Building a Multi-Tenant SaaS with Laravel 11 & React

Multi-tenancy is one of the most requested architectural patterns in SaaS development — and for good reason. It allows you to serve multiple customers from a single application instance while keeping their data completely isolated. In this guide, we’ll build a production-ready multi-tenant application using Laravel 11 as our backend API and React as our frontend.

Multi-tenancy is not just about database separation — it’s an architectural decision that affects every layer of your application, from routing to caching to file storage.

1. Understanding Multi-Tenancy Strategies

Before writing any code, you need to choose your isolation strategy. There are three main approaches:

• Single Database: All tenants share one database, data separated by a tenant_id column. Simplest to manage, least isolated.
• Separate Schemas: Each tenant gets their own schema within the same database. Good balance of isolation and resource sharing.
• Separate Databases: Each tenant gets a completely separate database. Maximum isolation, most complex to manage.

For most SaaS applications at an early to mid stage, the single database with tenant_id approach is the sweet spot — easy to implement, scales well with the right indexes, and keeps operational complexity low.

2. Setting Up the Laravel Project

Start with a fresh Laravel 11 installation and install the packages we’ll need:

composer create-project laravel/laravel saas-app
composer require spatie/laravel-multitenancy
composer require laravel/sanctum

3. The Tenant Model and Middleware

The Tenant model stores plan information, configuration, and serves as the context for every database query made within a tenant’s scope.

// app/Models/Tenant.php
class Tenant extends Model implements UsesTenantConnection
{
    protected $fillable = ['name', 'domain', 'plan', 'database'];

    public function configure(): static
    {
        config(['database.connections.tenant.database' => $this->database]);
        DB::purge('tenant');
        return $this;
    }
}

4. Global Scopes for Data Isolation

To ensure tenant data never leaks, we apply a global scope to all tenant-aware models. This automatically appends a WHERE tenant_id = ? to every query without any developer effort.

// app/Scopes/TenantScope.php
class TenantScope implements Scope
{
    public function apply(Builder $builder, Model $model): void
    {
        if (Tenant::current()) {
            $builder->where('tenant_id', Tenant::current()->id);
        }
    }
}

5. Building the React Frontend

On the frontend, we use React with a custom TenantContext that fetches and stores tenant configuration — branding, features, and plan limits — at the root of the application.

6. Deployment Considerations

• Configure Nginx with a wildcard server_name *.yourapp.com
• Use Redis for session and cache to avoid cross-tenant contamination
• Set up separate S3 prefixes or buckets per tenant for file storage
• Use Laravel Horizon for queue visibility across all tenants

Building a multi-tenant SaaS with Laravel 11 and React gives you an incredibly solid foundation. In the next post in this series, we’ll cover billing with Stripe Subscriptions, plan enforcement middleware, and usage metering.