Almost every cloud design platform sold since 2018 answers the same question: how much energy will this array make, and how do I get the customer to sign. archelios Suite, published by Trace Software International, answers a different one: is this installation electrically correct, and can you prove it to somebody with a rule book. That is a narrower question and a much less fashionable one, and it is also the reason the product still sells at EUR 990 to EUR 1,990 a year for design while its sibling module charges EUR 1,350 and up for calculation alone. archelios earns 33 of 50 on our review bench, including the highest compliance and documentation score we have given any tool. This review covers what it does, what the full stack actually costs, and the specific engineer for whom it is the correct purchase over anything else on this site, our own sister product included.
Direct answer. archelios Suite is a French PV design and electrical calculation package from Trace Software International. archelios PRO handles 3D design and yield from EUR 990 a year, and archelios CALC handles code-compliant electrical sizing from EUR 1,350 a year, both excluding tax. It scores 33 of 50 on our bench: exceptional electrical and documentation output, weak sales workflow. Buy it if your study gets audited.
This is a review, not a switching guide. If you are shopping the wider European market rather than evaluating one vendor, our best solar design software for France ranks the field. What follows is the evaluation you run before either.
What archelios Suite Is
archelios is a range, not a single application, and the range is the thing most reviews get wrong. There are two products that matter to a solar buyer, and they are licensed separately.
archelios PRO is the design and simulation side. Integrated 3D modelling, module and inverter sizing, production forecast, self-consumption analysis with battery storage, economic analysis including LCOE and profitability, solar pumping sizing, and export to DXF, GeoJSON and KML. It ships plugins for SketchUp, and the Platinum tier adds a Revit plugin along with tracker support and clipping optimisation, according to Trace Software’s own product pages.
archelios CALC is the electrical calculation side, and it is the reason this product exists in a market that already has PVsyst and PV*SOL. CALC sizes the electrical installation from the array to the grid: AC and DC cable diameter calculation, AC and DC protection type calculation, surge protection analysis, choice of AC and DC installation modes, a multi-manufacturer equipment list, material quantities, a customisable design score, and a single line diagram exported in PDF and DWG. Trace Software’s own product page describes it as supporting installations up to 250 kVA including medium voltage connection points, with a database spanning 50 or more manufacturers.
On standards, be careful with what anyone tells you, including us. Trace Software’s own pages describe “normative controls” and a “choice of standard”, and its product listings state that the software sizes “according to the IEC or NF standards”. The vendor does not print the specific guide number on the pages we fetched. What is publicly verifiable is that the French distributor Rexel lists the licences under explicit SKU names including archelios CALC - NF C 15-712-1, which is the French low voltage PV guide derived from NF C 15-100. So: NF C 15-712-1 support is well evidenced through the distribution channel, and the IEC option is stated by the vendor. We are not going to assert a longer standards list than that.
On the company, the primary source is Trace Software’s own legal notice. The publisher is Trace Software International SAS, share capital EUR 195,282, registered at the RCS du Havre under number 507 704 716, with its head office at Parc Eco Normandie, 76430 Saint Romain de Colbosc, France. That is the legal entity. We could not source a founding year from a primary source, so this review does not state one, and neither should any page quoting it.
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Book a free SurgePV demo → Compare pricingThe 5-Axis Review Bench
Every tool we review is scored on the same five axes, out of 10 each, for a total out of 50. We publish the axes so you can disagree with a number and still use the method. This is the Heaven Green 5-Axis Review Bench, the check we run before any tool goes into production on our own EPC work.
