Licence terms
6 criteriaWhat each vendor publishes about seats, projects, updates and stacks. Every cell carries the page it was read off and the day it was read.
| Criterion | MakerKit | supastarter |
|---|---|---|
| ASSERTED, WHAT EACH VENDOR PUBLISHES ABOUT ITS OWN PRODUCT | ||
| Cheapest licence | $349 (Pro)"Pro, A B2B SaaS Starter Kit for individual developers. $349 /lifetime".makerkit.dev/pricing, read 2026-09-18 | $299 (Solo)"Solo, Launch your first SaaS without hiring a team. $299".supastarter.dev, read 2026-09-18 |
| Team licence | $649 (Teams)"Teams, A B2B SaaS Starter Kit for teams of developers or companies. $649 /lifetime".makerkit.dev/pricing, read 2026-09-18 | $799 (Startup) · $1,499 (Agency)"Startup, Get your whole team building on one shared foundation. $799, Up to 5 Developer Seats"; Agency is listed at $1,499.supastarter.dev, read 2026-09-18 |
| Seats on the entry licence | 1"Access to 1 user (only you)" on Pro; Teams is "Up to 5 collaborators".makerkit.dev/pricing, read 2026-09-18 | 1"1 Developer Seat (GitHub access)" on Solo.supastarter.dev, read 2026-09-18 |
| Projects you may ship | Unlimited"Unlimited Projects" on both tiers; "Build unlimited applications".makerkit.dev/pricing, read 2026-09-18 | Unlimited personal projects"Unlimited Personal Projects (Commercial use allowed)" on Solo; Startup is "Unlimited Team Projects".supastarter.dev, read 2026-09-18 |
| Updates | Continuous, lifetime licence"Continuous updates" and "Lifetime license" on both tiers; "One-time payment, no subscriptions".makerkit.dev/pricing, read 2026-09-18 | Lifetime updates"Lifetime Updates" on Solo. The pricing block also carries "Last updated 1 day ago".supastarter.dev, read 2026-09-18 |
| Stacks offered | Supabase, Drizzle or Prisma"Choose your Stack … Supabase … Drizzle … Prisma", on Next.js 16, React Router 8 and TanStack Start.makerkit.dev/pricing, read 2026-09-18 | Next.js, Nuxt or TanStack Start"Choose your framework: Next.js … Nuxt … TanStack Start", with Better Auth, Prisma, Drizzle and Hono.supastarter.dev, read 2026-09-18 |
| WHEN EACH ONE IS THE RIGHT ANSWER | ||
| Pick it when | You are building B2B and you know it, teams, organisations, roles, a super admin. MakerKit is the only one of the three whose feature table names Organizations/Teams and Super Admin as shipped features, and it is the only one offering a choice of three data layers (Supabase, Drizzle, Prisma) at the same price rather than one opinionated stack. | You are not on Next.js, or you might not be later. supastarter is the only one of the three that offers Nuxt and TanStack Start alongside Next.js, and the only one that publishes an agency tier, $1,499 for unlimited seats, which is the right shape if you ship client projects rather than one product. |
KitGrade sells none of these and takes no referral fee on any of them. It scores them.
Everything, side by side
19 rowsThey differ on 4 of the fourteen capabilities. The upper band is each vendor's own claim; the lower band is what this index computed.
