Arka360 Review 2026: Real India Pricing, Scored 34 of 50

Arka360 is the tool most Indian solar installers have either used or been pitched, and it is the most direct competitor SurgePV has in this market. That makes this a harder review to write honestly than the ones about American software, because the people reading it know both products and will catch anything vague. So this review deals in the actual published rupee numbers, the actual tier gating, and the specific case where Arka360 is the correct purchase and SurgePV is not. It scores 34 of 50 on our bench. Its India entry plan is ₹46,000 a year plus 18% GST, which is real money less than the international alternatives, and that price is the single most important fact about the product.

Direct answer. Arka360 is India-origin solar design and proposal software, founded 2017, priced for India at ₹46,000 to ₹1,00,000 per year plus 18% GST. It scores 34 of 50 on our bench: fast residential layouts and strong value, but SLD export sits behind the ₹1,00,000 Premium tier and we did not find P50/P90 simulation output in the published plans. Best for small Indian residential installers.

If you have already decided to move, our Arka360 alternative comparison ranks replacements. This page is the evaluation you run first, and it is written so that a reader who buys Arka360 afterwards feels it was fair.

What Arka360 Is

Arka360 is a browser-based solar design, simulation and proposal platform founded in 2017, built by an India-origin team and incubated through Indian startup incubators including iCreate. It sells into India, the United States and international markets, with separate published price lists for each, which is itself a signal that the India business is treated as a first-class market and not an export afterthought.

What the product covers:

• 3D roof modelling from satellite imagery, with obstruction and setback handling
• Panel layout and automated array placement across multiple roof faces
• Shading and irradiance analysis with an annual production estimate
• Inverter selection, stringing, and single-line diagram output on higher tiers
• Financial modelling and a customer-facing proposal
• Lead and project tracking

The category it belongs to is residential-and-light-commercial design plus proposal, the same category as OpenSolar and Solargraf, rather than the simulation category occupied by PVsyst. Reviews that compare it to PVsyst are comparing the wrong things. Our solar design software India comparison places it in context against the full Indian tool set.

The reason Arka360 matters in India specifically is pricing and familiarity. A designer in Ahmedabad or Coimbatore can be productive in it inside a day, the interface assumes Indian roofs and Indian units, and the invoice arrives in rupees with GST charged and creditable. Those three things together explain most of its installed base better than any feature does.

The 5-Axis Review Bench

The Heaven Green 5-Axis Review Bench is the published frame we score every tool on. Ten points per axis, fifty total.

Axis	What it measures	Arka360	Notes
Design and simulation depth	3D modelling, shading, hour-by-hour yield, P50/P75/P90	6 / 10	Competent estimating. No lender-grade confidence bands.
Compliance and documentation output	SLD, BOQ, CAD and SketchUp export, permitting	6 / 10	SLD and SketchUp export gated to the top India tier.
Proposal and sales workflow	Branded proposal, financing, e-signature, CRM	7 / 10	Customisable proposal on Premium only. Automated contract and e-signature not in the published India plans.
Price against value	Total annual cost against what is delivered	8 / 10	Its best axis. ₹46,000 entry is genuinely accessible.
Support and onboarding	Implementation, responsiveness, India time zone	7 / 10	India-hours support is a real advantage over US vendors.
Total		34 / 50

Verdict. Arka360 earns its score on price and speed, not on depth. It is the right first design tool for an Indian residential installer and the wrong last one for an EPC growing into financed commercial work.

Pricing

Arka360 publishes India pricing openly, which we credit. These are the list numbers from Arka360’s India pricing page as of August 2026. GST at 18% is charged on top of every figure.

Plan	Monthly (plus 18% GST)	Annual (plus 18% GST)	Annual all-in with GST
Lite	₹7,500	₹46,000	≈ ₹54,280
Basic	₹11,500	₹70,000	≈ ₹82,600
Premium	₹16,500	₹1,00,000	≈ ₹1,18,000

Annual billing is the only sensible choice. Lite at ₹7,500 a month is ₹90,000 a year against ₹46,000 paid annually, so the monthly option costs nearly double for the same product.