| Axis | What it measures | archelios Suite | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design and simulation depth | 3D geometry, yield physics, self-consumption, storage, economics | 7 / 10 | Complete and credible. Not the reference bankability engine PVsyst is. |
| Compliance and documentation output | SLD, cable and protection sizing, standards checks, DWG and DXF export, material lists | 9 / 10 | The highest compliance score we have given. This is the product’s whole argument. |
| Proposal and sales workflow | Branded customer proposal, financing, e-signature, CRM | 4 / 10 | PDF reports and economic analysis. Not a sales tool and not pretending to be. |
| Price against value | True stacked annual cost for a working setup | 6 / 10 | Design alone is fair. Design plus calculation reaches EUR 3,580 at the top. |
| Support and onboarding | Documentation, language coverage, implementation | 7 / 10 | Silver services bundled with every subscription. French-first documentation. |
| Total | 33 / 50 |
Two things to read from that table. The 9 on compliance is not generosity, it is the only 9 we have awarded on that axis, and it is earned by an output no cloud design tool on this site produces: a sized, standard-checked electrical file with a DWG single line diagram attached. The 4 on sales workflow is equally deliberate. Trace Software is not competing for the installer who wants a prettier proposal.
Verdict. archelios is engineering software that happens to include a yield engine, not sales software that happens to include a cable check. Score it accordingly and the 33 makes sense.
Pricing
Trace Software publishes its prices, which puts it ahead of most of the market before the first feature comparison. Every figure below comes from the vendor’s own product and solution pages, fetched on 2 August 2026, and every one is annual, per licence and excluding tax. The design tiers are published on the archelios PRO Silver, Gold and Platinum product pages, and the calculation tiers on the archelios CALC solution page.
archelios PRO, the design side:
| Tier | Power limit per project | Price per year, excl. tax | Notable inclusions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silver | Up to 100 kWp | EUR 990 | 3D modelling, sizing, yield, self-consumption with storage, LCOE, SketchUp plugin, basic export to CALC |
| Gold | Up to 1 MWp | EUR 1,490 | Everything in Silver, plus virtual battery self-consumption, solar pumping, BIM&CO database |
| Platinum | No power limit | EUR 1,990 | Everything in Gold, plus tracker support, clipping optimisation, Revit plugin |
archelios CALC, the electrical side:
| Licence | Price per year, excl. tax | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| 1 standard | EUR 1,350 | Electrical sizing of PV installations, Silver level services included |
| 2 standards | EUR 1,440 | Work to two standards in the same environment |
| 1 standard + high voltage module | EUR 1,500 | Adds the high voltage module |
| 2 standards + high voltage module | EUR 1,590 | The full configuration |
Now the number that matters, because nobody buys half of this product.
⚠️ Watch out
The EUR 990 headline is design only. The electrical calculation that makes archelios worth buying is a separate subscription starting at EUR 1,350. Cost the pair, not the entry tier.
A working setup for a small commercial design office is PRO Silver plus CALC with one standard: EUR 2,340 per year excluding tax, per licence. A design office handling projects up to 1 MWp lands at PRO Gold plus CALC, or EUR 2,840. The maximum configuration, Platinum plus CALC with two standards and the high voltage module, is EUR 3,580 per year excluding tax. Trace Software also notes on its product pages that the listed prices apply to new purchases only and that renewals go through customer service, so treat renewal pricing as negotiated rather than listed.
What archelios Does Best
It sizes the electrical installation and shows its work. This is the sentence the product deserves in its strongest form. Almost every design platform on the market will tell you how many kilowatt hours an array produces. Very few will tell you the DC cable cross-section, the protection device type on each circuit, the surge arrester selection given the site’s lightning risk, and whether each of those choices passes a normative check. archelios CALC does that and then exports a single line diagram in DWG, which means the output goes straight into the drawing set instead of being retyped by a draughtsman.
The standards choice is a licensing decision, not a setting buried in preferences. Trace Software sells one standard or two, and prices them differently. That tells you the standards implementation is deep enough to be a commercial unit, not a dropdown. For a design office working across a French domestic market and an IEC export market, buying both is a coherent purchase.
Design and calculation share a model. archelios PRO exports into CALC, so the array you laid out in 3D is the array whose cabling gets sized. That link is where the time saving lives. Rebuilding a design inside a separate electrical package is where hours and transcription errors go, as our single line diagram glossary entry explains.
