Top 10 Best Proposal Software for Solar Installation Businesses in 2026

Aurora Solar is the closest thing the residential solar industry has to a default standard. Give it an address and an electric bill and it generates a LIDAR-assisted 3D roof model, runs shading analysis, and wraps the output in a tablet-friendly proposal reps present at the kitchen table through Aurora’s “Sales Mode.” For installers who need bankable, defensible production numbers on every job — not just the easy ones — Aurora’s design accuracy is hard to beat, and it’s the platform most likely to already be recognized by name when a customer starts comparing installers online.

The tradeoff shows up in the price tag and in what’s missing outside the design-and-proposal layer. Aurora doesn’t publish per-seat pricing for team plans — you’ll talk to sales — but the verifiable published rates run from around $159/user/mo at the Essentials tier to $259/user/mo at Premium, billed annually. For a 5-person sales team, that’s $9,540 to $15,540 a year before any add-ons, and the 8,760-hour shading simulation that makes Aurora’s numbers bankable is gated to the Premium tier. Below that, you’re working with simplified shading that lenders and some financing partners won’t accept for larger projects.

Best for: Residential and commercial installers who need engineering-grade shading and production numbers behind every proposal, and who have the sales volume to justify the per-seat cost.

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OpenSolar’s core design, CRM, and proposal tools are free, with no per-seat license fee and no project cap on the base tier. The platform is funded through hardware and finance-partner relationships — companies like Enphase and IronRidge pay to be surfaced inside the design workflow — rather than installer subscriptions, which is a genuinely unusual model in solar software. For a new installer testing the market or running a handful of straightforward residential jobs a month, that’s real headroom to grow into before paying anything at all.

The 2026 release of OpenSolar 3.0 pushed the platform further from a pure design tool toward a full solar CRM with design built in, adding an “Ada” AI assistant for auto-design and lead generation and a “Sales Machine” proposal tool that visualizes whole-home electrification — EVs, heat pumps, battery retrofits — alongside the solar system itself. The catch, and it’s a real one: better shading accuracy, e-signature, hardware connectors, and premium support all sit behind paid add-ons once your business scales past a handful of simple residential jobs a month. External API access also became a paid feature in 2026, so a business that starts integrating OpenSolar into a broader tech stack will hit a cost line that wasn’t there at signup.

Best for: New or cost-conscious solar businesses running low deal volume who want design and proposal tools without an upfront subscription.

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Solargraf, owned by Enphase since January 2021, is built around getting a residential proposal out fast: auto-roofline and obstruction detection, NREL-verified shading, a battery design tool, financing options, and e-signature via DocuSign all in one browser workflow. It began life in Montreal as a product from Sofdesk before Enphase acquired it, and the years since have been spent sharpening it into one of the fastest address-to-signed-contract paths in residential solar software. If your business sells Enphase microinverters and batteries, the direct integration with Enphase’s own commissioning tools is a genuine time-saver most competitors can’t match — a design pushes straight through to the physical install without a data hand-off.

The pricing model is unusual for the category: rather than a flat per-seat monthly fee, Solargraf runs on a project-quota system that lands between roughly $2,799 and $12,999 a year depending on volume. That’s transparent in the sense that it’s published, but it can escalate quickly for a shop with rising deal volume, and it doesn’t reward slow months the way Pylon’s true pay-per-project model does. Where Solargraf clearly loses ground is simulation depth — its shading analysis is real but shallower than Aurora Solar’s or HelioScope’s, which matters if a lender specifically requires P90 yield methodology on a project.

Best for: Residential installers standardized on Enphase hardware who prioritize proposal speed over deep engineering simulation.

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ARKA 360 bundles 3D modeling, shading reports, AI-assisted panel optimization, and instant proposal generation into a single tiered plan, with unlimited residential and commercial projects starting at the Basic level. It’s a credible middle ground between Aurora Solar’s per-seat cost and OpenSolar’s free-but-limited model — flat monthly pricing with room to add commercial-specific tools like single-line diagram export as you grow, without renegotiating your whole contract.

The Premium tier adds SLD export for permitting and design using micro-inverters and optimizers, which matters once you’re taking on jobs with more complex electrical requirements than a straightforward string inverter residential install. Reviewers on G2 consistently praise the solar irradiation data and panel-mounting workflow, while the most common complaint is cost creeping upward once add-ons like the CRM module are factored in — worth confirming exactly what’s bundled versus billed separately before signing.

Best for: Growing residential and light-commercial installers who want unlimited projects on one predictable monthly plan.

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HelioScope, built by Folsom Labs and now owned by Aurora, is the tool solar engineers reach for when a commercial or industrial project needs a module-level, 8,760-hour annual simulation with a loss tree that separates shading from soiling, mismatch, thermal, and wiring losses. Very few tools let an engineer point at a single line and explain exactly where a few percentage points of production went missing, and that transparency is what keeps HelioScope in the stack at firms that have to defend their numbers to a bank.

