A deep dive into the most feature-rich Next.js SaaS starter kit — two stacks, multi-tenancy, and a real pricing breakdown.
Research-based overview. This article synthesizes public documentation, pricing pages, and user reports. We have not built a production application with every tool we cover; where first-person testing exists, it’s called out explicitly. How we research.
Makerkit is a production-ready Next.js SaaS starter kit built specifically for B2B applications. Unlike most boilerplates that give you authentication and a payment form and call it a day, Makerkit ships with multi-tenancy baked into the architecture from the very first line of code. That means organizations, team invites, role-based access control, and workspace switching are already wired up and working before you write a single feature.
The project is maintained by a small team led by Giancarlo Buomprisco, who has been iterating on it publicly since 2022. The 2026 edition represents a significant maturation — the codebase has been rewritten twice, documentation is thorough, and the community on Discord is active enough that questions typically get answered within a few hours.
At its core, Makerkit targets a very specific founder persona: someone building a B2B SaaS product that needs to support teams, permissions, and organizational hierarchies. If your product is a simple consumer tool or a single-user dashboard, Makerkit is probably overkill. But if your product needs to let companies invite their employees, assign roles, and manage billing at the organization level, this is where Makerkit truly shines compared to every other starter kit on the market.
The architecture follows a monorepo pattern using Turborepo, with packages split cleanly between the core application, shared UI components, billing logic, email templates, and database layer. This structure makes it significantly easier to maintain as your codebase grows past the initial MVP stage — something many boilerplates fail at because they were never designed for long-term scaling.
The feature list in Makerkit is extensive, and more importantly, each feature is production-grade rather than a demo-quality implementation. Here is what ships in the box:
The admin panel alone is worth half the purchase price. Most founders underestimate how much time they will spend building internal tools after launch — Makerkit gives you a working admin dashboard on day one.
Beyond the feature list, the developer experience is polished. The project uses TypeScript throughout, has reasonable test coverage, and includes environment variable validation so your app fails loudly at build time rather than silently in production. The documentation walks you through every major flow with code examples and architectural explanations, not just copy-paste snippets.
Makerkit is available in two distinct variants, and choosing between them is the first major decision you will make. Each stack targets a different infrastructure philosophy.
The Supabase variant uses Supabase for authentication, database (Postgres), storage, and real-time subscriptions. This is the faster path to deployment because Supabase handles hosting, connection pooling, backups, and row-level security out of the box. You get a generous free tier for development, and the Supabase dashboard gives you a visual way to inspect your data without writing SQL queries.
The trade-off is vendor lock-in. Your auth tokens, RLS policies, and storage buckets are all Supabase-specific. Migrating away later is possible but painful. For most solo founders, this trade-off is worth it — the time saved on infrastructure management more than compensates for the theoretical lock-in risk.
The Drizzle variant uses Auth.js for authentication, Drizzle ORM for database access, and gives you full control over your infrastructure. You can deploy the database anywhere: Neon, PlanetScale, Railway, or even a self-hosted Postgres instance. This stack is $50 more expensive because it requires more initial configuration, but it gives you complete portability.
This variant is better suited for founders who want to own their entire stack, who anticipate needing custom auth flows that Supabase cannot support, or who have strong opinions about database hosting. The Drizzle ORM layer is excellent — type-safe queries with zero runtime overhead and migrations that are easy to review in pull requests.
If you are building your first SaaS product, start with the Supabase stack. You can always migrate to a self-hosted database later. If you are an experienced developer with infrastructure preferences, the Drizzle stack gives you the freedom you want without sacrificing the application-level features.
Makerkit uses a one-time purchase model with tiered pricing based on the stack and license type. Here is what you are looking at in March 2026:
| Plan | Supabase Stack | Drizzle Stack |
|---|---|---|
| Personal license | $299 one-time | $349 one-time |
| Team license (up to 5 devs) | $599 one-time | $699 one-time |
| Includes | Full source code, 1 year updates | Full source code, 1 year updates |
| Projects allowed | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Community access | Yes | Yes |
Both licenses include full source code access with no obfuscation, unlimited projects, and one year of updates. After the first year, you keep the code forever but stop receiving updates unless you renew. The renewal cost is typically 50% of the original purchase price, though Makerkit occasionally runs promotions.
Compared to the broader market, Makerkit sits at a premium price point. ShipFast is $199. Supastarter is $299. But Makerkit includes multi-tenancy, RBAC, and an admin panel that would cost you weeks of development time — which at even a modest freelance rate of $100/hour makes the premium easy to justify.
This is the comparison most founders are looking for, so let us be direct about when each tool wins.
Makerkit is the clear winner when you are building a B2B product that needs team management. If your application requires organizations, team invitations, role-based permissions, or per-seat billing, Makerkit gives you all of this out of the box. Building these features from scratch on top of ShipFast would take two to four weeks of focused development, and the result would almost certainly be less robust than what Makerkit provides.
Makerkit also wins on long-term maintainability. The monorepo architecture, clean separation of concerns, and comprehensive TypeScript coverage make it significantly easier to onboard a second developer or refactor features six months after launch. ShipFast is designed for speed, not for growing a team around the codebase.
The admin panel is another decisive advantage. ShipFast does not include one. For any SaaS product with paying customers, you will need internal tools for managing subscriptions, debugging user issues, and monitoring usage. Makerkit gives you this from day one.
ShipFast is the better choice when you are a solo founder validating an idea as quickly as possible. It is simpler, cheaper ($199 vs $299+), and gets you to a deployed product faster because there is less architecture to understand. If your SaaS is a single-user tool — a writing assistant, a social media scheduler, an analytics dashboard — you do not need multi-tenancy, and ShipFast’s lighter footprint is an advantage rather than a limitation.
ShipFast also wins on community size. Marc Lou’s audience is massive, which means more tutorials, more templates, and more third-party integrations. The Discord community is enormous and extremely active. When you hit a problem at 2 AM, the ShipFast Discord is more likely to have someone online who has solved it before.
The honest answer: if you are not sure which one you need, start with ShipFast. You can always add multi-tenancy later if your product demands it. But if you already know you are building for teams, save yourself the migration pain and start with Makerkit.
| Feature | Makerkit | ShipFast |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-tenancy | Built-in | Not included |
| RBAC | 3 roles + custom | Not included |
| Admin panel | Full dashboard | Not included |
| Price | $299–$349 | $199 |
| Time to deploy | 1–2 days | Same day |
| Best for | B2B team products | Solo user SaaS & MVPs |
| Community size | Growing | Very large |
| Blog/docs system | MDX built-in | Basic |
| Email templates | React Email | Included |
Makerkit is the most complete SaaS starter kit available for Next.js in 2026, period. No other boilerplate comes close on B2B features, and the code quality reflects years of iteration and real-world usage. The documentation is thorough, the architecture is sound, and the feature set covers everything you need for a production B2B SaaS application.
That said, completeness comes with complexity. If you are building a simple consumer tool or validating your very first SaaS idea, Makerkit’s extensive feature set can feel overwhelming. You do not need multi-tenancy and RBAC to test whether people will pay for your product. In that case, a simpler boilerplate like ShipFast is the smarter starting point.
If you are building a product that serves teams — project management, CRM, analytics, internal tools — Makerkit saves you weeks of development on multi-tenancy, RBAC, and admin tooling. The $299–$349 price pays for itself within the first week. For simpler products where speed matters more than architecture, start with ShipFast at $199 and add complexity only when your product demands it.
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