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 build and sell one of the kits in this list (Web Boilerplate, the $20 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 — $20 one-time, refunded after joining, includes a React Native kit too.
• Completely free: 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. Every kit here is a one-time purchase with lifetime updates; none are subscriptions.

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 $20

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, for a tenth of the price. The $20 is refunded after you join the community, so the effective price is zero — the fee exists to keep out drive-by downloads, and the products are funded by the community instead of the price tag.

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). ~$20 → Web Boilerplate. $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.