| Row |  supastarterRead, not run | |
|---|---|---|
| ASSERTED, WHAT EACH VENDOR PUBLISHES ABOUT ITS OWN PRODUCT | ||
| Price | $349-$649 one-time | $299-$1499 one-time |
| Licence | Proprietary (vendor licence) | Proprietary (vendor licence) |
| Built on | Next.js, React, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Stripe, Turborepo | Next.js, React, Prisma, PostgreSQL, Stripe, Turborepo |
| Documentation | Site, 15 pages | Site, 31 pages |
| Support | Private Discord community | Private Discord community |
| Authentication | Claimedvendor page "authentication", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "authentication", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Social / OAuth login | Claimedvendor page "social login", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "oauth", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Teams & organisations | Claimedvendor page "team", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "team", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Roles & permissions | Claimedvendor page "role", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "role", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Payments & billing | Claimedvendor page "stripe", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "stripe", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Transactional email | Claimedvendor page "transactional email", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "transactional email", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Admin panel | Claimedvendor page "admin panel", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "admin panel", https://supastarter.dev/docs/nextjs |
| Internationalisation | Claimedvendor page "internationalization", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "i18n", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Test suite | Claimedvendor page "end-to-end tests", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "playwright", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| CI pipeline | not claimed | Claimedvendor page "github actions", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Background jobs | not claimed | Claimedvendor page "cron job", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Webhook handling | not claimed | Claimedvendor page "webhook", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| Blog / content | Claimedvendor page "blog", https://makerkit.dev/ | Claimedvendor page "blog", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| File uploads | not claimed | Claimedvendor page "file upload", https://supastarter.dev/ |
| MEASURED, COMPUTED HERE FROM THE PUBLISHED METHOD | ||
| Maintenance, max 30 | not measurable | not measurable |
| Completeness, max 25 | 17.9 | 25 |
| Transparency, max 20 | 11 | 11 |
| Documentation, max 15 | 11 | 13 |
| Support, max 10 | 10 | 10 |
| Total | 49.9 | 59 |
| Points measurable at all | 70 | 70 |
So which one9.1 points apart
Both are paid, we have no review copy of either, and both rows are therefore read, not run. Everything above was read off their own public pages. If either vendor sends a review copy, this page changes and says so. That caveat is the honest frame for a comparison like this one, and it is the thing every other X versus Y page in this market leaves out.
Both kits score nothing on maintenance, and neither is being criticised for it: with no public repository there is no commit history, release cadence or contributor count to observe. That is why the pair of them sit lower than the open source kits on the main ranking without that saying anything about their code.
On measured facts the gap between them is small, and we are not going to invent a winner out of a gap that small. What the numbers do support:
- supastarter scores higher overall.
- The deeper documentation site, counted in pages, is supastarter's.
- Price is the clearest difference to check yourself, and both publish it: Makerkit at $349-$649 one-time, supastarter at $299-$1499 one-time. Both figures were read from the vendors’ own pricing pages and the exact sentence is on each kit’s page.
Before paying either, look at the free Next.js kits. Several of them we have actually run, several score higher, and it is much easier to justify a paid kit once you know precisely what the free ones did not do for you.
What people ask about this
4Is MakerKit or supastarter cheaper?
supastarter's entry tier is cheaper: $299 for Solo against MakerKit's $349 for Pro. That reverses at team size, MakerKit's Teams licence is $649 for up to 5 collaborators, where supastarter's Startup tier is $799 for up to 5 developer seats. supastarter then adds a tier MakerKit does not publish at all: Agency at $1,499. Both are one-time payments rather than subscriptions.
How many developers can use a starter kit licence?
One, on the entry tier of both, and this is the term most often discovered after purchase rather than before. MakerKit's Pro states "Access to 1 user (only you)"; supastarter's Solo states "1 Developer Seat (GitHub access)". Adding a second developer means moving to MakerKit Teams at $649 for up to 5 collaborators, or supastarter Startup at $799 for up to 5 seats. Both allow unlimited projects on the single seat, so the licence is limited by who holds the repository, not by what you build with it.
Which starter kit supports a framework other than Next.js?
supastarter. Its pricing page offers a framework choice of Next.js, Nuxt and TanStack Start. MakerKit is Next.js 16, React Router 8 and TanStack Start, and its variation is at the data layer instead, Supabase, Drizzle or Prisma at the same price. ShipFast is Next.js with MongoDB or Supabase. If the framework is not settled, that is the row that decides it, because it is the one thing a starter kit cannot be refactored out of cheaply.
Do starter kit licences include updates forever?
All three of the kits KitGrade scores here say so on their own pricing pages, in slightly different words. MakerKit states "Continuous updates", "Lifetime license" and "One-time payment, no subscriptions". supastarter states "Lifetime Updates" and its pricing block carries "Last updated 1 day ago". ShipFast lists "Lifetime updates" on both tiers, and its All-in tier carries the line "Updated 6 months ago". A lifetime-updates promise and a recent update are different claims, and only one of them is checkable from outside.