The part most reviews leave out is the tier gating, and Indian installers should read it carefully before signing. Based on the published plan comparison:

• Lite (₹46,000/yr) does not include manual stringing, microinverter design, optimizer design, SLD export, SketchUp export, a customisable proposal, or automated contract and e-signature.
• Basic (₹70,000/yr) adds microinverter support but still does not include manual stringing, optimizer design, SLD export, SketchUp export, a customisable proposal, or automated contract and e-signature.
• Premium (₹1,00,000/yr) includes essentially everything except automated contract and e-signature.

That gating changes the comparison materially. A DISCOM (distribution company) net metering application and most C&I tenders want an SLD in the submission. If you need one, your entry price is ₹1,18,000 all-in, not ₹54,280, and at that point you are inside the same band as the international platforms rather than well below them.

For context, Arka360’s international list is $1,699 to $9,999 per year, so the India pricing is a deliberate, substantial market-specific discount rather than a currency conversion.

What Arka360 Does Best

Speed on standard Indian residential roofs. A 3 kW to 10 kW rooftop on a typical RCC slab or a Mangalore-tile pitched roof goes from address to laid-out array quickly, and the automated placement makes sensible decisions about setbacks and walkways without much correction. For the volume end of the PM Surya Ghar business this is the thing that matters most, because your designer is doing several of these a day, not one a week.

Price that fits an Indian software budget. ₹46,000 a year is a number a two-person installer in Surat or Nashik can actually sign off. This is not a small point and it is not a compromise on the vendor’s part, it is a deliberate market-fit decision, and it is why Arka360 has real share here while several better-engineered international tools have almost none.

Rupee billing with creditable GST. The invoice is domestic. You claim the 18% GST as input credit against your own output tax, there is no forex conversion, no international card limits, and no LRS paperwork. Finance teams at small Indian installers care about this more than product teams expect.

India-hours support. When your designer is stuck at 4pm IST, someone answers. Against a US vendor whose support day starts at 7:30pm IST, this is a real operational advantage, and it shows up in our support score.

A usable proposal on the higher tier. The customer-facing output is clean and adequate for residential selling. It will not win a design award and it does not need to.

Honest positioning. Arka360’s own marketing does not position it as a lender-grade simulation tool, which we rate as a point in its favour in a price band where the claims often run ahead of the engine.

Curious what solar would cost for your own building? Use our free solar calculator, subsidy and savings in 60 seconds.

Where Arka360 Falls Short

Simulation depth is the real ceiling. In our evaluation, and on the vendor’s published feature descriptions as of August 2026, we did not find a full 8,760-hour, module-level engine producing P50, P75 and P90 confidence bands with an itemised loss diagram covering soiling, thermal, spectral, mismatch and clipping losses. For a ₹4 lakh residential job nobody asks. For a 500 kW industrial rooftop financed by a bank or sold on a PPA, someone will ask, and when they do you are buying PVsyst or an equivalent alongside. Compare against our PVsyst review and PV*SOL review before assuming the estimate output is enough.

SLD export behind the top tier is the gating decision we most disagree with. A single-line diagram is not a premium feature in the Indian market, it is a submission requirement. Putting it above ₹1,00,000 a year pushes the small installers who most need the price advantage into either the top tier or a separate drafting workflow. See our guide to reading a solar single-line diagram for why it lands in almost every application file.

Automated contract and e-signature is absent from all three published India plans. If closing digitally matters to your sales process, plan for a separate signing tool.

Depth on complex commercial geometry. Multi-level industrial roofs, sheds with varied purlin runs, shading from adjacent structures at oblique angles: the model handles these, but the correction time grows faster than on a purpose-built C&I tool.

Thin AI design layer. We did not find a natural-language design assistant in the product or its published feature list. Automated placement is not the same thing, and the gap against tools shipping conversational design is widening rather than closing.

Limited language output. English and Hindi cover most of the domestic market and leave you short if you expand into MENA, Southeast Asia or Africa.

Drone and as-built capture is not part of the published feature set. Worth noting because Indian industrial roofs are often poorly documented. See our Scanifly review for what that category actually costs.

Who Should Buy Arka360

Here is the reader for whom Arka360 is the correct purchase over every other tool on this site, including our own sister product. This is not a courtesy paragraph.