Genuine BIM and CAD reach. SketchUp on the lower tiers, Revit on Platinum, DXF, GeoJSON and KML export throughout, plus the BIM&CO component database. If your project deliverable is a coordinated building model rather than a proposal PDF, that matters more than any yield refinement.
Published, tiered, power-limited pricing. The tiers are drawn on project size, which is honest. A 60 kWp installer is not subsidising tracker features they will never open.
Where archelios Falls Short
Stacking is the real cost, and it is steep. EUR 990 buys you a design tool. The thing you actually came for costs EUR 1,350 more. At EUR 2,340 to EUR 3,580 per licence per year, archelios sits above most of the cloud design market on a per-seat basis, and it does so without the proposal and CRM functionality those competitors bundle.
It is not the reference bankability engine. When a lender or an independent engineer wants a P50 and P90 yield with a documented loss diagram, the market’s default answer is still PVsyst, as covered in our PVsyst review. archelios PRO produces a credible production forecast. It does not carry the same institutional weight in a financing conversation, and pretending otherwise would not help you.
The sales layer is thin. As of the Trace Software product pages we fetched on 2 August 2026, we found no branded customer proposal builder, financing calculator, e-signature or CRM described. If your bottleneck is closing deals rather than proving cable sizes, this is not the product aimed at it. Compare against the tools in our solar proposal software guide instead.
French-first documentation and support. The English site is complete but reads as a translation, and several solution pages carry less detail in English than in French. If nobody on your team reads French, factor in slower onboarding.
The 250 kVA figure sets a design ceiling. Trace Software’s own CALC page describes installations up to 250 kVA with medium voltage connection. That covers the great majority of commercial rooftop work and does not cover a utility-scale plant. For terrain and multi-megawatt layouts, look at the tools in our PVcase review and RatedPower review.
Curious what solar would cost for your own site? Use our free solar calculator to see subsidy and 25-year savings in 60 seconds.
Who Should Buy archelios Suite
There is an engineer for whom archelios is the correct purchase over every other tool on this site, ours included. Here is that engineer.
You work in a design office or an installer engineering team in France or a francophone or IEC market, delivering commercial rooftop and small ground-mount projects, typically between 36 kWp and 1 MWp. Your deliverable is not a proposal. It is a file: layout, production estimate, cable schedule, protection schedule, surge arrester justification, single line diagram, material list. Somebody downstream, a utility, an inspection body, an insurer or a client’s own consulting engineer, is going to read that file and look for a mistake in it.
For you, the EUR 1,350 that CALC costs is not a software line item. It is the cost of not spending two days in a spreadsheet computing voltage drop and protection coordination by hand, and not being sent back by a reviewer. On a practice doing thirty such files a year, the arithmetic is not close.
Two more buyers should look hard at it:
- Teams whose output goes into a BIM model. The Revit and SketchUp path plus BIM&CO makes archelios unusually well behaved inside an architectural workflow.
- Anyone bidding across two standard regimes. Buying the two-standard licence at EUR 1,440 is cheaper and cleaner than running two tools.
📘 Regulation note
NF C 15-712-1 is the French guide covering the electrical design of PV generators, derived from the NF C 15-100 low voltage installation standard. International equivalents sit under the IEC framework published by the International Electrotechnical Commission.
Before you buy any tool in this category, run the check we use internally. We call it the Audit-Exposure Test:
- Name the person who will read your electrical file. A utility engineer, an inspection body, an insurer, a client’s consultant, or nobody.
- If the honest answer is nobody, stop. You do not need calculation software, you need a faster proposal.
- If somebody is named, count how often they send work back, and what a returned file costs in days.
- Multiply by your annual file count. That is the number to compare against EUR 1,350.
- Check which standard that reviewer works to before you choose a one-standard or two-standard licence, because the wrong one is a wasted year.
Who Should Not Buy archelios Suite
Residential installers at volume. A 5 kW rooftop job does not justify EUR 2,340 a year of engineering software. A cloud design and proposal platform closes those deals faster and costs less, ranked in our best solar design software guide.
