Search Aurora Solar review and you get two kinds of page: affiliate roundups that have never opened the software, and competitor pages that exist to sell you something else. This is neither. Heaven Green Energy has run Aurora seats on live EPC work, paid the invoices, and shipped permit sets out of it. Aurora is the most-used residential solar design platform in the United States for a reason, and the reason is not marketing. It is that the LIDAR-backed irradiance engine and the code-aware plan set output are genuinely good enough to hand to an inspector. The problem is what it costs to get there. Aurora now publishes its prices, which is new, and the honest 2026 read is $135 per user per month on Basic billed annually, $220 on Premium, with the features most installers actually need sitting on Premium. On our five-axis bench Aurora scores 38 out of 50, and it is still the wrong purchase for a large share of the people who buy it.
Direct answer. Aurora Solar is a genuinely strong US residential design and proposal platform, priced at $135 per user per month on Basic and $220 on Premium when billed annually (Aurora, 2026). It scores 38 out of 50 on our review bench. Buy it if you are a one to three designer US residential team that needs permit-ready plan sets without an in-house engineer. Skip it if seat count is growing.
This review covers what Aurora actually does, the five-axis score with the reasoning behind each number, the real pricing including what is gated and what is billed separately, the specific reader for whom Aurora beats every alternative including ours, and the reader who should walk away. If you already know you are leaving, our Aurora Solar alternatives comparison ranks the replacements, and our Aurora Solar pricing breakdown goes deeper on the invoice math than this page does.
What Aurora Solar Is
Aurora Solar is a cloud solar design, simulation and proposal platform founded in 2013 by Christopher Hopper and Samuel Adeyemo, headquartered in San Francisco. It started as a remote site assessment tool, built to replace the truck roll, and grew into the default design layer for US residential solar. In 2021 Aurora announced the acquisition of Folsom Labs, the company behind HelioScope, which closed the following year and gave Aurora the commercial and industrial simulation engine it lacked, as Mercom India reported at the time. Our companion HelioScope review scores that product separately. Aurora and HelioScope remain separate products with separate pricing to this day, which matters if you are comparing them.
What the software does, in the order a designer touches it: you type an address, Aurora pulls high-resolution imagery and, where coverage exists, LIDAR point cloud data. You trace or auto-detect the roof, and the platform builds a 3D model with pitch, azimuth and obstruction heights derived from the elevation data rather than guessed. That LIDAR grounding is the thing Aurora is best in the market at. Most competitors infer roof geometry from imagery alone and then ask the designer to eyeball obstruction heights. Aurora measures them. A chimney that is 1.4 m tall casts a very different December shadow than one that is 0.7 m tall, and the difference shows up in the annual number.
From there it runs irradiance and shading across the year, places modules against a component database, sizes strings, and produces a permit-grade plan set: site plan, array layout, single line diagram, placards, and the equipment cut sheets an authority having jurisdiction expects. It also produces the customer-facing proposal, with financing options, utility rate modelling and e-signature. That span, from satellite image to signed contract, inside one login, is why it dominates US residential.
Bring one of your own sites to a free SurgePV demo. We will build the 3D roof from a satellite address, run the 8,760-hour [shading](/glossary/shading-loss) simulation, and hand you the SLD, BOQ and branded proposal on the call.
Book a free SurgePV demo → Compare pricingThe 5-Axis Review Bench
Every review page on this site scores its subject on the same five axes, so the numbers are comparable across tools and you can audit our reasoning rather than take a star rating on trust. We call it the Heaven Green 5-Axis Review Bench. Each axis is scored out of 10 against a defined question.
- Design and simulation depth. Does it model irradiance hour by hour across the year at module or string level, with real obstruction geometry, soiling, thermal and mismatch broken out separately? Can an engineer defend the number?
- Compliance and documentation output. Does it produce a plan set an authority having jurisdiction will accept without redrawing: single line diagram, placards, conductor and overcurrent sizing, structural notes?
- Proposal and sales workflow. Can the same file become a branded, financeable, signable customer document without exporting to a second tool?
- Price against value. Cost per finished project across a realistic team, not headline seat price. What is gated, what is metered, what is billed separately.
- Support and onboarding. Time from purchase to a designer shipping unsupervised work, and what happens when something breaks on a Friday.
