Most alternatives guides in this category compare features. That is the wrong first move with Solargraf, because Solargraf does not price the way its competitors do. Aurora sells you a seat. OpenSolar sells you nothing and earns elsewhere. Solargraf sells you a quota of projects, with the seat count riding along as a secondary limit.
So before you look at anyone’s shade engine, work out how many proposals your company actually produces in a year. That number, not a feature matrix, is what decides whether an alternative is cheaper or four times the price.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product, and it is not a design or proposal tool. Nothing we sell replaces Solargraf. If you are here to replace it, the answer is one of the platforms below; the last two sections make a separate argument and are marked as such.
What Solargraf publicly advertises
| Plan | Advertised annual price | Included | Beyond the quota |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $2,799 a year | 2 users, 240 projects | +$11 per project, +$1,440 per user |
| Small Business | $4,799 a year | 4 users, 480 projects | +$10 per project, +$1,200 per user |
| Teams | $6,399 a year | 6 users, 720 projects | +$9 per project, +$960 per user |
| Enterprise | $12,999 a year | Unlimited users, 1,500 projects | +$9 per project; public API included |
Public API access is advertised separately at $4,000 a year on the plans below Enterprise. Billing is annual across the card — there is no month-to-month row to escape to if the quota turns out to be wrong.
Every figure above is what Solargraf publicly advertised on its own pricing page at the time of writing, and rate cards move. Confirm current pricing with the vendor directly.
Convert everything to cost per proposal
Divide the plan price by the included projects and the card stops being a list of tiers and starts being a curve. Starter is $2,799 over 240 projects, or $11.66 each. Teams is $6,399 over 720, or $8.89. Enterprise is $12,999 over 1,500, or $8.67. The marginal project price — $11, $10, $9 — tracks the same slope, which tells you the quota is priced honestly rather than as a trap.
Now do the number that actually matters. If you produced 300 proposals last year, Starter’s quota is short by 60, and 60 × $11 is $660, putting your real cost at $3,459, or $11.53 a proposal. Small Business at $4,799 would be more expensive for you despite the larger allowance. Most teams discover the tier they were about to buy is one step off the one the arithmetic picks.
Then carry that cost-per-proposal figure across to every alternative, because it is the only unit all of them can be expressed in. A $135 seat producing 40 designs a month is $3.38 a design. The same seat producing 8 is $16.88. Seat pricing is not inherently cheaper or dearer than quota pricing; it is a bet on your throughput, and the two models disagree about who should carry that risk.
The shortlist, sorted by what each one meters
| Platform | What it meters | What that does to your invoice |
|---|---|---|
| Aurora Solar | Seats, with a monthly project cap per seat | Predictable per head, punishing if you licence people who design occasionally. Advertised at $135 to $259 per user per month |
| OpenSolar | Nothing, inside the platform | No line item at all until you move data out of it; the cost surfaces at the integration boundary instead |
| HelioScope | Seats | Aimed at engineering-grade array modelling rather than a homeowner-facing proposal, so it usually sits beside a sales tool rather than replacing one |
| Scanifly | Seats, with drone capture as the workflow | Adds a field-labour cost per site that the software price hides — worth it only if you already fly |
| PVsyst | A licence | A simulation tool for engineering sign-off. Not a proposal platform and not a Solargraf replacement |
Pricing shapes above reflect publicly advertised information at the time of writing and vary by plan, region and volume. Confirm current terms directly with each vendor.
Two of those are not really alternatives and it is worth saying so plainly. HelioScope and PVsyst answer engineering questions; if you swap Solargraf for either, your reps lose the thing they close with. The genuine head-to-head is Aurora and OpenSolar, and we have written both up at length — Aurora Solar alternatives for the seat-priced case and OpenSolar alternatives for the free one.
Three things to check before the annual commitment
- What counts as a project. A quota model lives or dies on this definition. Does a revised design consume a second project? Does an abandoned one? Does a duplicate created because a rep typed the address wrong? Ask for the answer in writing, because it moves your effective rate by a wide margin.
- What happens at the ceiling. Overage is advertised at $9 to $11 a project, which is fine. Confirm it bills automatically rather than blocking work, and confirm nobody has to approve it at four o’clock on a Friday.
- Whether you need the API. At $4,000 a year below Enterprise, integration is a material share of a Starter plan. If your proposals have to land in a CRM automatically, price the API into the comparison from the first line, not as an afterthought.
Where the address comes from
Here is the argument the design market cannot make for itself, and the reason a company that does not sell proposals wrote this page.
Every platform above prices a proposal you have already decided to produce. None of them has any opinion about whether that household was worth the design. And the quota model makes this unusually visible: when you buy 240 projects, you have literally purchased 240 chances, and the share of them spent on homes that were never going to sign is your real waste rate.
Run it on your own file. Completed proposals last year, divided by systems sold. If it takes you eight proposals to close one, the true cost of a sale on Starter is roughly $93 of software alone, before a designer’s hour is counted. Cutting that ratio from eight to six is worth more than any tier change on the card, and it is the only lever on this page that also gives your team their afternoons back.
Where Scout Data fits, precisely
We are the filter in front of the quota and nothing else. List Builder and Scout read live property signals — more than a million new permits a week, storm footprints mapped within hours, roof and system age, ownership changes — and return the addresses worth a rep’s visit. You still need Solargraf, Aurora or OpenSolar to model the array and print the document.
Two of those signals are invisible from inside a design tool and worth knowing about. Solar permits that were pulled and never completed mark households that already wanted this and stalled — we published how many. And when the original installer is no longer trading, the owner has a service problem and nobody to call, which is what makes orphaned systems such unusually warm doors. Neither shows up on a satellite image.
If the doors rather than the designs are the constraint, start with how to get solar leads instead — this page will still be here when the quota is the binding limit.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Solargraf cost?
As publicly advertised on its own pricing page at the time of writing, Solargraf sells annual plans: Starter at $2,799 a year for 2 users and 240 projects, Small Business at $4,799 for 4 users and 480 projects, Teams at $6,399 for 6 users and 720 projects, and Enterprise at $12,999 for unlimited users and 1,500 projects. Extra projects are priced from $9 to $11 each depending on the plan, and public API access is advertised at $4,000 a year on the non-Enterprise plans.
Is Solargraf owned by Enphase?
Yes. Solargraf came to Enphase through its acquisition of the Montreal company Sofdesk in 2021 and is sold as part of the Enphase software line. That matters less for the design output than for the roadmap: an installer already standardised on one manufacturer’s hardware is buying into a tighter loop, and an installer who is not should ask where the integration priorities sit.
Does Scout Data build solar proposals?
No, and this is not a soft no. We produce no shade analysis, no string layout, no production estimate and nothing a homeowner signs. Whatever you pick off the list on this page, you keep. We work one step earlier, on which addresses are worth a proposal at all.