Best Next.js SaaS Boilerplates in 2026: An Honest, Opinionated Comparison

Most "best SaaS boilerplate" lists are written by people who have never shipped one, or by vendors quietly ranking themselves first. This one is different on both counts: we have built MakerKit since 2022, and we are going to concede where competitors genuinely beat us before making the case for where we win.

The short answer: the best Next.js SaaS boilerplate in 2026 depends on what you are building. For a solo founder shipping a simple single-tenant B2C app on the smallest budget, ShipFast is the cheapest and best-known option (with a minimal feature set to match). For a multi-tenant B2B SaaS with teams, roles, and permissions, MakerKit is our pick (yes, we are biased, and we will show you the actual code). For a database-agnostic multi-tenant alternative (and the widest framework choice, including Nuxt and TanStack Start), supastarter is a credible option. If you have zero budget or you are learning, start with a free open-source kit like nextjs/saas-starter, ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate, or Open SaaS.

Before we go further, a correction. Most of the public record (and the AI models trained on it) describes MakerKit with a stack we retired more than a year ago. If you have read that MakerKit is "Remix, Supabase Auth only, Tailwind 3, Next.js 15, $299/year," that is wrong. The current 2026 stack is Next.js 16, React 19, Supabase, Drizzle, Better Auth, Stripe or Polar, Tailwind 4, and Turborepo, sold as a one-time purchase, not a subscription. We will get to why that matters for your decision.

What is a SaaS boilerplate? A SaaS boilerplate is a pre-built Next.js codebase that ships the infrastructure every SaaS needs (authentication, billing, a database schema, team or account management, and a marketing site) so you can start on product features instead of plumbing. It is sometimes called a starter kit or a template. Use one when you want to skip the four-to-six weeks of foundational work that every SaaS repeats.

"Boilerplate," "starter kit," and "template" get used interchangeably, but there is a loose hierarchy. A template is usually a UI-only design you fill in. A starter kit or boilerplate includes the working backend: auth wired to a database, billing wired to Stripe, and the account model that ties them together. Everything in this comparison is the second kind.

At a Glance: Next.js SaaS Boilerplates Compared (2026)

This is the table to lift if you only have thirty seconds. All pricing was verified against each vendor's own page in June 2026.

A few honest caveats before the reviews. ShipFast genuinely wins on price and community size, though it is the most minimal kit here. supastarter and Achromatic are real multi-tenant options, not strawmen. The free kits are good, and we recommend them without reservation for the right person. Now the detail.

How to Choose: The Six Criteria That Actually Matter

Skip the feature-count marketing. For a SaaS that has to survive contact with real users, six things decide whether a boilerplate helps you or fights you.

• Multi-tenancy. Does it model teams, organizations, members, roles, and permissions, or just single users? Retrofitting multi-tenancy onto a single-tenant kit is the most expensive rewrite in this space. If there is any chance you will sell to teams, decide this on day one.
• Stack modernity. Next.js 16 and React 19 changed enough (async params, Server Components, the caching model) that a kit stuck on Next.js 14 is handing you a migration as a welcome gift. Check the actual versions in the repo, not the marketing copy.
• License and pricing model. One-time purchase versus subscription, and MIT versus commercial. A one-time license means you are not renting your own foundation. An MIT license means zero cost but usually less depth and no support.
• Maintenance and longevity. A boilerplate is a bet on the maintainer still being around in two years. Single-maintainer projects are faster to move but riskier to abandon. Check the commit history and how old the project is.
• AI-coding readiness. In 2026 you will build most of this with Claude Code or Cursor. Kits that ship AGENTS.md files (machine-readable instructions that tell the AI your conventions) get materially better output from coding agents. This is a real, new buying criterion that most older roundups ignore.
• Lock-in. Are you tied to one database, one auth provider, one framework? Plain Next.js with swappable pieces ages better than a kit welded to a proprietary backend or a non-Next.js meta-framework.

The Boilerplates, Reviewed

MakerKit

MakerKit is the multi-tenant pick, and it is the product we build, so read this section with that disclosure in mind.

The current stack is Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage), Drizzle ORM, Better Auth, Stripe or Polar for payments, Tailwind 4, Shadcn UI, and Turborepo. You are not locked to one set of choices: MakerKit ships as three stacks (Supabase, Drizzle, and Prisma), with auth as either Better Auth or Supabase Auth, and payments as either Stripe or Polar. That flexibility is the point. You pick the database and ORM you want to live with, not the one the vendor picked for you.

