Everything a document library should do.
Find it, organise it, decide who opens it, deliver it — and know when it’s gone out of date. One plugin, $59 a year.
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Fig. 1The plugin itself, running here. Search it · See it in your own site’s colours
01The pieces
A library is five jobs. The category sells four of them, separately.
FileBird files it. Download Monitor gates it. Document Library Pro lists it. Three renewals — and not one of them knows a document has gone stale.
| The job | What you buy for it today | FileDeck |
|---|---|---|
| Find it | Document Library Pro, $199 | Included |
| Organise it | FileBird, from $39 | Included |
| Decide who opens it | Download Monitor, free to $69 | Included |
| Deliver it | Download Monitor or WP Download Manager | Included |
| Know when it goes stale | Nothing on this list does it | Included |
On 3 September we installed all five on clean WordPress, next to our own free build, and published what each one does. We lose a row: Download Monitor protects files for free and we don’t. Nobody wins another: no free version in this category can read a PDF, ours included.
See the six-plugin test Where each one beats us
All plugin names are trademarks of their respective owners; we’re not affiliated with any vendor listed.
02What you get
The jobs the free build hands over.
Two things the category sells separately, and one it does not sell at all. The library itself — every layout, the filters, the blocks, as many documents as you like — costs nothing.
02.1Find it
Search the words inside the file, including the scans
Type a phrase and FileDeck looks inside your PDFs and Office files, not just their titles — and runs OCR over the ones that are photographs of paper. Document Library Pro sells it on its $199 plan and still cannot read a scan.
02.2Decide who opens it
A restricted file has no working public URL
Of the five plugins we tested, two protect the file itself; the rest gate the page and leave the file at its upload URL. FileDeck moves protected files into a deny-all vault and streams each download only after re-checking the visitor’s access, so a restricted file has no working public URL. Share one deliberately with a link that dies in 15 minutes.
02.3Know when it goes stale
It emails you before the inspector asks
Put a review date on a document. Three weeks before that date it turns amber; the day after it passes, red; and every morning a short email says what is due and what has passed. We searched all five plugins we tested for so much as a next-review field and found nothing.
02.4AI & Governance tier
Two people ask the same question. They get different answers.
A governor asks what the safeguarding review concluded and gets the answer with a link to it. A parent asks the same thing and gets an answer that has never heard of it, because the permission check runs before the retrieval. Runs on your own AI account; off until you switch it on.
03Pricing
$59, against $199 + $39 elsewhere.
Document Library Pro’s search-inside-files plan is $199 and FileBird’s folders are $39; gating we have left out of the sum, because our own test shows Download Monitor doing it free. That is $238 and three renewal dates, and none of it knows a policy has expired. One licence for all of it. Renewals stay at $59 — that is set in the checkout, not just promised here. Stop renewing and the plugin keeps working exactly as it is — renewal covers updates and support, not access to what you already have. 1, 5 or 50 sites, 30-day refund.
| Feature | Free$0 forever | Pro$59 per year | AI & Governance$119 per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Table, grid, list and folder layouts, with instant search | Included | Included | Included |
| Block, shortcode & page builders | Included | Included | Included |
| Unlimited documents | Included | Included | Included |
| Full-text search inside files, with OCR | — | Included | Included |
| Access control & signed links | — | Included | Included |
| Review cycles, supersede & versions | — | Included | Included |
| Lead capture & activity audit trail | — | Included | Included |
| Ask this library, with cited answers | — | — | Included |
| Semantic search & related documents | — | — | Included |
| Retention schedules, transmittals & acknowledgments | — | — | Included |
| Get started | Download free | Search inside my files — $59 | Cited answers, permission-checked — $119 |
04Moving in
What happens to the 400 files you already have
One-click importers for Document Library Pro, FileBird, Download Monitor, WP Download Manager, Shared Files and six more, plus CSV and any folder on your server.
- 04.1Bring the library acrossOne-click importers for eleven document and download plugins, plus CSV and a folder already on your server. Nothing is deleted at the other end — you can run it and change your mind.
- 04.2Run both until you are sureYour old plugin keeps serving its own URLs while you check the new library. Switch the page over when you are satisfied.
- 04.3Then place the blockDrop the Document Library block on a page. Titles, descriptions and categories are searchable the moment it renders; the text inside your files indexes in the background.
05Before you go
Ask the other five for their test results.
We published the versions we installed, the day we installed them, the row a competitor wins and the row nobody wins — including the morning we published a number that made our own free build look worse than it is, and corrected it the same day. Ask the other five where theirs is.