These three get mixed up a lot, and the difference matters because it changes the budget, the team and the timeline. Here's the quick way to tell them apart.
|
Website |
Web app |
SaaS product |
| Main job |
Inform visitors and turn them into leads or sales |
Let users complete a task |
Sell access to software on a subscription |
| Who uses it |
Mostly anonymous visitors |
Logged-in customers, staff or partners |
Many paying customer accounts |
| Typical features |
Pages, CMS, blog, forms, search, SEO |
Accounts, search, booking, data entry, workflows, notifications |
Everything a web app has, plus tenants, plans, billing, onboarding and usage limits |
| Measured by |
Traffic, leads, sales |
Tasks completed, hours saved |
Sign-ups, retention, recurring revenue |
| Starts from |
$3,000 (custom code) |
$3,000 |
$10,000 (MVP) |
You need a website if your main goal is publishing content and capturing enquiries. A marketing site may not need custom code at all — more on that below.
You need a web app if people sign in to do something: book, order, upload, track, approve or report.
You need SaaS if other businesses will pay you a recurring fee to use that web app. Multi-tenancy, subscription billing and self-serve onboarding come with that, which is why SaaS starts at a higher price.
Plenty of projects are a mix. A vacation-rental business, for example, needs a public booking site for guests and a logged-in portal for property owners. For The House Kee we built both.