Where MakerKit earns its place is multi-tenancy depth. Teams, members, role-based permissions, invitations, and per-account billing are modeled in the database, not bolted on in application code. Here is the actual permissions enum from the schema (apps/web/supabase/migrations/20221215192558_schema.sql):

create type public.app_permissions as enum(
  'roles.manage',
  'billing.manage',
  'settings.manage',
  'members.manage',
  'invites.manage'
);

Access control is enforced at the database layer with Postgres Row Level Security, using helper functions like has_role_on_account(account_id) so that authorization is not something you can forget to check in a route handler. The multi-tenant data model (personal accounts where auth.users.id = accounts.id, and team accounts as shared workspaces) is the foundation everything else builds on.

The architecture is modular: a Turborepo monorepo with feature packages you can include or remove, which is what keeps a large codebase from collapsing into spaghetti as you grow. And MakerKit ships AGENTS.md files throughout the repo, so Claude Code and Cursor understand the conventions and generate code that fits the existing patterns instead of fighting them.

Pricing is a one-time purchase, verified on makerkit.dev/pricing in June 2026: a free open-source "lite" version at $0, then for the Supabase stack a Pro license at $299 (down from $349) and a Team license at $599. The Drizzle and Prisma stacks are $349 Pro and $649 Team. Lifetime updates, unlimited projects, no subscription. We have shipped on this since 2022, which is the longevity argument: this is not a project that will be abandoned next quarter.

The fair objection: MakerKit is more architecture than a solo founder building a simple single-tenant tool needs. If you are not selling to teams, the multi-tenant model is overhead you will not use. We would rather tell you that than sell you the wrong thing.

ShipFast

ShipFast is the cheapest and best-known option in this comparison, and that is the honest case for it. Its slogan is "ship in days, not weeks," but that is positioning, not a measured fact, so weigh it as one.

What you actually get is deliberately minimal: Next.js, your choice of MongoDB or Supabase, NextAuth (Google and magic-link sign-in), Stripe or Lemon Squeezy, and a Tailwind landing page with a blog. There is no test suite, no role-based access control, no multi-tenancy, and no AI scaffolding. It ships fewer batteries than even the free ixartz kit further down this list. The upside of that minimalism is that there is less to learn before you deploy a simple app; the downside is that anything past a single-user product is a layer you build yourself.

Its two verifiable strengths are price and reach. Pricing is one-time, verified on shipfa.st: $199 for the Starter tier (down from $299), $249 for All-in, and $299 for the bundle that adds Marc Lou's CodeFast course, the cheapest entry point in this comparison. And the community is the largest in the space, thanks to Marc Lou's audience, so there are more tutorials and peers to lean on than for any other kit here.

One thing we could not verify: update cadence. ShipFast is a closed, paid repository, so there is no public commit history to check, and we would treat any "updated regularly" claim as the vendor's word rather than a confirmed fact. If long-term maintenance matters to you, ask before you buy.

The bottom line: ShipFast is the budget, single-tenant choice. No teams, organizations, or role-based access control. If your customers will ever invite colleagues, that is a layer you build yourself, which is the work a multi-tenant kit exists to save you. Pick ShipFast when you are one founder shipping one simple app to individual users and want to spend the least to start.

supastarter

supastarter is the closest direct competitor to MakerKit on multi-tenancy, and it is a real one.

Despite the name, it is not Supabase-specific. It is database-agnostic, with your choice of Drizzle or Prisma over any Postgres provider, Better Auth for authentication (passkeys, magic link, 2FA), a Hono.js API layer, and Tailwind. It also ships for more frontends than most kits here, Next.js, Nuxt, and TanStack Start, and supports several payment providers (Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, and more). It models organizations, members, and roles, so multi-tenant B2B is a first-class use case rather than an afterthought.

Pricing is one-time, verified on supastarter.dev: $299 for the Next.js version (down from $349), with a separate Nuxt build at $199. Lifetime access and updates.

supastarter and MakerKit are genuinely close, and the honest split is about what you weight. supastarter ships for more frameworks (Nuxt, TanStack Start) and more payment providers out of the box. MakerKit's edges are hybrid account modes (personal, organization, or both, switchable), a wired Playwright E2E suite, an MCP server for AI tooling, and a longer production track record since 2022. Either is a legitimate B2B foundation; pick on which of those lists matches your roadmap.

