Best Next.js Boilerplates in 2026: An Honest Comparison

A Next.js boilerplate is a pre-built SaaS codebase — authentication, payments, database, emails, and deployment already wired together — that you buy (or clone) instead of spending your first month on plumbing. In 2026 the market has consolidated around a handful of serious options, and they differ far more in focus and price than in raw technology: almost all of them are Next.js App Router + Postgres + Stripe underneath.

We make one of the kits in this list (Web Boilerplate, the free one), so read this as an opinionated comparison from people who work on this problem daily — we've linked every competitor so you can verify claims yourself.

TL;DR — the short version

• Multi-tenant B2B SaaS (teams, roles, permissions): MakerKit — the most battle-tested, from $299.
• Solo founder, simple B2C app, biggest community: ShipFast — from $199.
• Multi-framework or database-agnostic: supastarter — around $299, supports Next.js, Nuxt, and TanStack Start.
• Smallest budget without giving up auth + Stripe + analytics: Web Boilerplate - free with any Base44 plan, includes a React Native kit too.
• Fully open source: Vercel's Next.js SaaS starter — minimal but official, a great reference implementation.

What they cost

Prices below are the entry tier for each kit as of July 2026 — most sell higher tiers with extra templates or support. The paid kits here are one-time purchases with lifetime updates; none of them charge a recurring fee for the code.

Feature comparison

ShipFast — the best-known, built for speed

ShipFast ($199–$349) by Marc Lou is the boilerplate that popularized the category. It optimizes for one thing: getting a simple, single-tenant B2C product live in days. You get auth, Stripe or Lemon Squeezy, a choice of Supabase or MongoDB, email via Resend, and a library of landing-page components.

The trade-off is depth: there is no multi-tenancy, no admin panel, and no role-based access control. If your product will ever need "invite your team," you'll be building that layer yourself. For weekend projects and directory-style apps, that's a fine trade.

MakerKit — the B2B workhorse

MakerKit ($299–$649, with a free open-source lite version) has been shipping since 2022, which makes it the most battle-tested kit on this list. It's the clear pick when you're building multi-tenant B2B SaaS: organizations, team invites, per-seat billing, roles and permissions, and a super-admin panel all come finished.

The cost of that depth is surface area — it's the most codebase to understand before you feel at home, and the higher tiers get expensive if you need multiple projects.

supastarter — the flexible one

supastarter (~$299) is the most configurable option: it supports Next.js, Nuxt, and TanStack Start, and because it's built on Prisma it is effectively database-agnostic. Multi-tenancy, i18n, and a billing portal are included. Pick it if you're not fully committed to Next.js, or if your team wants to choose its own database.

Vercel's SaaS starter — the free reference

nextjs/saas-starter is Vercel's official free, open-source template: Next.js App Router, Postgres, Stripe, and JWT-based auth with a basic team/RBAC sketch. It's intentionally minimal — no OAuth providers, no analytics, no transactional email, minimal SEO — but it's the best free codebase to learn the patterns from, and it's what we'd point engineers at who want to build everything themselves.

Web Boilerplate — ours, and why it's free

Web Boilerplate is our kit, so discount accordingly — but the honest positioning is simple: it covers the same core ground as ShipFast (Supabase auth with Google sign-in, Stripe payments, SEO, one-click Vercel deploy) plus PostHog product analytics wired in, and it costs nothing. Subscribe to any Base44 plan through our partner link and you get lifetime access to the whole bundle at no extra cost. We're funded by that partnership and by the community around it rather than by a price tag on the code.

Two things the pricier kits don't include: the React Native Mobile Boilerplate comes in the same bundle, and the codebase ships with a Claude Code setup guide — conventions and configuration tuned so AI coding tools can navigate and extend it reliably. Like ShipFast, it's single-tenant: if you need teams and RBAC on day one, buy MakerKit instead.

How to actually choose

Ignore feature checklists for a second and answer three questions:

1. Will users belong to organizations? If yes → MakerKit or supastarter. Retrofitting multi-tenancy onto a single-tenant kit is the single most painful migration in this space.
2. Is your stack decided? Committed to Next.js + Supabase → ShipFast or Web Boilerplate. Want options → supastarter.
3. What's your budget? $0 → Vercel's starter and 50–90 hours of your time (we've broken down those hours here). Already paying for an AI app builder → Web Boilerplate, free with any Base44 plan. $200–$300 → ShipFast for B2C, MakerKit for B2B.

Whatever you pick, the economics are the same: every kit on this list costs less than a single day of engineering time. The expensive mistake isn't picking the wrong boilerplate — it's spending three weeks building auth from scratch. If you're still weighing that, start with what a web boilerplate actually includes or the cheapest options ranked.