Next.js Shadcn Dashboard Starter

Every dashboard starts the same way. You open ThemeForest or Colorlib, you find a template, and you spend the next two days deleting code you never asked for.

I've been there. So I built the thing I wish I'd found.

Next Shadcn Dashboard Starter is a free, open-source admin dashboard template for Next.js, built with shadcn/ui, Tailwind CSS, and TypeScript. It gives you a dashboard layout, data tables, forms, and auth screens as a clean base to clone and build on. Today it sits at nearly 6,000 stars and over 1,400 forks on GitHub. Here's how it started, and why I still maintain it.

Where This Started

Back in 2021, I joined a startup for my first real job. At some point we needed an admin panel, and like every developer does, I went hunting for a template. ThemeForest, Colorlib, free repos, whatever I could find.

I picked one. And then the real work started: cleaning it up.

Most templates out there are bloated. Tons of code, weird conventions, theming systems you didn't ask for, demo pages you'll never ship. You don't need any of that. You need a layout and a few solid building blocks so you can start on the actual product. That's it.

But the templates were built to look good in a preview, not to build on. Half of them locked the useful components behind a paywall too. So we took one free template and cleaned it out by hand. It took time, but we kept the cleaned version as a starter for our next projects.

That's the moment the idea was planted, even if I didn't know it yet.

The Freelance Job That Made Me Build It

Later I was between jobs, spending my time on portfolio projects, and a freelance inquiry came in. A SaaS built in Next.js that needed a dashboard.

Around that time shadcn/ui was blowing up. The copy-paste architecture was the whole appeal. You copy a component into your project, it just works, and you own every line of it. Full control, no black box. It was a great time to be building UI.

But there were no real dashboard templates built on it yet. I was assembling everything from scratch, component by component.

So I thought: let me build one and give it back. I'd used plenty of free templates from other developers over the years. This was my turn to hand something back to the community.

The plan was simple. Take shadcn components, build one clean dashboard layout, and put it on GitHub with a README good enough that anyone could clone it and start working in minutes. ChatGPT had just gotten good, so I used it to shape the README into something people could actually read and follow.

The first version was small: a dashboard layout with a sidebar, a header, an overview page with a few charts, and basic auth screens. I pushed it to GitHub and deployed it on Vercel's free plan.

Then it started getting attention. I wasn't the only one, since shadcn was growing fast that year, and a lot of people were looking for exactly this: a starter kit they could copy and make their own.

The Philosophy: Keep It Minimal

Everything I learned from that first cleanup job went into one rule. Keep it minimal.

A good starter shouldn't come loaded with features you'll immediately delete. It should give you the things every dashboard actually needs and get out of your way:

• A dashboard overview layout with a sidebar and header
• A good data table, because most dashboards are tables underneath: filtering, pagination, sorting, all of it
• Forms, including the annoying ones: complex forms, multi-step forms
• Clean patterns for fetching and mutating data

That was my whole checklist. No twenty demo pages that look impressive in a screenshot and mean nothing in your real app.

I added just enough to show how things work. A couple of pages for the table, a few for the different form types and data patterns, and the basic dialogs and sheets. Enough to learn from, not enough to drown in.

The Cleanup Script

Even with a minimal starter, there's still stuff to remove before you make it yours. Cleanup is the boring part nobody enjoys.

So I built a cleanup script. Run one or two commands and the example features are gone, leaving you with a clean base. It's a small thing, but it saves everyone the exact chore that started this whole project for me.

Organized by Feature

The other decision that pays off over time is how the code is organized. Everything lives in feature folders.

Want to remove a feature? Delete its folder. Want to add one? Create a new folder and build inside it. That's the whole mental model.

You won't feel the benefit when you have five pages. But when the codebase grows, feature-based organization is the difference between a project you can navigate and one you're scared to touch.

The Stack Today

I've been maintaining this thing for years now. I keep it current with every major version so it stays one of the best free Next.js + shadcn admin starters you can grab on GitHub. Here's what it runs on today.

Next.js + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS. Always the latest versions. Keeping it modern is half the reason people trust it.

shadcn/ui, now on Base UI. shadcn used to be built on Radix under the hood, and it now defaults to Base UI. It's from the same team, it's newer, and it's where the long-term support is heading. It fits the components perfectly.

TanStack Query for data fetching. I don't start a project without it. Fetching, mutations, cache invalidation. The developer experience is just better, and it pushes you toward good patterns instead of fighting you.

Nuqs for type-safe URL params. Next.js doesn't give you type safety on search params out of the box. Nuqs does, and it drives the table filters and sorting in the starter. It's already wired in and it works great.

TanStack Form + Zod for forms and validation. I'll be honest, I was on React Hook Form for a long time, and it's one of the best form libraries out there. But I'm a TanStack fanboy, so I moved over, and it's been solid. Zod handles validation and slots right into the form. If you want to see the tradeoffs, check out the TanStack Form vs React Hook Form comparison yourself.

What It Gave Me Back

Building this in the open gave me back way more than a repo with some stars on it.

The first thing was time. I built it while I was between jobs, for that one freelance project, and after that it was just ready. Every new project, I could clone it and start on the real work instead of cleaning up someone else's template or building the base from scratch. That saved me a huge amount of time.

Then there was the dopamine. The repo started getting traction, and I still remember hitting 50 stars. I was so happy I posted it on LinkedIn. You can rack up 10k likes on an Instagram photo and feel nothing, but 50 stars on GitHub feels completely different. That felt awesome.

The traction brought work too. The people reaching out were already building on top of the starter, so who knows it better than the person who made it? That's why they came to me. I got to work with clients internationally, which is how I broke into the global freelance market, took contract work, and started earning in dollars. All of it traces back to one free open-source starter kit.

It even gave me some amazing opportunities to collaborate with top companies. I got to work with Clerk on authentication and Sentry on error monitoring, among others. It also got me into the Claude and Codex open-source programs, both six-month plans, purely because of this repo, and I'm really, really happy about that.

That's the part that gives me the high to keep spending time on this thing.

Why It Still Matters

The idea never changed. Give people a clean starting point, not a project they have to dismantle first.

That's why I keep updating the dependencies, keep the stack modern, and keep it free. It started as me handing something back to the community, and years later that's still the whole point.

Clone it, run the cleanup script if you want, and go build your actual product.

• Repo: Next Shadcn Dashboard Starter on GitHub
• Live demo: shadcn-dashboard.kiranism.dev