Anyone whose main problem is winning work. We found no CRM, proposal builder or e-signature described on the vendor’s published pages. If your pipeline leaks before the engineering starts, fix that first.
Teams that need lender-grade bankability documents. For financed assets where an independent engineer reviews the yield, PVsyst remains the reference. Our PV*SOL review covers the closest alternative on that axis.
Utility-scale developers. The stated 250 kVA installation ceiling on the calculation side and the absence of terrain tooling put multi-megawatt greenfield work outside this product’s range.
Indian residential and small commercial installers. The standards implementation is aimed at NF and IEC regimes rather than the IS code library, DISCOM formats and PM Surya Ghar subsidy modelling that Indian work runs on. Our solar design software India comparison covers what fits that pipeline better.
archelios vs SurgePV
Disclosure, stated plainly: SurgePV is a sister product of Heaven Green Energy and we run it on our own EPC projects every day. That is first-party operating experience and it is also a commercial interest. Read the table with both facts in view.
| Axis | archelios Suite | SurgePV | Honest read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrical cable and protection sizing | Native in CALC, standard-checked | Auto SLD and BOQ, not a normative sizing engine | archelios, clearly, and it is not close. |
| Standards regime | NF and IEC, licensed per standard | NEC, IEC, IS and AS/NZS labelling | archelios on depth, SurgePV on breadth. |
| Single line diagram output | PDF and DWG from CALC | Native auto-generated, DXF and DWG export | Both. archelios carries the normative check. |
| Hour-by-hour yield with P50/P75/P90 | Production forecast in PRO | 8,760-hour module-level on every paid plan | SurgePV on the confidence bands. |
| 3D roof from a satellite address | Manual and SketchUp modelling | AI 3D in under 60 seconds | SurgePV. |
| Branded customer proposal | Not offered | Native, white-label, 9 languages | SurgePV. |
| BIM and Revit path | Revit plugin on Platinum | Not available | archelios. |
| Drone capture | Not offered | Not available in SurgePV either | Neither. See our Scanifly review. |
| Structural stamping | Not offered | Not available | Neither. |
| Racking database | Material lists across 50+ manufacturers | Thinner than its module and inverter libraries | archelios. |
| Brand track record | Established French publisher, RCS-registered entity | Launched 2025, thin brand recognition | archelios. |
| Published price | EUR 990 to EUR 3,580 a year, excl. tax | $1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, plus 18% GST | Both publish. SurgePV is cheaper per seat. |
SurgePV’s weaknesses sit in that table on purpose. It launched in 2025 and carries far less brand history than a French publisher with a registered legal entity and a distributor network. It has no normative electrical sizing engine, no Revit path, no drone capture and no structural stamping, and its racking database is thinner than its module and inverter libraries. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling.
The useful framing: archelios answers “is this installation compliant and can I prove the cable size”. SurgePV answers “what will this array produce, how fast can I model the roof, and what does the customer sign”. A European engineering practice that also sells direct can reasonably run both, using SurgePV’s simulation engine and proposal output on the commercial side and CALC on the engineering side. Published SurgePV tiers are on the SurgePV pricing page: $1,899 per user per year for a single seat, $1,499 at three seats and $1,299 at five, all plus 18% GST.
How Heaven Green Energy Uses This In Practice
We build solar across residential, commercial and industrial segments out of Gujarat, and our design team works satellite-first on SurgePV. archelios is not our production tool, and the reason is regional rather than technical: our electrical work answers to IS standards, DISCOM formats and the chartered electrical safety engineer process, not to NF C 15-712-1.
What we do take from this product is the discipline. On every project above about 100 kW we produce a separate electrical justification pack, sized cable schedule, protection coordination, surge arrester selection and earthing, because the moment a client’s consultant or an inspecting engineer reads a file, an unshown calculation is treated as an absent one. The tools that force that output produce better installations, and that is a fair thing for a competitor’s page to say out loud.
