Caisson vs supastarter
supastarter is the most feature-rich starter kit. Caisson is the compliance depth a broad kit doesn't carry. Here is the honest line between breadth and audit-readiness.
Which should you use?
Pick supastarter for breadth: a production-ready monorepo with auth, multi-provider billing, organizations, a typed API, i18n, storage, and an admin UI, on your choice of Next.js, Nuxt, or TanStack Start. Pick Caisson for depth on one axis (the compliance and tenant-isolation substrate): fail-closed RLS with isolation tests, a WORM + hash-chained audit trail, per-tenant field encryption, and SOC 2 / HIPAA / EU AI Act evidence packs. supastarter is the widest kit; Caisson is the regulated backend it doesn't try to be.
What supastarter is
Next.js / Nuxt / TanStack SaaS boilerplate. Facts below were read from supastarter.dev on 2026-07-07.
- Monorepo on Next.js, Nuxt, or TanStack Start with a shared packages layer.
- Auth, multi-provider payments, organizations/multi-tenancy, a typed API (oRPC), i18n, storage, background jobs, notifications, an admin UI, and a blog.
- AI integration and AGENTS.md conventions for AI coding agents.
- One-time pricing, lifetime access and updates; a paid 'done-for-you' MVP service is offered.
An honest comparison
Where supastarter has a capability, it is marked. Caisson is the compliance and tenant-isolation substrate; supastarter wins the rows it wins.
| Detail | Caisson | supastarter |
|---|---|---|
| Stack | Next.js + Postgres | Next.js / Nuxt / TanStack + Postgres |
| Auth | ||
| Organizations / multi-tenancy | ||
| Typed API + i18n + jobs | partial | |
| Fail-closed Postgres RLS + automated cross-tenant isolation tests | — | |
| WORM evidence store + append-only hash-chained audit trail | — | |
| SOC 2 / HIPAA / EU AI Act evidence packs + OSCAL export | — | |
| Per-tenant field encryption (envelope, per-tenant key) | — | |
| Detached evidence signing (Ed25519 + RFC-3161) | — |
What supastarter is genuinely better at
A comparison that only flatters one side isn't worth reading. Here is what this kit does well.
supastarter is genuinely the most complete kit here (organizations, typed API, i18n, jobs, storage, notifications, admin) and it is one of the few that lets you pick Next.js, Nuxt, or TanStack Start. For raw breadth, it leads.
Its shared-packages monorepo is well structured and documented, and it is explicitly tuned for AI coding agents. That scaffolding is real, ships today, and saves weeks.
Where Caisson draws the line
The compliance and tenant-isolation substrate a launch kit leaves to you.
supastarter gives you organizations and an admin UI; it does not ship isolation tests that prove cross-tenant reads fail, a WORM audit trail, per-tenant field encryption, or framework evidence packs. Those are the controls a SOC 2 or HIPAA audit actually inspects.
Caisson is composable packages on an Apache-2.0 base: you add the compliance modules you need onto a standard Postgres app rather than adopting one large template wholesale.
Which should you pick?
You want the widest possible feature set and framework choice in a single well-structured monorepo.
You need the compliance controls and audit evidence a broad kit doesn't include, on a composable base you extend as needed.
Ship the app breadth on supastarter and add Caisson's Compliance bundle for the isolation tests, WORM audit, and evidence packs when compliance enters scope.
One-time, own the source.
Caisson is a one-time perpetual license — the price never recurs, and it includes 12 months of updates from your purchase date, renewable per entitlement afterward at 40% of list per year. The Base substrate is Apache-2.0; the compliance modules are commercial.
Compliance bundle
$1,649, one-time. Fail-closed RLS, WORM, the audit chain, evidence packs, and the framework and signing carves — the whole substrate this comparison is about.
À la carte
Take a single module from $49 — audit-worm, field-crypto, or compliance-core on their own, onto your existing Postgres app.
Everything bundle
$2,259 covers every bundle and every à-la-carte module, plus the open base, in one purchase.
Common questions.
supastarter has more features. Why would I add Caisson?
Do both let me own the source?
Can I use supastarter and Caisson together?
Ship the compliant backend.
Explore the Compliance bundle, browse every module in the marketplace, or read another comparison.