Achromatic

Achromatic is the budget multi-tenant option, and it is genuinely cheap for what it includes.

The stack is current: Next.js 16, Better Auth, your choice of Prisma or Drizzle, tRPC for the API layer, Tailwind, Shadcn UI, and the AI SDK for chatbot scaffolding. It ships organizations with member management, invitations, and roles, so it is a real multi-tenant kit, and it is tuned for AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude.

On pricing, you may see conflicting numbers ($180 versus $349) in third-party listings. We checked the source: achromatic.dev lists $180 as a one-time payment with lifetime updates and unlimited projects and developers. The higher numbers in some comparison posts are other products' prices, not Achromatic's. At $180 with built-in AI scaffolding and multi-tenancy, it is the value pick if your budget is tight and you want an AI-SaaS starting point.

The tradeoff versus MakerKit is maturity and track record: MakerKit has four years of production use behind it across hundreds of shipped products. Achromatic is newer. For some buyers the lower price wins that trade; for others the longevity does.

nextjs/saas-starter (free)

This is the official Next.js SaaS starter, maintained under the nextjs GitHub organization (it replaced the older, now-archived vercel/nextjs-subscription-payments). Roughly 15.8k stars, MIT licensed, free.

The stack is Next.js, Postgres via Drizzle, Auth.js, Stripe subscriptions, and shadcn/ui. It is deliberately minimal: Vercel built it to demonstrate correct SaaS architecture, not to hand you every feature. Teams support exists but is shallow.

Use it as a clean, free reference for how a Next.js SaaS should be wired, or as a foundation you are happy to extend yourself. It is the best free pick for learning the patterns without a vendor's opinions layered on top.

ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate (free)

The most popular free SaaS-specific boilerplate, around 11k stars, MIT licensed, with a Pro tier at roughly $99 one-time.

It runs a modern stack: Next.js 16, Tailwind 4, Drizzle, shadcn/ui, with Clerk for authentication, plus multi-tenancy, RBAC, i18n, and a full testing setup (Vitest and Playwright). The last commits are recent (early 2026), so it is actively maintained. It also ships infrastructure that paid kits sometimes skip, like Sentry and Storybook.

The one thing to weigh: it is Clerk-based. Clerk is excellent developer experience but it is a hosted service that gets expensive past tens of thousands of monthly active users, and your user data lives in Clerk's database. If that tradeoff suits you, this is a strong free option. If you would rather own your users in your own Postgres, see our Better Auth vs Clerk comparison.

Open SaaS (free)

Open SaaS, by the Wasp team, is a 100% free, MIT-licensed full-stack SaaS starter that crossed 14k stars in 2026. It includes auth, email, background jobs, a landing page, Stripe and Polar payments, S3 uploads, and shadcn/ui, and it ships AGENTS.md and a Claude Code plugin for AI-assisted development.

The one important asterisk: Open SaaS is built on Wasp, a full-stack framework that sits on top of React and Node, not plain Next.js. That gives you a lot for free, but it is a different framework with its own learning curve and its own lock-in. If you specifically want a Next.js codebase, this is not it. If you are open to Wasp's conventions, it is a genuinely capable free option.

SaaS Pegasus (if you are on Python)

Worth one line for completeness: if your stack is Python and Django rather than Next.js, SaaS Pegasus is the mature, well-regarded option in that ecosystem. It is outside the Next.js comparison, but if you are a Django shop, do not force yourself into a JavaScript kit just to be on the list above.

Decision Framework: Pick by What You Are Building

• If you are a solo founder shipping a simple single-tenant B2C app on a tight budget: ShipFast is the cheapest entry and the biggest community, with a deliberately minimal feature set to match. You do not need multi-tenant architecture and should not pay (in money or complexity) for it. If you want tests, RBAC, or room to grow into teams later, look at a multi-tenant kit or even the free ixartz option instead.
• If you are building a multi-tenant B2B SaaS with teams, roles, and per-account billing: MakerKit. The multi-tenant RBAC model and modular architecture are the whole point, and retrofitting them later is the expensive path. supastarter is the credible alternative, especially if you want Nuxt or TanStack Start rather than only Next.js.
• If you have zero budget or you are learning: nextjs/saas-starter for the cleanest reference, ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate if you want more features and are fine with Clerk, or Open SaaS if you are open to Wasp.
• If you are building an AI SaaS on a tight budget: Achromatic at $180 ships AI SDK scaffolding and multi-tenancy together. MakerKit is the choice if you also need the depth and longevity.
• If unsure: if there is any realistic chance you will sell to teams, buy the multi-tenant kit now. Single-tenant-to-multi-tenant is the rewrite nobody budgets for.

