Laravel Spark Alternatives: Free Kits, Paid Boilerplates and Multi-Tenant Options
By ERAG··10 min read
Laravel Spark is often the first name people find when they search for "Laravel SaaS". Then they read what it includes and realise it's a billing portal, not a whole SaaS. If you need sign-up screens, teams, tenants or an admin panel, you're looking for Laravel Spark alternatives, and the search results don't help much: they're directory pages that list names without saying what each product does.
In this post we explain what Spark actually is, when an alternative makes more sense, and then go through the options by category: free kits, paid Laravel SaaS boilerplates, multi-tenant kits and admin-panel based setups. We end with a comparison table. We make one of the products in this list, so we only state what we could check on each product's own site, and where we couldn't, the table says "check site".
What Laravel Spark is (and isn't)
Laravel Spark is the official, paid billing package from the Laravel team. It's built on Laravel Cashier and comes in two flavours, laravel/spark-stripe and laravel/spark-paddle. It gives your customers a ready-made billing portal where they can:
- Subscribe to a plan, switch plans and cancel.
- Update their payment method.
- Download PDF invoices.
You define monthly and yearly plans in config/spark.php. Per-seat billing (for example per team member) is supported. With Paddle you get a merchant of record that handles VAT for you. The portal is isolated from the rest of your app with its own CSS and JavaScript, so it works whatever frontend you use.
What Spark doesn't give you is everything around billing. It's designed to sit next to a Laravel starter kit, which provides the login, registration and settings screens. There's no multi-tenancy, no admin panel for you, and no landing pages.
As of November 2026, the Spark site lists two licenses: $99 per project or $199 for unlimited projects, both with one year of updates.
When you need a Laravel Spark alternative
Spark is a good fit when you already have an app and just want a polished billing portal for Stripe or Paddle. You'll want something else when:
- You need more than billing. Auth, user management, roles, invitations and an admin area are where most of the time goes in a new SaaS.
- You're building B2B with workspaces. Spark bills customers but doesn't separate their data into tenants.
- You want billing inside your own UI. Spark's portal is deliberately separate from your app, with its own look.
- You use another payment provider. Spark covers Stripe and Paddle. Lemon Squeezy, Polar or a regional provider like Razorpay means another route.
- You don't want a separate billing product at all. Cashier plus Stripe's own customer portal covers a lot of what Spark does.
Free alternatives
Laravel starter kits plus Cashier
The free, official route is a Laravel 13 starter kit with Laravel Cashier. The starter kits come in React, Vue and Svelte (all on Inertia 3) and Livewire 4 with Flux UI. They use Fortify for login, registration, password reset, email verification and two-factor auth.
The kits can also be generated with teams: each user gets a personal team, can create and switch teams, and invite members, with the current team's slug in the URL. That's a shared-database model, where team data lives in the same tables.
Cashier (laravel/cashier for Stripe, laravel/cashier-paddle for Paddle) handles subscriptions, trials, webhooks and invoices. For the customer-facing screens, you can send people to Stripe's hosted customer portal with billingPortalUrl() instead of building your own. We show that setup, including billing a tenant instead of a user, in Laravel Stripe subscriptions for a SaaS.
Good for: developers who want official code and are happy to build the SaaS parts (admin, roles, plans UI) themselves.
Wave by DevDojo
Wave is a free, MIT-licensed SaaS framework from DevDojo. Its feature list covers authentication, user profiles, impersonation, billing, subscription plans, roles and permissions, notifications, a changelog, a blog, pages, an API, an admin area, themes and plugins.
Billing supports Stripe or Paddle, chosen with a BILLING_PROVIDER setting. Its composer.json requires Livewire, Laravel Folio and Filament. The latest release we found, 3.1.5 from January 2026, requires Laravel 12, so check the repository for Laravel 13 support if that matters to you.
Good for: solo founders on a budget who like Livewire and want billing and a blog included.
Paid Laravel SaaS boilerplates
Paid boilerplates bundle billing, auth and an admin panel, and usually add a landing page and emails. Two that clearly position themselves against Spark:
SaaSykit
SaaSykit describes itself as a Laravel SaaS boilerplate with billing, auth, an admin panel and emails. Its FAQ lists Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Creem and Lemon Squeezy as supported payment providers. The stack is Livewire, Alpine.js and Tailwind, with a Filament admin panel. Multi-tenancy is a separate product, SaaSykit Tenancy, which keeps all tenants in a single database and adds seat-based subscriptions. The site says it's a one-time payment with lifetime updates and unlimited projects.
Larafast
Larafast is a Laravel SaaS starter kit offered in a Vue (VILT) version and a Livewire (TALL) version. Its plans list subscriptions and one-time payments with Stripe, Lemon Squeezy and Paddle, an admin dashboard and a user dashboard, and Laravel 13. There's also a separate Larafast Multi-Tenancy product with team-based tenancy, team invitations and roles. Plans differ in what they include, so compare them on the pricing page.
There are more paid kits than these two. Before you buy any of them, run through the questions in our Laravel SaaS starter kit buyer's guide: how often it's updated, what the license allows and whether you can read the docs first.
Multi-tenant kits
If each customer is a company with its own users, the question isn't "which billing UI" but "how do I keep customers' data apart". Most boilerplates that offer tenancy use a single database with a team or tenant column. That's simpler to run, but a missed where clause can show one customer's data to another. Our single vs multi-database tenancy post explains the trade-off.
