Best Next.js SaaS Boilerplates & Templates 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 beat us before making the case for where we win.

The short answer: the best Next.js SaaS boilerplate in 2026 comes down to one question: is there any realistic chance you will sell to teams? If yes, MakerKit is our pick for multi-tenant B2B SaaS with teams, roles, and permissions (yes, we build it, and we will show you the actual multi-tenant code). It is also the only kit in this comparison that goes beyond the Next.js web app: the same feature set ships for TanStack Start, and the new Expo (React Native) kit adds a native iOS and Android app to the same monorepo. If no, and you are 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 database-agnostic multi-tenant alternative (and Nuxt support), supastarter is a solid option. If you have zero budget or you are learning, start with a free open-source kit like nextjs/saas-starter, ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate, Open SaaS, or our own free MakerKit Lite.

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.

SaaS Template vs SaaS Boilerplate: Which Do You Actually Need?

"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: the $14-59 Next.js SaaS themes on marketplaces like ThemeForest are this kind, and they ship pages, not a product. There is no auth, no billing, no database, no account model; you are buying a coat of paint and building the car yourself. 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.

If you searched for a "Next.js SaaS template" and you actually need the second kind (most people building a real SaaS do), everything in this comparison is the second kind. If all you need is a marketing-site design, a UI template is cheaper, and you should not pay boilerplate prices for it.

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 July 2026.

A few caveats before the reviews. ShipFast does win 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. Repo structure matters here too: coding agents do their best work in a monorepo, where the schema, API, UI, and conventions are all visible in one place — a point Nx creator Victor Savkin and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch have both made publicly.
• 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 16.3, React 19, TypeScript, Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage), Drizzle ORM, Better Auth, Stripe or Polar for payments, Tailwind 4, Shadcn UI, and Turborepo. The v4 release (August 2026) rebuilt every route around Next.js Cache Components, so navigation paints instantly instead of waiting on queries — you can drive the rendering model yourself on Modern Next.js. You are not locked to one set of choices: MakerKit ships as three Next.js stacks (Supabase, Drizzle, and Prisma), with auth as either Better Auth or Supabase Auth (passkey sign-in included), 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.

As of mid-2026 you are not locked to Next.js either. The same feature set ships as a TanStack Start kit (July 2026, in Drizzle, Prisma, and Supabase variants), and the new Expo (React Native) kit (August 2026) adds a native iOS and Android app to the same monorepo — same Supabase project, same RLS policies, with authentication, personal and team accounts, invitations, and role-based permissions working natively on mobile. Checkout deliberately stays on the web to avoid the 15-30% app-store commission. No other kit in this comparison ships a native mobile app.

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 July 2026: a free open-source "lite" version at $0, then a Pro license at $349 and a Team license at $649, the same across the Supabase, Drizzle, and Prisma stacks. 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 objection you will read elsewhere: MakerKit is "overkill" for solo projects, with a deep codebase and a steeper learning curve. That was a fair critique in 2023; it does not hold in 2026, for two reasons. First, the kit collapses to fit the project: disable team accounts with a feature flag and you are running a single-tenant app with personal accounts only — the simple app now, with the flag to flip when the first customer asks for teams, instead of the rewrite nobody budgets for. Second, the "learning curve" assumed a human reading the codebase file by file. In practice you build with Claude Code or Cursor, and a structured Turborepo monorepo with AGENTS.md in every package is precisely the environment coding agents perform best in — see the Savkin and Rauch threads linked above. The same architecture that once cost you an onboarding week is now why the agent's output lands in the right package on the first try. The honest remaining objection is price: if the budget caps at $199 and the product will never grow past one user, ShipFast is cheaper.

ShipFast

ShipFast is the cheapest and best-known option in this comparison, and that is the strongest 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 changed in 2026, and most roundups have not caught up. Verified on supastarter.dev in July 2026: the Next.js version is now priced in euros at €349 for a Solo license (one developer), €799 for Startup (five seats), and €1,499 for Agency. One-time, lifetime access and updates. If you read elsewhere that supastarter costs $299, that is out of date; at current exchange rates the €349 Solo tier works out slightly above a MakerKit Pro license at $349 — a smaller gap than the $299-era comparisons older posts still quote.

supastarter and MakerKit are close, and the split comes down to what you weight. supastarter's remaining framework edge is Nuxt — both kits now ship Next.js and TanStack Start, since MakerKit added its own TanStack Start kit in July 2026 — and it supports 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, a native mobile app via the Expo (React Native) kit, a longer production track record since 2022, and now the lower solo price. 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 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. One nuance on the "AI-ready" label: the AI SDK scaffolding is a product feature (building AI features into your SaaS); as of July 2026 its docs do not show agent rules, AGENTS.md files, or an MCP server for AI-assisted coding, which is the other half of that label.

