This comparison is usually run as a feature bake-off, and that produces a tie. Both platforms will show you a lead becoming a proposal becoming a signed contract becoming a tracked install, and both demos will look competent, because both products are competent.
The difference that survives the demo is on the invoice. Enerflo’s own FAQ describes a flat-rate monthly subscription based on your average monthly volume, explicitly not charged per seat, design, proposal, contract or job. Sunbase advertises pricing from $59 per user per month, customised around team size, industry workflow and which modules you switch on.
One meters installs. The other meters people. Your company has a ratio between those two things, and that ratio picks the winner before anybody opens a feature list.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product. We are not a solar platform and compete with neither of these. We supply one of their inputs, which the last section states plainly.
Deals per rep is the deciding number
Take two solar companies doing identical revenue.
Company A runs 45 commissioned reps through a high-volume canvassing motion and installs 40 jobs a month. Lots of logins, modest install volume, heavy churn in the sales seat count between summer and winter. Every per-user platform charges Company A for 45 people, most of whom open the software to log activity rather than to run a deal, and charges again every time the roster turns over.
Company B runs 9 experienced reps on referral and appointment flow and installs 60 jobs a month. Few logins, high volume. A per-user platform is close to free for Company B; a volume-metered platform bills it for being good at its job.
Same industry, same revenue, opposite answer. Which is why the useful preparation for this decision is not a feature checklist but two numbers: your fully-loaded seat count at seasonal peak, and your average monthly install volume across a full year. Work them out before either demo, because both vendors will ask, and the quote you get is a function of the answer.
Pricing descriptions on this page reflect what each vendor publicly advertised at the time of writing — Enerflo on its own FAQ, Sunbase on its own pricing page. Both quote individually; confirm current terms directly with each vendor.
What each one is actually for
| Enerflo | Sunbase | |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning | Operating system / integration spine for residential solar | Modular suite covering the whole workflow in one product |
| Your CRM | Integrates with it — Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho are named on its own site | Replaces it — the CRM is one of the modules |
| Advertised pricing basis | Flat monthly rate on average volume, plus one-time implementation | From $59 per user per month, customised by modules and scope |
| Advertised commitment | 12-month minimum for new partners | Not published |
| Buys you | Connective tissue between tools you already chose | One system of record and one dashboard |
The question that settles it faster than price
Do you already own tools you are unwilling to give up?
If your design team lives in a specific proposal platform, your ops director will not leave a CRM she has spent two years configuring, and you hold direct lender relationships — you are describing a best-of-breed stack with seams in it, and a spine is the shape of product that addresses that. Replacing all of it with a suite means winning an internal argument with several people who are right.
If instead your reps are entering the same customer three times, the install team works from a spreadsheet, and nobody can say how many deals are stuck in permitting — you do not have tools worth defending. You have disconnection, and a suite that holds everything in one database is the cheaper cure.
This is the fork, and it is upstream of both vendors. The single-product versions of each side are in Enerflo alternatives, which covers what committing to a spine costs, and Sunbase alternatives, which covers how to shortlist a suite by the module that broke.
Three things to force into both quotes
- The seasonal seat curve, in writing. Ask the per-user side what happens in November when you drop twenty reps, and ask the volume side what happens in July when installs double. Both have an answer; neither answer is on a web page.
- Implementation as a separate line. Enerflo publishes the existence of a one-time implementation fee, which is more disclosure than most of this market offers. Insist the other side separates its onboarding, workflow setup and training from the subscription too, or you are comparing a rate against a bundle.
- The exit. Ask what leaves with you: contacts and deals, or also documents, signed contracts, design files and integration configuration. A spine’s cost of exit is the integrations you rebuild; a suite’s is everything that only existed inside it.
Where both of them start counting
Notice what neither platform does. Every module in either product operates on a household that is already in the system. The CRM tracks it, the proposal prices it, the install tracker schedules it, the canvassing module logs the knock that produced it.
Nothing in either one decides which households should have been in there in the first place. That decision is being made anyway — by an aggregator’s pricing model, by which street a rep parked on, or by whichever list somebody exported last quarter — and it sets the ceiling on everything the platform then does efficiently.
Before spending a quarter migrating, run one check: take your last two hundred deals and sort close rate by how the household entered the pipeline. If the spread across sources is wider than the spread you expect from a platform change, you are about to fix the cheaper problem. How to buy solar leads covers what shared and exclusive records should cost, and how to price a bought lead gives you the ceiling your own funnel can afford.
Where Scout Data fits
We are an input to whichever of these you sign. List Builder assembles homeowner audiences from live property signals and hands them over; Scout puts the same intelligence on a canvasser’s map; the API exists so records land in your platform rather than in a spreadsheet on the way to it.
If you already know which roofs in a territory carry panels and which do not, how to find homes without solar is the list-building half of this decision, and it does not care which platform you chose.
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, Enerflo or Sunbase?
Neither, reliably — they meter different things, so the answer moves with the shape of your company rather than with the vendors. Enerflo’s own FAQ describes a flat-rate monthly subscription based on average monthly volume, explicitly not per seat, design, proposal, contract or job, plus a one-time implementation fee and a 12-month minimum for new partners. Sunbase advertises a starting point of $59 per user per month with pricing customised by team size, industry workflow and modules. A headcount-heavy org with modest volume tends to prefer the first; a lean org with high volume tends to prefer the second.
Are Enerflo and Sunbase actually competitors?
They overlap without being the same category. Enerflo positions itself as an operating system for residential solar and integrates with CRMs rather than replacing them — Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho are named on its own site — alongside design tools and a lender network. Sunbase sells a modular suite that includes the CRM itself, plus proposals, project management, inventory, financials and reporting, with canvassing as a module. If you intend to keep a CRM you already like, only one of these is compatible with that plan.
Can I trial either of them?
Not in the self-serve sense. Both route through a demo and a quote, and Enerflo’s own FAQ describes a one-time implementation fee to configure an instance to your workflows. Treat the evaluation as a paid pilot with a defined scope rather than a free trial, and negotiate what happens to the implementation fee if you do not proceed after it.