Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.

The grid says what these tools are. This says what builders did about it — one decision per person, changeable whenever you change your mind.

# Tool comparison — Next.js SaaS Starter (Vercel) vs AlternativeTo vs Anthropic Academy (incl. Claude Code in Action)

Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects.
Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code.

## Next.js SaaS Starter (Vercel) (next-js-saas-starter)
- URL: https://github.com/nextjs/saas-starter
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: free — Free and open source (MIT)
- What it is: Vercel's reference SaaS template: Next.js with Postgres, Drizzle ORM, Stripe subscriptions and Customer Portal, shadcn/ui, email and password auth using JWT cookies, an RBAC dashboard, activity logging and a marketing landing page. 16,000+ stars with a live demo.
- Why builders pick it: Free proof of how auth, Stripe and Postgres fit together. Read this before paying $199 for a boilerplate, because for many projects it is already enough and agents extend it comfortably.
- Trap: Explicitly a learning resource: no team billing, transactional email, admin tooling or tests, and the roll-your-own JWT auth is the first piece most people replace with a real auth provider.
- Wiring: git clone https://github.com/nextjs/saas-starter
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/next-js-saas-starter

## AlternativeTo (alternativeto)
- URL: https://alternativeto.net
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: free — Free · no paid tier · funded by partnerships and optional donations
- What it is: Crowdsourced database of 150,000+ apps and services ranked by more than two million user opinions, filterable by platform, licence, self-hosted and open source. Community rankings sit alongside staff-curated Crew Picks, and anyone can submit apps or reviews.
- Why builders pick it: The honest counterweight to paid AI directories: when a tool doubles its price or kills its free tier, this is where you find the cheaper or self-hostable replacement in one search.
- Trap: Rankings reward long-standing vote counts, so established tools outrank newer ones and coverage of 2026-era agent tooling lags specialist directories.
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/alternativeto

## Anthropic Academy (incl. Claude Code in Action) (anthropic-academy)
- URL: https://www.anthropic.com/learn
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: free — Free · every course and certificate, no credit card · account required
- What it is: Anthropic's own course catalog, hosted on Skilljar. Tracks cover Claude 101, Claude Code 101, Cowork, Agent Skills, MCP and the Claude API. Claude Code in Action is the deepest: plan mode, compaction, the rewind menu, hooks, permission modes, headless runs, GitHub Actions review and packaging plugins.
- Why builders pick it: Free, current, and written by the people who ship the tool, so it is right about defaults that blog posts get wrong. Best first stop once you are past single prompts and want longer unsupervised runs.
- Trap: Vendor training: it teaches the Anthropic way and never compares Claude Code with Cursor, Codex or Gemini CLI. Courses change as the product ships, so bookmarked lessons go stale.
- Wiring: https://anthropic.skilljar.com
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/anthropic-academy

## Rules
1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is.
2. Read the full dossier before integrating.
3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.

Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=next-js-saas-starter,alternativeto,anthropic-academy