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.

SaaSBold

SaaSBold is worth a short entry because it is one of the few single-product pages that ranks for "saas boilerplate" searches, so you will run into it. Verified on saasbold.com in July 2026: the stack is Next.js 14 with Auth.js, Prisma on Postgres (MySQL and MongoDB supported), and Stripe or Lemon Squeezy for payments, sold as a one-time purchase with lifetime updates.

Two things to weigh. First, the stack is a generation behind: Next.js 14 in a market where MakerKit, Achromatic, and ixartz ship Next.js 16 and React 19, which means the App Router migration work lands on you. Second, we found no team accounts, organizations, or role-based access in its feature list, so treat it as a single-tenant kit. If you want a familiar Auth.js and Prisma setup for a B2C product and the version gap does not bother you, it is a workable option; for multi-tenant B2B or a current stack, look elsewhere in this list.

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.

MakerKit Lite (free)

Our own free kit, so the same disclosure applies as the MakerKit section above. MakerKit Lite is the open-source foundation layer of the paid kit: Next.js 15, Supabase auth and Postgres, Tailwind 4, Shadcn UI, i18n, a basic Playwright setup, and the same Turborepo monorepo structure as the full product. MIT licensed, around 445 GitHub stars as of July 2026.

What it deliberately leaves out is the production layer: no billing, no team accounts or RBAC, no admin panel. It also tracks Next.js 15 while the paid kits are on 16, so expect a version bump when you upgrade. That makes it the wrong pick if you need multi-tenancy on day one, and the right pick for two situations: you want to evaluate MakerKit's architecture with real code before paying for anything, or you want a free single-tenant start that can grow into the paid kit later with minimal rework, because both share the same Turborepo structure and conventions. The free Next.js SaaS boilerplate page has the full feature-by-feature split against the paid kit.

ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate (free)

The most popular free SaaS-specific boilerplate, around 7.3k 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 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 the smallest possible budget: ShipFast is the cheapest entry and the biggest community, with a deliberately minimal feature set to match. Just pick it for the price, not because you have read that a multi-tenant kit is "too much" for a solo project: MakerKit runs as a single-tenant app with team accounts disabled by one feature flag, so the real trade is $199 versus $349, not simple versus complex. If you want tests, RBAC, or room to grow into teams later, that gap is cheap insurance.
• 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 closest alternative, especially if you want Nuxt (for TanStack Start, MakerKit ships its own kit).
• If your SaaS needs a native mobile app: MakerKit is the only kit in this comparison with one. The Expo (React Native) kit ships an iOS and Android app in the same monorepo as the Next.js app, sharing the Supabase project, the RLS policies, and the team-account model, and it installs into an existing MakerKit project with one CLI command.
• 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, Open SaaS if you are open to Wasp, or MakerKit Lite if you want a free start that upgrades into a multi-tenant kit with minimal rework.
• 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.

It is also no longer a single-framework bet. The same architecture now ships for TanStack Start, and the Expo (React Native) kit extends it to native mobile — which means the multi-tenant foundation you buy once covers web, iOS, and Android without a second codebase to model accounts and permissions in.

When not to use MakerKit: if the budget caps at $199 and the product will truly never grow past a single user, ShipFast is the cheaper buy, and if you have no budget at all, start with MakerKit Lite. What we no longer concede is the "overkill for solo projects" framing: with team accounts behind a feature flag and an AI agent doing the navigation, a solo founder runs the same kit as a ten-person team, minus the parts they turned off. We would rather you buy the right thing than the expensive thing — but "right" is about budget and product fit, not about a solo founder being unable to handle good architecture.

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. Prefer a line-by-line feature matrix instead of prose? The SaaS starter kit comparison page pits MakerKit against SupaStarter, ShipFast, Achromatic, and IndieKit feature by feature. And if multi-tenant B2B is where you are headed, that is exactly what MakerKit was built for.

Updated August 23, 2026: added MakerKit's TanStack Start kit (July 2026) and the new Expo (React Native) mobile kit (August 2026), noted the v4 Cache Components release and passkey sign-in, corrected the framework comparison with supastarter accordingly, and updated the solo-founder guidance — with team accounts behind a feature flag and AI agents onboarding into the monorepo, the old "overkill for solo projects" objection no longer reflects how the kit is used.

Updated July 18, 2026: re-verified every vendor's pricing against their live pages (supastarter has repriced to €349-€1,499; ShipFast and Achromatic unchanged), added SaaSBold and MakerKit Lite entries, expanded the template-vs-boilerplate guidance, and linked the feature-by-feature comparison page.