Building a software-as-a-service (SaaS) from the ground up can be a time-intensive chore.
Don't fret, there are pre-configured SaaS boilerplates available, including the one I'll introduce shortly, which can give you that essential acceleration and time-saving boost you need.
What is a SaaS?
I'm glad you asked, in short Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud-based software model that delivers applications to users through your browser.
The software and infrastructure are managed by the SaaS provider, and users can access the service on-demand, typically under a subscription or pay-as-you-use pricing model
All business needs can be very different and the curated list of features can vary from one organization to the next.
Your SaaS application can integrate open-source software to enhance its capabilities and provide exceptional value to your users.
Let's take a look at how leveraging valuable open-source software can be a game changer.
It provides a more versatile and powerful solution to your up-and-coming business while you build your SaaS app.
#. BoxyHQ's SaaS Starter Kit This is your SaaS👇
Kickstart your enterprise app development with the Next.js SaaS boilerplate.
Get a development boost by leveraging the pre-built boilerplate features out of the box.
Significantly reduce the time to build your own SaaS and focus on building your core application features.
Ideal for startups, and those looking to enhance their existing applications with strong, out-of-the-box security.
1. Cerbos
Cerbos is an open-source, scalable authorization layer that simplifies the implementation and management of user roles and permissions across multiple applications and services.
Customize access control within your SaaS application, allowing you to define fine-grained permissions to meet the unique requirements of your users.
Prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and ensure that data remains protected from unauthorized users.
Enhanced user experience, enabling users to have precise control over their access rights within your application.
2. Supertokens
SuperTokens is an open-source authentication and authorization solution designed to provide secure login and scalable access management for web and mobile applications.
Supports a variety of authentication methods, including session management and JWT, ensuring that user authentication is seamless and secure.
Prevents common security pitfalls such as session hijacking and data breaches, enhancing user trust in your application.
Improved user experience by simplifying the user authentication process, ensuring that users can access the application with ease and confidence.
3. Retraced Audit Logs
Retraced is an open-source audit logs service used for documenting activity within software systems across your organization.
Provide detailed tracking of all activities within your application, allowing you to monitor who accesses your application and what actions they perform.
Early detection of suspicious or unauthorized behavior, enabling a swift response to potential security incidents.
Maintain transparency and accountability by providing an audit trail of user actions and system events.
4. Unleash
Feature flags make it easy to test how your code works with real production data without the fear that you'll accidentally break your users' experience.
Control feature rollouts, ensuring that updates and new features are introduced gradually, reducing the risk of disruptions and issues.
Rapid issue mitigation in the event of unforeseen issues or bugs allowing you to quickly turn off problematic features without a full application redeployment.
Minimizes the risk of disruptions and issues, ensuring a smoother user experience.
5. Ockam
Facilitate secure data authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality for data in motion at the application layer.
Robust security framework that allows developers to establish end-to-end encrypted communication channels, ensuring data authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality.
Support for multiple protocols allowing secure channels to span across various network topologies and transport protocols.
Provides tools for identity creation, key management, and credential management, which are essential for secure communication in distributed systems.
6. Hasura
Hasura is an open-source engine that provides instant, real-time GraphQL APIs over Postgres, with webhook triggers on database events and remote schemas for business logic.
Simplified data fetching from databases while maintaining strong security, reducing development time and potential security risks.
Fine-grained control over data access through permissions and role-based access control (RBAC), ensuring that only authorized users access specific data.
Enhance the data security by protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access.
7. Meltano
Declarative, code-first data integration engine that provides developers with the tools to move, transform, and explore data across various sources and destinations.
Designed to help unlock APIs and databases, and to facilitate the creation of data and machine learning-powered product ideas.
Support for over 600 data sources and destinations, providing a versatile integration solution.
Declarative, code-first approach for managing data pipelines which makes it a powerful tool for handling large-scale data.
Allows developers to build custom connectors and integrate existing data tools, offering a high level of customization and flexibility.
8. Odigos
Odigos, is an open-source project for application monitoring and observability, enabling the user to proactively detect and troubleshoot security issues.
Application developers
- More focus on writing code by leveraging the power of OpenTelemetry and eBPF to automatically instrument applications. Be prepared for the next production incident with best-in-class observability data.
Platform engineers
- Automatically deploy and scale collectors according to the traffic of applications. No need to waste time deploying and configuring collectors.
9. Trigger.dev
Trigger. dev is a platform, SDK, and API for building and running Jobs in your codebase, triggered by various sources, but without having to worry about managing any complicated orchestration infrastructure. It can be used from any Node.
Manage long-running Jobs on serverless platforms that have short timeouts.
The user is provided an SDK for building Jobs in your codebase, triggered by various sources such as events, scheduled events, and webhooks.
Out-of-the-box Integrations with popular services such as Slack, OpenAI, GitHub, and more, which vastly simplifies the process of interacting with 3rd-party services.
Bonus 🔥 Trending List
Get notified via email when your open-source project becomes trending on GitHub in real-time.
🤩 Incorporating open-source projects can be a total win for your SaaS application.
Thank you for checking out these nine POWERFUL open-source projects that you should consider integrating into your SaaS to enhance its capabilities that will turn your app into gold.🥇
One of the best ways to support open-source software is with a star 🌟
Top comments (53)
Great projects!
All of them! :)
I took a look at your project, I thought it was phenomenal, I hope one day to appear in an email with it LOL 🦤.
Thanks @nevodavid!
BTW, nice job creating trending-list, I'm using it so I will be notified when BoxyHQ repos as well as side projects start trending. It was a nice bonus to add to the list.
hay lam!
Thanks for adding Ockam to the list! If anyone here wants to learn more, or join our community, swing by our Discord to say 'hey'.
No problem @mattgreg! Ockam has some really great end-to-end encryption features and I thought it was very fitting to add to the mix of fitting inside a SaaS as a tool to boost security.
Meltano is a really nice project 🔥. And superb article @nathan_tarbert amazing list.
Thanks @srbhr!
I just came across Meltano recently and was impressed with their huge list of connectors.
Amazing resources and more than that you have compiled and enriched these with relevant details quite nicely. Bookmarking...
That’s great to hear, thank you so much 😊
I had almost gotten convinced that these list articles were AI generated entry level ones that just summarize GitHub trending page or something of that sort but this one is actually good. Bookmarking it.
Haha I’m very flattered by your comment. I appreciate that 😁
I stumbled upon this article just when I needed it the most. At that time, I was diligently working on developing my SaaS app, and I found myself investing significant effort in building everything from scratch.
Wow thanks so much for the feedback @mhbaando, that is great to hear!
Please reach out to me on X with an update twitter.com/nathan_tarbert
Exciting projects! Can't wait to try these out
Cool @edenfed, post your feedback. I would love to hear your experience.
Or just use Frappe Framework :)
Nice list by the way. Bookmarked.
Thank you!
Nice addition @turker_tunali
Surprising content, thank you
Thank you @flowzai for the positive feedback :)
Shout out to Novu, the open-source notification infrastructure for developers.
Agreed! Novu is pretty awesome :)
thanks alot for this helpful content
You're very welcome Okoro ❤️
Pretty great stuffs, gotta save it for later
Thanks @vicveksr9485!
pocketbase.io/
supabase.com/
Supabase base is definitely awesome!
Great list, saved for later!
Nice!