We build Orbit, so we put it at the top — full disclosure. Beyond that, this is an honest comparison of the eight Next.js SaaS boilerplates we'd actually consider in 2026, ranked on multi-tenancy depth, billing flexibility, auth choices, architecture, and price. Skip to the FAQ if you just want the picking-criteria summary.
Orbit is the boilerplate we maintain, so take that as a bias warning — but it earns the top spot here on what it actually ships. It's the only template in the list with first-class TanStack Start support next to Next.js, both behind a single CLI that scaffolds whichever you pick. Multi-tenancy is the design centre: workspaces are the tenant root, teams nest inside, two-scope PBAC governs both, and tenancy is enforced in the type system via branded prefixed IDs. The API is a separate Hono service with a WebSocket realtime hub. The Unit of Work pattern means every write is transactional, every domain event fires post-commit, and projectors handle audit log materialisation, mailer sends, and webhook reconciliation. Three interchangeable billing adapters (Stripe, Polar, Dodo). Two ORMs (Prisma 7 default, Drizzle paid).
ShipFast set the template for 'launch a SaaS this weekend'. It's intentionally small, intentionally opinionated, and intentionally MongoDB. Auth is NextAuth, billing is Stripe or LemonSqueezy, and the whole template fits in your head in an afternoon. There's no multi-tenancy primitive, no audit log, no separate API service — and that's the point. If your product is one user logging into one workspace, you're paying for things you'll never use with anything more elaborate.
Makerkit is the most polished template in the Supabase ecosystem. Multi-tenancy, teams, billing (Stripe + LemonSqueezy), and a settings UI all ship out of the box. Tenancy is enforced via Postgres Row Level Security policies — defense in depth at the database layer, which appeals to security-conscious teams. The trade-off is lock-in: Supabase Auth, Supabase Postgres, Supabase Storage, Supabase Edge Functions are all assumed. If you wanted to swap Postgres providers or use a different auth library, you're rebuilding a lot.
Vercel's official template covers auth, Stripe subscriptions, a dashboard, and a marketing site. It's the canonical 'how would Vercel themselves do it' answer and pairs naturally with Vercel + Neon for hosting. Multi-tenancy is shallow — there's a teams concept but no nested teams, no PBAC, no audit log. Treat it as the floor: a clean, free starting point that you'll outgrow as soon as the SaaS gets serious about tenancy or compliance.
The most-starred open-source SaaS boilerplate on GitHub. Next.js App Router, Drizzle, Clerk for auth, Stripe for billing, Tailwind, and i18n via next-intl. It's a well-curated stack and a great free starting point — the trade-off is depth. Multi-tenancy via Clerk Organizations is fine for basic teams, but if you need PBAC, audit logs, or a separate API, you'll add them yourself.
Shipped is the answer if you wanted ShipFast but with Postgres + Prisma instead of MongoDB. Same 'launch this weekend' framing, similar feature set (auth, Stripe, blog), and a similar price point. There's no multi-tenancy primitive and no audit log; the template stops where the product begins.
Bedrock by Max Stoiber is a thoughtful, opinionated template centred on a typed GraphQL layer between Next.js and Postgres. If you've decided GraphQL is your API contract, Bedrock has the cleanest expression of that idea among production templates. Multi-tenancy is light, and the GraphQL choice is itself an opinion you'll either love or actively dislike.
Strictly speaking the T3 stack isn't a SaaS boilerplate — create-t3-app scaffolds a typed Next.js + tRPC project and stops there. But it's the most common starting point for engineers who want to build the SaaS themselves. You'll write your own workspaces, your own PBAC, your own audit log, your own billing — but the foundation is solid and free, and tRPC + typed end-to-end is genuinely good DX.