You are a one to three person Indian residential solar installer doing 3 kW to 10 kW rooftop jobs under PM Surya Ghar, mostly in one or two DISCOM territories, closing 5 to 30 systems a month. Your software budget is under ₹60,000 a year and it is a real constraint, not a preference. You bill in rupees, you want GST input credit, and an international card charge in dollars is genuine friction for your accountant. Nobody has ever asked you for a P90 number and nobody is going to.

For that installer, Arka360 Lite at ₹46,000 plus GST is roughly half the cost of a single SurgePV seat, which lists at $1,299 per user per year, close to ₹1.1 lakh before any forex spread. That gap is not marketing, it is arithmetic, and a review that pretended otherwise would be worthless to you. Buy Arka360.

A second reader: solar design freelancers and small consultancies serving Indian installers, where the tool is a cost of doing business and the client’s expectations are residential.

Who Should Not Buy Arka360

Indian EPCs moving into financed C&I work. The moment a bank, an NBFC or a corporate offtaker specifies yield methodology, an estimating engine is not enough. India’s commercial rooftop pipeline continues to grow, as tracked by Mercom India, and the financing scrutiny grows with it.

Anyone who needs an SLD on the cheapest tier. If the ₹46,000 price is what attracted you and you need a single-line diagram, the price that applies to you is ₹1,18,000 all-in. Re-run the comparison at that number, where the picture changes.

Installers expanding outside India. Two proposal languages and an India-weighted tariff library do not travel. Our best solar software for India guide and the best solar design software roundup cover the tools that do.

Teams that want AI-assisted design. We did not find a natural-language design layer in the published feature set.

Utility-scale developers. Wrong category entirely. Terrain, layout optimisation and CAD workflows belong to a different class of tool.

Arka360 vs SurgePV

Disclosure, stated plainly: SurgePV is a sister product of Heaven Green Energy and we run it daily on our own EPC projects. That is first-party operating experience and a commercial interest at once. Both facts should inform how you read this table.

Axis	Arka360	SurgePV	Honest read
India entry price	₹46,000/yr plus GST	$1,299 per user per year (≈ ₹1.1 lakh)	Arka360, clearly, for one or two seats.
Billing and GST	Rupee invoice, creditable GST	USD billing	Arka360.
Residential layout speed	Fast	Fast	Roughly level.
SLD export	Premium tier only	Native on paid plans	SurgePV.
8,760-hour simulation with P50/P75/P90 bands	Not in the published feature set	P50/P75/P90 on every paid plan	SurgePV.
BOQ output	Basic	Native auto-generated	SurgePV.
AI design assistant	None	Natural-language assistant	SurgePV.
Proposal languages	2	9	SurgePV.
PM Surya Ghar and DISCOM tariffs	Native	Native	Level.
India-hours support	Yes	Yes, India-based team	Level.
Brand recognition in India	Established since 2017	Launched 2025, thin recognition	Arka360.
Drone or as-built capture	None	None	Neither.
Structural stamping	None	Not available	Neither.
Racking database	India-weighted	Thinner than its module and inverter libraries	Arka360, for Indian racking specifically.

SurgePV’s weaknesses are in that table on purpose. It launched in 2025 and has far less name recognition in India than a product that has been selling here since 2017, it has no drone capture, no structural stamping, and its racking database is thinner than its module and inverter libraries. On a straight one-seat cost comparison for simple residential work, Arka360 wins and we are not going to argue the point.

Where the comparison turns is at the second seat and the first financed commercial project. Once you need SLD output as standard, a defensible yield number, and a BOQ that matches the design file, you are comparing Arka360 Premium at ₹1.18 lakh all-in against a SurgePV seat at a similar number that includes 8,760-hour simulation and multilingual proposals. That is a genuinely different calculation from the one at the ₹46,000 tier, and it is the calculation most growing Indian EPCs eventually run.

How Heaven Green Energy Uses This In Practice

We install solar across Gujarat and beyond, and our design team runs SurgePV as the daily platform. We have also had Arka360 in front of us repeatedly, because a meaningful share of the channel partners and subcontractors we work with use it, and their files land on our desks.