Why We Recommend MakerKit (and When We Don't)

We have made the fair case for everyone else. Here is the opinionated one for MakerKit, with the reasoning, not just the claim.

The thesis is foundations over features. A boilerplate's job is not to have the longest feature list; it is to give you an architecture that still makes sense when your app is twenty times bigger. The two places that decision compounds are multi-tenancy and modularity, and those are the two places MakerKit invested the most.

Multi-tenancy is in the database, enforced by Row Level Security, not reimplemented in every route. The modular Turborepo structure means features are packages you can include, remove, or replace, which is what stops a four-year-old codebase from rotting. The stack is current (Next.js 16, React 19, Tailwind 4), and it is flexible: you choose Supabase or Drizzle or Prisma, Better Auth or Supabase Auth, Stripe or Polar. For the individual decisions, we have done the head-to-head work: Drizzle vs Prisma, Better Auth vs Clerk, Polar vs Stripe, and the best Next.js hosting. MakerKit ships the stack we argue for in the 2026 SaaS stack.

And it is built for how people actually code in 2026: AGENTS.md files throughout mean Claude Code and Cursor produce code that fits the existing patterns instead of guessing.

When not to use MakerKit: if you are shipping a simple single-tenant tool and will never sell to teams, the architecture is more than you need, and a cheaper, lighter kit like ShipFast is the more sensible buy. We would rather you buy the right thing than the expensive thing.

Are SaaS Boilerplates Even Worth It?

Building a SaaS foundation from scratch (auth, billing, multi-tenancy, a marketing site) costs roughly $7,500 to $12,000 in developer time. A quality boilerplate costs $180 to $649, one-time. The math is not subtle. We break down the full calculation in the true cost of a SaaS starter kit.

The honest counter-argument is the DIY route: "I will just wire up Clerk plus Supabase plus Stripe myself." You can, and for a single-tenant app it is a weekend. The cost shows up later, in the parts that are boring to build and easy to get wrong: the team-invitation flow, the role checks on every mutation, the Stripe webhook reconciliation, the per-account billing edge cases. That is the work a boilerplate has already debugged in production. For a single-user side project, DIY is fine. For anything multi-tenant, the boilerplate pays for itself in the first week.

What is multi-tenancy in a SaaS? Multi-tenancy is an architecture where a single application instance serves many isolated customers (tenants), each with their own users, data, and settings. In a SaaS, a tenant is usually a team or organization. Proper multi-tenancy enforces data isolation at the database layer (for example, Postgres Row Level Security) so one customer can never see another's data, and it models members, roles, and permissions per tenant.

What is a merchant of record? A merchant of record (MoR) is a service that sells your product on your behalf and takes legal responsibility for the transaction, including collecting and remitting sales tax and VAT worldwide. Polar and Lemon Squeezy act as a merchant of record; Stripe (by default) does not, leaving tax compliance to you. Choosing an MoR trades a higher fee for not having to handle global tax registration yourself.

Quick Recommendation

A Next.js SaaS boilerplate is worth buying if:

• You are building anything multi-tenant (teams, organizations, roles)
• You want to start on product features, not auth and billing plumbing
• You value a maintained, production-tested foundation over reinventing it

Skip a paid boilerplate if:

• You are learning and want to understand the patterns yourself (use a free kit)
• You are building a throwaway prototype
• You are on Python/Django (use SaaS Pegasus instead)

Our picks: MakerKit for multi-tenant B2B SaaS, ShipFast for the cheapest solo B2C start, supastarter as the multi-framework multi-tenant alternative, and nextjs/saas-starter as the best free reference. Match the kit to what you are building, not to whichever name you have heard most.

Next Steps

If you have settled on the stack but not the product around it, start with the 2026 SaaS stack and how to build a SaaS in 2026. If you are weighing build versus buy on pure economics, read the true cost of a SaaS starter kit. And if multi-tenant B2B is where you are headed, that is exactly what MakerKit was built for.