Guide
How to choose solar software
A buying process built around the questions vendors do not answer on their own websites — starting with what it costs, which most of this market will not tell you.
Start with the constraint, not the category
Most buying advice starts by naming a category. That is the wrong end. The useful first question is what constrains you: seats, projects per month, system size, or jurisdiction. Those constraints sit in different places in different products, and they are what a plan actually gates on.
Two products from the same vendor illustrate it. Aurora Solar and HelioScope both start at $159 per licence per month. Aurora gates on projects per month and seats; HelioScope gates on megawatts per design. Same price, entirely different limit — and which one matters depends on whether you do many small jobs or a few large ones.
Expect not to be told the price
Of the products we could read, only 27 publish a price. 51 publish nothing at all. If you are comparing three products and two will not quote until you take a call, your evaluation is already asymmetric.
There is no single unit to compare on either: twelve distinct pricing models are in use. A per-seat subscription, a per-project fee, a per-plan-set deliverable and a flat monthly fee plus a per-closed-deal success fee cannot be reduced to one number without assuming your volume.
Practical move: work out your own denominator first — seats, projects per month, or megawatts per year — and ask every vendor to quote against it. That converts their model into yours.
Ask the lock-in question explicitly
Manufacturer-published design tools are often excellent and free. The question they rarely answer on their own site is whether you can design with someone else’s hardware.
SolarEdge Designer never states it either way — every sentence is scoped to “your SolarEdge systems”. Huawei SmartDesign makes no statement at all. KACO’s free tool answers it by listing thirteen competing inverter brands, including SMA, Fronius, SolarEdge, Huawei and Enphase.
Silence is not consent. Put the question in writing before you build a process on a free tool.
Look for the dependency that changes the price
Some products cannot run alone. Blu Banyan’s SolarSuccess requires Oracle NetSuite — it is a NetSuite vertical, not a standalone ERP. Enact’s PVCAD tier requires your own AutoCAD licence, or a bundled one at roughly $66 a month more. Xendee’s enterprise API requires third-party utility-rate access.
PVsyst has a constraint of a different kind: it is Windows-only and explicitly does not support Citrix, Remote Desktop or Azure Virtual Desktop, and its workspace cannot sit in a synced folder. For an organisation running virtual desktops, that is disqualifying and it appears in no comparison table.
Count named integrations, not claimed ones
Integration counts are the least reliable number on a vendor site. Enerflo claims “150+ native integrations” and names seven. Tigo advertises an open platform and names none. 3E states support for 79 inverter brands and 34 datalogger brands, naming none of them.
A logo wall is not an integration list. Ask for the named products, and ask which ones the vendor has tested rather than merely built.
Separate AI from automation
“Smart”, “one-click automatic” and “magic” are automation claims. They may describe excellent features, but they are not AI, and a vendor that means AI generally says so.
Two counter-examples worth knowing. Raptor Maps runs automated defect detection across millions of inspection images and makes no AI claim at all on its homepage. Transect argues actively against relying on AI for permitting analysis, and positions expert validation as the product. Neither position is a deficiency.
Check what “trial” means
Six different things are called a free trial in this market. Xendee’s 30-day demo is charged at the monthly Platinum price. Payaca states plainly that it offers personalised demos rather than free trials. Several products have a genuinely permanent free tier.
Before you plan an evaluation, confirm which of the six you are being offered, and what happens to your data at the end.
Build the shortlist from constraints
Write down your denominator, your jurisdiction, your hardware commitments and your must-have integrations. Then filter on those rather than on category.
The finder does exactly this against the verified dataset, and it will also tell you where we could not verify a capability — which is a different answer from “no”.
Next steps
- Match products to your requirements — the finder runs against the same verified dataset.
- The pricing-transparency study — who publishes, who does not, and the twelve models.
- All comparisons — generated from the feature database.