SaaS Laravel
SaaS Laravel is our kit, so here's what it is and isn't. It's a set of Laravel 13 starter kits built around multi-tenancy with stancl/tenancy: a separate database per tenant, each tenant on its own subdomain, with central and tenant contexts and separate guards. On top of that it has Fortify auth (including two-factor and passkeys), spatie roles and permissions, signed invitations, a permission-aware menu builder, per-user languages, and per-tenant maintenance mode and suspension. The backend is the same in every kit; you pick Vue, React or Svelte (Inertia v3 with shadcn components) or Livewire 4 with Flux UI.
What it doesn't include is billing. That's on purpose, so you can choose Stripe, Paddle or a regional provider, but it means it's not a drop-in Spark replacement. You'd add Cashier (or Spark itself) yourself. As of November 2026 it's a one-time payment from $49 per kit, or $139 for all four, with lifetime access, weekly updates and unlimited projects. See the pricing page.
Good for: B2B products where customers expect their data kept separately, and teams that want to choose their own frontend and payment provider.
Admin-panel based: Filament and plugins
Some teams don't want a boilerplate at all. They build the product in Filament panels, which are free and MIT-licensed, and add plugins. Filament (now on v5) has its own multi-tenancy: users belong to tenants such as teams, records belong to a tenant through an ownership relationship, and a tenant switcher sits in the menu. It's a shared-database model.
Billing hooks into the same system. A panel can set a tenant billing provider and require an active subscription. There's an official filament/spark-billing-provider package that plugs Spark into a Filament panel, and you can write your own provider for anything else. So "Filament plus Spark" is itself a common Spark setup, with Filament supplying the app around it.
Good for: internal tools and admin-heavy products where a polished panel matters more than a custom customer-facing UI. If you're torn, read Filament vs Inertia.
Laravel Spark alternatives compared
We only filled in cells we could confirm on each product's own site or repository in November 2026. Everything else says "check site".
| Billing included | Multi-tenancy | Frontend | License and updates | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Laravel Spark | Stripe or Paddle billing portal | No | Any (portal has its own UI) | $99 per project or $199 unlimited, 1 year of updates |
| Starter kits + Cashier | Cashier (Stripe or Paddle), you build the UI | Optional teams, shared database | React, Vue, Svelte or Livewire | Free; you own the code, no kit updates |
| Wave | Stripe or Paddle | Check site | Livewire, Folio, Filament admin | Free, MIT |
| SaaSykit | Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Creem, Lemon Squeezy | Separate Tenancy product, single database | Livewire, Alpine, Filament admin | Paid, one-time, lifetime updates |
| Larafast | Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle | Separate team-based product | Vue or Livewire | Paid; plans differ, check site |
| SaaS Laravel | Not included | Database per tenant (stancl/tenancy) | Vue, React, Svelte or Livewire | Paid, one-time, lifetime access and weekly updates |
| Filament + plugins | Via billing provider plugins (incl. Spark) | Built in, shared database | Livewire (Filament panels) | Filament free, MIT; plugins vary |
A table can't show code quality, documentation or how responsive the author is. Read the docs and, where there's a demo, click through it before you decide.
How to choose
Start from your product, not from the feature lists:
- Is it B2B with company workspaces? Decide the tenancy model first. That's the hardest thing to change later, much harder than swapping a billing UI.
- Which frontend does your team know? A Livewire-only kit is a poor fit for a React team, however many features it lists.
- Which payment provider can you use? Check it's supported in your country before you pick a kit built around one.
- How much do you want to own? A smaller kit you understand fully is often better than a large one you'll fight. Our post on boilerplate vs building from scratch goes deeper.
- What does the license allow? Client work, unlimited projects and how long updates last differ a lot between products.
Mistakes we see when picking a Spark alternative
- Comparing feature counts. Twenty features you'll delete are worse than eight you'll use.
- Treating billing as the hard part. With Cashier and a hosted portal, billing is a few days of work. Tenancy, permissions and invitations take much longer.
- Ignoring the update story. A kit is a fork of someone else's code. Ask how updates reach you and how often they've shipped.
- Trusting old comparisons. Prices, stacks and Laravel versions change. Check the vendor's own page, as we did here, and note the date.
- Buying for the demo. Read the docs and look at a controller or two. That's the code you'll live with.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Laravel Spark alternative?
It depends on what you're missing. For billing only, Cashier with Stripe's customer portal is the free alternative. For a complete single-database SaaS with billing, look at Wave, SaaSykit or Larafast. For B2B with a database per tenant, SaaS Laravel fits, but you add billing yourself.
Is there a free alternative to Laravel Spark?
Yes. Laravel Cashier is free and handles subscriptions with Stripe or Paddle, and Stripe's hosted customer portal covers plan changes, cards and invoices. Wave by DevDojo is a free, MIT-licensed SaaS framework with Stripe and Paddle billing built in.
Does Laravel Spark include multi-tenancy or authentication?
No. Spark is a billing portal built on Cashier. It's meant to be used with a Laravel starter kit for login and registration, and it doesn't separate customer data into tenants. For that you need a package like stancl/tenancy or a kit built around it.
Can I use Spark together with a SaaS boilerplate?
Often, yes, because Spark works alongside an existing app and keeps its portal separate. Filament even has an official Spark billing provider for its panels. Check that the boilerplate doesn't already ship its own billing, so you don't end up with two systems for the same subscriptions.
SaaS Laravel as a Spark alternative
SaaS Laravel isn't a Spark replacement on billing, because it doesn't include billing at all. Where it fits is the part Spark leaves out: database-per-tenant multi-tenancy, authentication with Fortify, roles and permissions, invitations and a modular Laravel 13 backend, with your choice of Vue, React, Svelte or Livewire. The tenant model lives in the central database with an email and a name, which makes it a natural billable model if you add Cashier or Spark. Our comparison of Stripe, Paddle and Lemon Squeezy helps you pick the provider.