The demo. Directorist demos beautifully. The feature list is long, the admin panel looks organized, and the initial setup creates the impression that someone has already solved the hard problems for you. If the product performed the way it presents itself during evaluation, it would be a genuinely great plugin. It does not. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Three things, and they compound each other.
First, design flexibility is a fiction. Styles are hardcoded into the plugin so aggressively that making basic visual changes means writing CSS overrides on top of inline styles that Directorist injects on its own. You are not customizing your directory. You are fighting someone else's design decisions with a wrench.
Second, WordPress integration is poor for a WordPress plugin. Standard themes and common plugins (caching, page builders, image optimizers) routinely conflict with Directorist. The vendor's own documentation lists these conflicts, which reads less like a help article and more like a confession. I needed custom code just to get it to coexist with a normal WordPress installation.
Third, major updates destroy your work. I would spend weeks building layouts and writing workarounds for problems one and two, and then an update would roll through and wipe it all out. Not subtle regressions. Complete, start-from-zero layout destruction. After two years of that cycle, I stopped trusting the product entirely. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.