SaaSykit vs. Laravel Starter Kits: What’s the Real Difference?

When you start a new Laravel project, the first question is often the same:
Should I use a starter kit… and if so, which one?

Laravel offers great starter kits. They give you authentication, simple scaffolding, and a clean starting point for your projects.

On the other hand, SaaSykit was built specifically for developers who want to launch real SaaS products fast, stable, and with modern SaaS expectations already handled. It’s a feature-rich, production-ready foundation packed with everything a modern SaaS needs.

My favourite way to describe SaaSykit is actually how Povilas from Laravel Daily put it:

"SaaSykit isn’t just a SaaS starter kit — it’s a SaaS Full kit."

Both SaaSykit and Laravel Starter Kits help you save time building your projects. But they are fundamentally different in their purpose, depth, and target audience.

Let’s break it down. 👇

Audience & Purpose

• Laravel Starter Kits

Laravel’s starter kits are designed for general web apps.

They give you:

• Login & registration

• Basic profile management

• Simple dashboards

• Authentication scaffolding

That’s it, and that’s intentional. They’re minimal by design.

• SaaSykit

SaaSykit is a SaaS-specific foundation, built for one purpose: help developers launch fully-fledged SaaS products without reinventing the wheel.

Whether you're building a single-tenant SaaS for individuals or a multi-tenant platform for organizations, SaaSykit gives you everything you need to ship faster without sacrificing architecture quality.

It’s not "starter scaffolding", it’s a production-ready SaaS framework.

Feature Depth

Laravel Starter Kits give you the basics.
SaaSykit gives you… well, almost everything you’d normally spend months building.

Some of the major built-in SaaS features in SaaSykit include:

• 💰 Payment provider integrations (Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, offline)

• 💻 Product, plan, discount & pricing management

• 🎁 Trials (with or without collecting payment info)

• 📐 Flat-rate, seat-based & usage-based pricing (metered billing)

• 👩 Beautiful admin & user dashboards (FilamentPHP)

• 🖌️ Multiple themes

• 🚪 A polished checkout experience

• 🦮 Onboarding workflows

• 🗓️ Ready-made components (hero, features, testimonials, etc.)

• 🥑 Built-in auth + social login + OTP login

• 🔐 2FA + reCAPTCHA

• 📈 SaaS metrics dashboard

• 🎨 Customizable landing page styling

• 🧾 Invoice generation

• 💌 Email templates + transactional emails

• 🎤 Announcements system

• 📝 Full blog system with automatic OG images + themes

• 🚧 Integrated SaaS roadmap

• 🧒 User & role management

• 🌍 Translation-ready + SEO optimized

• 🚀 One-press deployment

• 🧪 Automated tests included

• 🧑‍💻 Detailed documentation

Multi-Tenancy with SaaSykit Tenancy

For projects building organization-based platforms, SaaSykit Tenancy adds:

• 👯 Multi-tenant dashboards

• 🤑 Seat-based billing that auto-syncs with providers

• 🗃️ Single or multi-database tenancy

• 💴 Tenant-level subscriptions

• 📩 User invitations

• 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Team management

• 👮 Tenant roles & permissions

• 🔌 Tenant events (invited, added, removed, etc.)
  
  

Laravel Starter Kits offer none of the above features.

Maintenance & Updates

SaaSykit is a very active product since its launch at the start of 2024. Since its launch, not a single week has passed without new features, improvements, fixes and or documentation updates.

SaaSykit also has a public roadmap where you can see which features are coming next and/or in development, with updates driven directly by customer feedback.

With SaaSykit, you aren’t buying a static template, you’re investing into a constantly improving SaaS framework.

Documentation & Learning Resources

A big part of SaaSykit’s strength is how well documented it is. All features come with clear, practical documentation that’s easy to follow.

Beyond written docs, SaaSykit includes video tutorials and step-by-step demos that walk you through real workflows, not just code snippets. Whether you’re setting up subscriptions, configuring tenancy or even learning how to build a full SaaS with SaaSykit, there’s usually a video that shows the exact process from start to finish.

This makes onboarding incredibly smooth, especially for developers who prefer learning visually or want to see the things in action before implementing something themselves.

Final Thoughts

Laravel Starter Kits are good for general apps. But once you enter SaaS territory, with subscriptions, customer onboarding, roles, teams, tenant dashboards, and all the operational stuff, you quickly realize how much work it really is.

That gap is exactly where SaaSykit lives.

If your goal is to ship a SaaS product faster, with a solid technical foundation and all the boring (but necessary) parts already done, SaaSykit is the way to go. 

Keep building great stuff! 🚀