Where a stamped drawing set or a structural package is the deliverable, we route it to our sister engineering company rather than stretching a design licence, through electrical and CEIG approval drawings and civil and structural engineering. For quick DC-side checks during a survey, the free QBits string sizing calculator resolves most on-site disagreements before anyone opens a laptop.
For homeowners and businesses reading this from the buying side rather than the building side:
- Residential Solar: 1 to 10 kW rooftop systems with PM Surya Ghar subsidy handled start to finish.
- Commercial Solar: 10 to 100 kW with ROI modelling and accelerated depreciation planning.
- Industrial Solar EPC: 100 kW+ turnkey projects where the electrical file gets audited.
- Solar Calculator: subsidy and 25-year savings in 60 seconds.
Related evaluations in this series: PVsyst review, PV*SOL review, HelioScope review and SolarEdge Designer review. The category overview lives in our solar design software pillar.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does archelios cost per year?
archelios PRO costs EUR 990 a year excluding tax for projects up to 100 kWp, EUR 1,490 up to 1 MWp, and EUR 1,990 with no power limit. archelios CALC is licensed separately from EUR 1,350 a year for one standard, EUR 1,440 for two standards, EUR 1,500 with the high voltage module and EUR 1,590 for two standards plus high voltage. A realistic working setup of PRO plus CALC therefore runs EUR 2,340 to EUR 3,580 a year excluding tax.
What is the difference between archelios PRO and archelios CALC?
PRO is design and yield: 3D modelling, module and inverter sizing, production forecast, self-consumption with storage, and economic analysis. CALC is electrical sizing: AC and DC cable diameters, protection device types, surge protection, a material list and a single line diagram in PDF and DWG, all checked against the standard you licensed. PRO exports into CALC, so the layout you drew is the installation you size.
Which standards does archelios CALC work to?
Trace Software’s product pages state that CALC sizes according to IEC or NF standards and sells one-standard and two-standard licences. The French distributor Rexel lists the licences under SKU names that name NF C 15-712-1 explicitly, which is the French guide for the electrical design of PV generators derived from NF C 15-100. We did not find a full published list of every supported guide on the vendor’s own pages, so confirm the exact scope with Trace Software before purchase.
Is archelios better than PVsyst?
They compete on different axes. PVsyst is the reference for lender-grade yield modelling with documented loss diagrams and P90 bands. archelios is stronger on the electrical study: cable sizing, protection coordination, surge arresters and a standard-checked single line diagram in DWG. Many European design offices run both, using PVsyst for the production number and archelios CALC for the electrical file.
Does archelios generate customer proposals?
Not in the sales sense, on the evidence we have. It produces PDF technical reports and economic analysis including LCOE and profitability figures. On the vendor pages we fetched on 2 August 2026 we found no branded proposal builder, financing module, e-signature or CRM described. If a persuasive customer-facing document is what you need, this is the wrong category of tool and you should look at a proposal-first platform.
Who publishes archelios and where are they based?
The publisher is Trace Software International SAS, a French company with share capital of EUR 195,282, registered at the RCS du Havre under number 507 704 716, with its head office at Parc Eco Normandie, 76430 Saint Romain de Colbosc, France. Those details come from the company’s own legal notice. We could not source a founding year from a primary source and therefore do not state one.
Can archelios handle utility-scale projects?
Partly. archelios PRO Platinum removes the per-project power limit and adds tracker support and clipping optimisation. The calculation side is described by the vendor as covering installations up to 250 kVA including medium voltage connection, and there is no terrain modelling comparable to a dedicated utility-scale tool. For multi-megawatt greenfield work, a terrain-first platform is the better fit.
Is archelios worth it for an Indian installer?
Usually not. The standards implementation targets NF and IEC regimes rather than the IS code library, DISCOM submission formats and PM Surya Ghar subsidy modelling that Indian rooftop work runs on, and the EUR 2,340 entry stack is expensive against Indian per-seat norms. An Indian EPC building large C&I assets for an IEC-based client is the exception worth testing.
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