked stays visible with an explanation of what it does, and where a screen also needs the Pro plugin it says so before you buy, not after. Optional integrations Rooster One runs entirely on your own server. Nothing below is required for the plugin to work — each is an opt-in add-on you enable only if you want that capability, using your own account. Rooster AI credits (rooster.systems) — powers the AI chat, AI SEO copy and Insights Chat via Anthropic Claude and Voyage AI embeddings, with no per-provider API keys to manage. Recommendations service (eshop-optimizer.com) — graph-database up-sell/cross-sell analysis of your order history. DataForSEO — optional keyword rank tracking under a spend cap you set. Ad and measurement platforms — Google Ads, GA4, Meta and TikTok, each independently selectable. Couriers and marketplaces — your own carrier and marketplace accounts, for vouchers and order import. Google Places / Search Console for location data and search performance.

wp-admin forgets. OpenStation doesn’t. You know the moment. You’re deep in a post and you need one image from the Media Library. You click over, find it, click back, and everything you had going is gone. Your scroll position, your half-typed thought, the three other things you had queued up in your head. That’s not a bug you hit. That’s the design. wp-admin shows you one screen at a time, and every navigation throws the last one away. It has worked this way since 2003, like a fridge that empties itself every time you close the door. WordPress has rebuilt almost everything else. The editor, the site editor, the patterns, the styles. The admin’s one-screen-at-a-time model is the layer nobody touched. OpenStation touches it. Install it and admin screens become draggable, resizable windows. Edit a post while the Media Library sits open next to it. Drag an image from one window straight into the other. Keep comments open in the corner. Reload the browser and your window layout — open pages, positions, sizes, and window states — comes back where you left it. OpenStation itself is free, GPL, and opt-in per user. One click in the admin bar turns it on for you. One click turns it off. Nobody else on your site sees anything change, and deactivating the plugin restores the classic admin exactly. No Core patches and no lock-in. Optional AI providers may charge for their service. Built and maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and Tumblr. Work on more than one thing at once Admin pages open as windows, including pages added by most other plugins. Drag them, resize them, snap them, tile them, minimize them to a taskbar. The admin menu becomes a dock of icons. Two editors open at once is one click away. Never lose your place Moving between open windows leaves each page in place. Across reloads, OpenStation remembers your open pages, window positions, sizes and states, virtual desktops, and focus. Closing a window with unsaved changes warns you first. A desk you can actually put things on Drop posts, media, and links right onto the wallpaper. Sort them into folders. Trash them to a Trash that actually holds things. The stuff you’re working on this week can just sit out where you can see it. One desktop per job Virtual desktops, the way your operating system does them. One for writing. One for the store. One for comment triage. One for that redesign you keep poking at. Switch between them without closing anything. Find anything with Cmd+K The full WordPress command palette, plus slash commands from your plugins, all under one keystroke. Turn on the optional AI assistant and you can ask it things like “which post had the comment asking for the recipe?” and it searches your own content to answer. (Requires an AI provider configured in Settings → Connectors on WordPress 7.0+. Details under “External services” below.) See how your site fits together The Corkboard is an interactive, zoomable map of how your posts, pages, and products link to each other. Pan around it. Find the orphans. Find the hubs. Running a store? Orders, Products, Coupons, and Customers become browsable folders with stock and sale ribbons. Open a customer to see their lifetime spend and what they buy most. Follow a product to its buyers, or a coupon to who redeemed it. Make it yours Wallpapers, from color presets to animated scenes to your own photo. Live widgets pinned to the desktop: drafts, stats, recent comments, a focus timer. Uploadable desktop themes, including a built-in Legacy theme that brings the old WordPress blue back in one click. And Mio, a soft-body desk companion that drifts across your wallpaper and gets bumped around by your windows. Off by default. You’ll turn it on. For developers Extend OpenStation through documented PHP and JavaScript APIs. Register windows, icons, wallpapers, widgets, commands, and settings tabs through stable openstation_register_* PHP APIs and a typed JavaScript API; customize dock items through documented hooks; add AI tools with the WordPress Abilities API. Copy-paste examples live in the developer docs on GitHub. External services No external service is required for OpenStation’s desktop interface. The optional AI Assistant and two user-initiated enrichment features make the external requests described below. AI Assistant The optional AI Assistant sends data to the AI provider you configure in WordPress’s Settings → Connectors (for example OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). Generation is routed through WordPress 7.0’s built-in AI Client, which supplies the credentials stored in Connectors. The plugin never handles an API key itself. With no provider configured in Connectors, no external AI requests are made. When the AI Assistant is enabled and a user invokes it (via Cmd+K or the slash-command palette): What is sent: the user’s prompt, the conversation history for the active session, and tool-call metadata. The plugin’s built-in tools (search_posts, search_pages, search_comments) run WordPress’s native keyword search and may include excerpts of the matching posts/pages/comments in tool results, which are then sent back to the provider as part of the agentic loop. When it is sent: on user-initiated AI requests, and (if an administrator enables “Score new comments with AI”) on comment-save hooks for spam analysis. Posts, pages, and taxonomy terms are not sent automatically. Why it is sent: to obtain model completions and tool-call decisions that drive the AI Assistant. Who provides the service: whichever provider you configured in Settings → Connectors. Which provider (and endpoint) receives the data depends entirely on that configuration. Review the chosen provider’s own terms and privacy policy (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). URL shortcut favicons When an authorized user creates a desktop shortcut to an external URL, OpenStation asks that URL for its page HTML and favicon so the shortcut can display the site’s icon. The request is made from your WordPress server and sends the requested URL, the server’s IP address, an OpenStation user-agent string, and normal HTTP request metadata to the operator of that site. This happens only when a user creates the shortcut. The destination site’s terms and privacy policy apply. WordPress.org plugin information When an authorized user opens or refreshes parts of OpenStation’s Plugins window, OpenStation may request public plugin details, update metadata, and review excerpts from WordPress.org. These requests send plugin slugs, the site’s locale, and normal HTTP request metadata to WordPress.org. This information is used only to display and manage plugins. Review the WordPress.org Privacy Policy. OpenStation’s OAuth relay does not contact a service by itself. Third-party plugins that configure the relay may contact their own providers and are responsible for disclosing those services. Credits OpenStation is brought to you by Automattic. The plugin is open source under GPLv2-or-later; contributions are welcome on GitHub. Third-party libraries The plugin bundles the following third-party JavaScript library, loaded on demand only when a feature that needs it is in use: PixiJS (MIT License) — used by the Corkboard window, built-in canvas wallpapers (e.g. the animated WordPress logo), the Mio desk companion, and the Inkfall typing game. PixiJS is loaded from the plugin’s own assets/vendor/ directory; no CDN requests are made. Data files The Inkfall game’s word list (assets/games/inkfall/words.txt) is generated from the following sources (attribution also ships in the file’s header): FrequencyWords by Hermit Dave (CC-BY-SA 4.0) — English word-frequency ranking derived from the OpenSubtitles corpus. english-words by dwyl (Unlicense) — used as a validity filter. LDNOOBW English list (CC-BY 4.0) — used as an exclusion filter.