Building your own SaaS can be a challenging experience, especially if you are self-funded and have a full-time job.
In this post, I am going to cover a few starter kits to help you ship to market much sooner.
ShipFast (Commercial)
NextJS has exploded onto the scene in the past few years; while I prefer Django or Laravel, NextJS is a pretty decent platform to build your next SaaS app and seems to be the way most new startups are going (well according to X/Twitter anyway).
The pain I usually have with Node-based projects is that they don't come with "batteries included", so you have to spend a lot of time bringing in your packages.
Luckily, Shipfast is a great starting point with several essential features baked in that will save you hours if not days of dev time.
Compared to the other boilerplates below, it does lack some features like teams - nonetheless, it's well-priced, looks great, is minimal, and will still save you loads of time.
Nano Asp (Commercial)
It's not often that you find good Asp.net boilerplates. I guess it's because the whole dotnet ecosystem is largely used in enterprises and not startups.
Nonetheless, C# is one of my favorite languages and the .net stack is rock-solid, mature, and reliable.
Nano Asp simplifies working in a dotnet ecosystem, the template provides common useful SaaS features out of the box to help you speed up your development workflow. Comes with a very beautiful dark mode theme and a sleek interface that's smooth and clean.
Wave (Open Source)
One of the simplest templates around. They don't deviate too much from stock standard Laravel, so anyone familiar with Laravel will find this boilerplate fairly easy to customize.
Django Pegasus (Commercial)
Django is one of the best web frameworks out there, it's clean and easy to use - thanks to Python. Django Pegasus is a well-thought-out boilerplate with loads of features. Furthermore, It's easy to customize and doesn't deviate too far from the Django way of doing things.
Bullet train (Open Source)
Ruby is not one of my favorite languages. It's easy on the eyes but Rails introduces too much magic for my liking.
Nonetheless, I tried out Bullet Train and was quite impressed with the amount of features you get for free out of the box. Furthermore, Rails does make you super productive.
So if Ruby is your cup of tea, then you will love Bullet Train.
Gravity (Commercial)
Like Ruby, Node is not one of my favorite stacks either, however, this boilerplate is so sleek and feature-rich that it's hard to ignore.
Especially in the Node world where you waste too much time manually picking components of your stack. Gravity makes it super easy to launch sooner without mucking around with plumbing stuff.
Top comments (5)
Nice collection! Thanks!
I would also add Laravel Nova (Commercial) - nova.laravel.com/
Thanks. I briefly looked at Nova some time ago. To me, it seemed more of an admin panel but sure no problem, I guess It can be used as a starting point for a SaaS. Will review and add to the list.
You're right. Probably Laravel Spark (Commercial) fits better in this list. Maybe not as complete as the ones you listed, but definitely a great starting point for PHP devs.
Thanks for the article. This one looks promising as well.
opensaas.sh/
Thanks much appreciated. I was going to add OpenSaas. I just never had the time to install and evaluate it for myself but will look at adding them soon.