Most people arrive here having already chosen a language and a framework — the question left is which starter kit for it is worth the afternoon of reading. This is the same catalogue as the directory, grouped by what a kit is built on rather than what it is built for.
A stack appears below only when the catalogue holds enough entries for a comparison to mean anything. Stacks with two or three kits are deliberately absent rather than padded out — see our editorial criteria.
73 open-source · 11 paid
Next.js is where most commercial SaaS starters land: App Router, server components and a hosting story that needs no configuration. It is also the most crowded shelf in this directory, so the useful question is rarely “which framework” but “which of these kits already ships the auth, billing and database wiring I would otherwise write twice”.
56 open-source · 8 paid
React kits split into two families: full-stack starters that happen to use React for the view layer, and front-end-only scaffolds that leave the backend to you. The tags on each entry say which one you are looking at — a scaffold with no auth or payments tag is the second kind.
34 open-source · 5 paid
A TypeScript tag here means the kit ships typed end-to-end, not that it merely tolerates a .ts file. For a starter you intend to keep for years, that is the difference between a refactor you can run and one you have to read.
31 open-source · 7 paid
Tailwind has become the default styling layer for starter kits, which makes it a weak filter on its own — most entries below also carry a component library tag (shadcn/ui, DaisyUI). That second tag is the one that decides how much design work is already done for you.
22 open-source · 1 paid
Node backends in this directory range from thin Express scaffolds to opinionated NestJS structures with modules, guards and dependency injection already laid out. The trade is the usual one: the thinner the scaffold, the fewer decisions inherited, and the more written by hand.
24 open-source · 2 paid
Python starters cluster around two poles: Django templates that assume a database-backed product from the first commit, and FastAPI templates built for services with typed request and response models. Both are well represented; the choice is closer to “admin included or not” than to raw performance.
8 open-source
Angular starters divide on one question: how much opinion do you inherit? At one end, strict templates that pin linting, formatting, spell-checking and commit hooks so a team argues about none of it; at the other, monorepo scaffolds that hand you a design system and enforced module boundaries. The framework already decides a great deal — what a kit adds is the part Angular deliberately leaves open.
6 open-source · 2 paid
Django starters assume a database-backed product from the first commit: the ORM, the migrations and the admin are already there, so what a kit adds on top is usually billing, teams and the deployment story. The admin is the reason most of these exist — it hands you a working back-office on day one, which is exactly the part a SaaS founder underestimates.
15 open-source
FastAPI templates are the busiest Python shelf here, and they differ mostly in how much production scaffolding they assume: migrations, background workers, Docker Compose, and whether authentication arrives wired or as a to-do.
6 open-source · 2 paid
Nuxt occupies the same ground in the Vue world that Next.js does in React — routing, rendering modes and server routes in one package — so the kits below tend to be full products rather than front-end scaffolds.
8 open-source · 1 paid
SvelteKit starters are fewer than their React equivalents, and that shows in what they ship: less framework ceremony, more of the application actually written out. Worth reading the entry rather than the tag list.
12 open-source · 1 paid
Astro entries lean towards content: blogs, documentation sites, portfolios and marketing pages where shipping little JavaScript is the point. A SaaS product is the wrong reason to pick from this list.
8 open-source
Go starters here are backends and CLIs rather than full products — the language's appeal in this catalogue is a single deployable binary and a small runtime, not a batteries-included admin panel.
7 open-source · 2 paid
The PHP shelf is the most commercially mature in this directory: several entries are paid products with years of releases behind them, and Laravel's own first-party billing tooling means subscriptions are usually solved rather than sketched.
8 open-source · 1 paid
Mobile starters here assume Expo unless they say otherwise, which decides more than it looks: Expo settles the build pipeline and over-the-air updates for you, at the cost of native modules you cannot add without ejecting. Read that line first, the rest follows from it.
9 open-source
Extension scaffolds exist to absorb one specific tedium: Manifest V3, its service-worker background page, and the build that has to emit several entry points at once. What separates them is how much of the browser-store submission they also take on.
20 open-source · 5 paid
Supabase-based kits hand you Postgres, authentication and row-level security as one dependency instead of three services. The entries below differ mainly in how much of the row-level security policy work they have already written for you.
17 open-source · 16 paid
Billing is where a starter kit either saves a fortnight or costs one. Everything below arrives with a payment provider wired in — check the tags for which provider, since swapping one for another is rarely the afternoon it looks like.