Published 2026 pricing runs $159/mo for the Basic plan (10 projects/month) and $259/mo for Pro, which adds LIDAR-assisted modeling and AI-based obstruction detection. What HelioScope will not do is sell the job or get it permitted — there’s no proposal tool at any tier, so it functions as the engineering seat in a stack rather than the whole stack. That single fact governs whether it belongs in your business: buy it to back up the numbers on complex commercial layouts, but plan to pair it with a separate customer-facing proposal tool to actually close.

Best for: Commercial and industrial solar engineers who need bankable, defensible simulation on complex layouts like carports and ground mounts.

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Pylon skips the monthly fee entirely and charges per project instead — a flat 2D design canvas, high-resolution aerial imagery, 3D shading, load profiles, and a proposal output for a few dollars per job, with no monthly minimum and no contract to sign. For installers with volume that swings seasonally, only paying when you’re actually quoting is a real advantage over a fixed monthly seat cost sitting idle in a slow month, and unlimited team members can use the account since the cost is tied to the project, not the seat.

Pylon’s own pitch leans on the flat 2D design surface as an advantage rather than a limitation — the company argues that rotating a design along a 3D axis, the way Aurora or Solargraf do, is slower and harder on touch devices like an iPad, especially in the field. Whether that tradeoff works for your team depends on how much you rely on a 3D visual to sell the homeowner on the look of the finished install. An optional CRM layer is available separately at $49/mo (Independent) or $99/mo (Business) for teams that want lead tracking and referral sourcing on top of the design tool.

Best for: Installers with seasonal or unpredictable deal volume who don’t want a fixed monthly bill regardless of how many jobs they quote.

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SunPower’s dealer proposal generator lets authorized SunPower installers input customer data and produce a branded, real-time proposal built specifically around SunPower’s own panel and battery line. Because it’s purpose-built for one manufacturer’s product catalog, it removes a lot of the manual configuration a general-purpose tool requires — hardware specs, warranty terms, and financing partners tied to SunPower are already mapped in, so a rep isn’t rebuilding that structure from scratch on every quote.

The obvious limitation is enrollment: this isn’t a product you can sign up for independently, and the tool only makes sense in the context of an existing SunPower dealer relationship. For an installer already inside that network and selling primarily SunPower systems, it’s a convenient bundled tool rather than a separate line-item decision. For everyone else — multi-brand installers, or shops considering SunPower alongside other manufacturers — it’s simply not accessible as a standalone purchase, which is why it ranks lower on this list despite doing its narrow job well.

Best for: Installers already enrolled in the SunPower dealer network who exclusively or primarily sell SunPower systems.

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Scanifly starts with a drone flight over the property — either flown by your own team or by a Scanifly operator — and turns the aerial imagery into a to-scale 3D model automatically, detecting roof planes and obstructions without manual measurement. The AI-powered image processing produces CAD-ready models and technical drawings that export to other solar design tools, which makes Scanifly less of a standalone platform and more of a specialized front-end for whatever design and proposal tool you’re already running.

For installers who want the most physically accurate site data available — actual measured obstructions and roof planes rather than a satellite-imagery estimate — and are comfortable paying per processed site rather than a monthly seat, it’s a strong fit. The tradeoff is logistical: you need either an in-house drone operator or a booked Scanifly flight, which adds a scheduling step that satellite-based tools like Aurora or QuoteIQ’s MapMeasure Pro skip entirely. That makes Scanifly the right call specifically when a roofline is complex or heavily obstructed enough that a remote estimate genuinely isn’t good enough.

Best for: Installers who want drone-based, to-scale 3D site models instead of satellite-imagery estimates, especially on tricky rooflines.

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PVsyst is a desktop simulation package built for solar engineers modeling irradiance, shading, system design parameters, and financial metrics at a depth few browser-based tools attempt. It’s the tool lenders and investors trust for bankability studies on utility-scale and complex commercial projects — the kind of report where a financing partner needs to see the underlying assumptions, not just a final production number — but it was never built to generate a customer-facing sales proposal, and it shows the moment you try to use it that way.

Licensing runs around €500 per user per year plus a roughly 20% annual maintenance fee, and the software is Windows-only with a genuine learning curve that most teams need dedicated training to climb. That’s the right investment for an engineer producing formal bankability documentation, and the wrong one for a residential sales rep trying to get a homeowner to sign before the end of the site visit. Solar installers evaluating this list for a residential or light-commercial proposal workflow should treat PVsyst as out of scope entirely and look at the tools ranked above it instead.

Best for: Solar engineers producing bankability and performance reports for utility-scale or complex commercial financing.

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