The practical observation from that: Arka360 files are fine. Residential layouts arrive clean, panel counts are sensible, and the production estimates sit within a range we are comfortable with for a domestic rooftop. The friction shows up in two places. The first is SLD, where partners on lower tiers send us a proposal without a diagram and we redraw it, which costs both sides time. The second is the commercial handoff, where a 300 kW industrial shed needs a loss-diagram-level yield report for the client’s finance team, and in the files we have seen the Arka360 output has not carried that conversation on its own.

Our standing advice to partners is unglamorous: pick the tool that matches the job you are actually being paid for this year, not the one you hope to be paid for in three. If that is 5 kW residential in one DISCOM area, Arka360 Lite is a sound purchase. When the tenders start asking for stamped drawings and a bankable yield study, the tool has to change, and our engineering sister company handles that layer directly through rooftop detailed engineering design and PVsyst reporting. For string sizing checks that any of these tools will ask you to sanity-test, QBits Energy’s free string sizing calculator is a fast second opinion.

For readers on the buying side rather than the building side:

• Residential Solar: 1 to 10 kW with PM Surya Ghar handled start to finish.
• Commercial Solar: 10 to 100 kW with ROI modelling and depreciation planning.
• Industrial Solar EPC: 100 kW+ turnkey.
• Solar Calculator: subsidy and 25-year savings in 60 seconds.

Other evaluations in this series: Sunbase review, Aurora Solar review and OpenSolar review. The category overview is our solar design software pillar.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Arka360 cost in India?

Arka360’s published India plans are Lite at ₹46,000 per year, Basic at ₹70,000 and Premium at ₹1,00,000, each plus 18% GST. All-in that is roughly ₹54,280, ₹82,600 and ₹1,18,000. Monthly billing is ₹7,500, ₹11,500 and ₹16,500 plus GST, which works out far more expensive annually, so annual billing is the sensible choice. Internationally the same product lists at $1,699 to $9,999 per year.

Does Arka360 include SLD export?

Only on the Premium tier. Based on the published India plan comparison, SLD export and SketchUp export are not included in Lite or Basic, so the effective price for a team that must submit a single-line diagram is ₹1,00,000 plus GST rather than the ₹46,000 headline. Check this against your own quote, because plan contents change.

Is Arka360 good enough for bankable yield reports?

Not in our assessment. Arka360 produces solid production estimates for residential selling, but we did not find a full 8,760-hour, module-level simulation with P50, P75 and P90 confidence bands and an itemised loss diagram in the published feature set as of August 2026. Financed commercial and industrial projects where a bank or offtaker specifies the yield methodology will usually need PVsyst, HelioScope, SurgePV or an equivalent engine alongside it.

Arka360 or SurgePV for an Indian installer?

For a one or two person residential outfit under a ₹60,000 software budget, Arka360 Lite at ₹46,000 plus GST is roughly half a SurgePV seat and is the better buy. For a growing EPC that needs SLD as standard, BOQ, bankable simulation, and proposals in more than two languages, SurgePV covers more in one licence. SurgePV launched in 2025 and has less brand history in India.

Does Arka360 handle PM Surya Ghar subsidy calculations?

Yes. Arka360 was built for the Indian market and handles residential subsidy arithmetic and Indian tariff structures. Always verify the subsidy slab in the software against the current rates on the PM Surya Ghar national portal before issuing a proposal, because scheme rates and eligibility have changed more than once.

Is Arka360 an Indian company?

Arka360 was founded in 2017 by an India-origin team and was backed by Indian incubators including iCreate. It now operates internationally with separate India, United States and international price lists. Company registration details vary by source, so we describe it as India-origin rather than making a claim about its current corporate domicile.

Does Arka360 support microinverters and optimizers?

Microinverter design is available from the Basic tier upward per the published plan comparison, while optimizer design and manual stringing appear only on Premium. If your standard offer uses optimizers or you need manual control over stringing, price the Premium tier from the start.

What is the biggest weakness of Arka360?

Simulation depth. It produces an estimate, not a lender-grade yield study, and that ceiling arrives exactly when an installer starts winning bigger commercial work. The second weakness is tier gating: putting SLD export behind the top plan removes much of the price advantage for the small installers the entry tier is aimed at.