Here is how Aurora scores.
| Axis | Score | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Design and simulation depth | 9 / 10 | LIDAR-derived obstruction geometry is the most accurate we have tested. Loses a point because the bankable shade report is Premium-gated |
| Compliance and documentation output | 8 / 10 | Code-aware US plan sets are genuinely permit-ready. Plan sets are a separately priced service, not included |
| Proposal and sales workflow | 9 / 10 | Financing, utility rates, e-signature and a strong customer-facing document, all native |
| Price against value | 5 / 10 | Per-seat monthly billing plus tier gating plus a metered project allowance. Cost scales badly with headcount |
| Support and onboarding | 7 / 10 | Good documentation and an established user community. On our own standard-plan tickets, response times were slower than a live sales call can wait for |
| Total | 38 / 50 | Highest US residential score on our bench so far |
Verdict. Aurora earns its reputation on the engineering and the paperwork, and loses on the invoice. If you are one to three seats and US residential, the 38 is what you will experience. If you are eight seats and growing, the price axis is the only one that will matter to you by year two.
Pricing
Aurora publishes its pricing now, which removes the single biggest complaint installers had about the company. As of August 2026, Aurora’s pricing page lists three plans.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Project allowance | Notable gating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $135 / user / month | $159 / user / month | 50 projects / month | No bankable shade report, no AutoDesigner |
| Premium | $220 / user / month | $259 / user / month | 50 projects / month | Bankable shade reports and AutoDesigner included |
| Enterprise | Custom, per project | Custom | Custom | Negotiated |
Three things about that table deserve more attention than they usually get.
Bankable shade reports are Premium and above. This is the gate that decides the real price for most buyers. A shade report is not a nice-to-have in the US residential market. Utilities, incentive programmes and finance partners in several states ask for one, and a customer disputing a production shortfall will ask for one too. If you need it, your price is $220 per user per month billed annually, not $135. Treat Basic as an evaluation tier rather than an operating tier unless you genuinely never produce a shade report.
Plan sets are a separate service. Aurora lists plan sets, including solar-plus-storage, as a priced service with a turnaround commitment (solar-only in under 24 hours, solar-plus-storage in under 48). That is a real product and for many installers a good one, because it is cheaper than staffing a drafter. But it is not a seat inclusion, and it is not in the monthly number. Budget it per project.
The project allowance is a meter. Fifty projects a month per user is generous for a designer who also sells, and tight for a designer supporting three closers. The published pricing page does not spell out the overage treatment, so if your volume is spiky, ask the rep in writing what happens at project 51.
⚠️ Watch out
A five-seat team on Premium billed annually is $13,200 a year in licences alone, before plan sets. Model the seat count you expect in 18 months, not the one you have today.
Note that HelioScope, which Aurora owns, is priced entirely separately: HelioScope publishes $159 per month for Basic and $259 for Pro. As of the pricing pages we checked in August 2026, we found no published bundle across the two. We cover that in our HelioScope pricing guide.
What Aurora Solar Does Best
LIDAR-grounded irradiance. Where LIDAR coverage exists, Aurora is not estimating your roof, it is reading a measured point cloud. Pitch, azimuth, ridge heights and the height of every obstruction come from data rather than from a designer’s judgement about how tall that vent looks. The downstream effect is that two designers modelling the same house get the same annual number, which is worth more than it sounds when you are trying to standardise a sales team’s proposals.
NEC-aware plan sets. Aurora’s plan set output understands the National Electrical Code articles that govern PV, and it produces the drawings and placards in the form US inspectors expect. For an installer without an in-house electrical engineer, this is the feature that justifies the whole subscription. The alternative is outsourcing every permit package, and at that point you are paying a per-project fee anyway. Teams that do want stamped engineering alongside the drawings usually pair a design tool with a service like Heaven Designs solar permit design, because none of the design platforms on our bench stamp drawings.
The proposal actually closes. Aurora’s customer-facing document is genuinely good: financing scenarios, utility rate escalation, a clear production narrative and e-signature. Plenty of engineering tools produce a beautiful simulation and an ugly PDF. Aurora does both halves.
Ubiquity has value. US residential remains the largest distributed solar software market by seat count, per IEA solar PV tracking, and Aurora is the most widely used platform inside it, which means new hires arrive knowing it, contractors accept its plan sets without argument, and there is an answer on a forum for almost any question. That is a real operational benefit, and any comparison that leaves it out is incomplete.
Where Aurora Solar Falls Short
The gating is the business model. Two of Aurora’s flagship capabilities, bankable shade reports and AutoDesigner, sit above the entry tier. That is a legitimate commercial choice, but it means the advertised entry price is not the price a working installer pays. Buyers who budget on $135 and then discover they need $220 feel misled even though nothing was hidden.
Per-seat monthly billing punishes growth. This is the structural critique and it is the one that costs Aurora customers. Solar installers grow in steps: you hire two closers, then a designer to support them, then a coordinator. Every one of those people wants a login. At Premium, each login is $2,640 a year. A team going from three seats to eight adds $13,200 to the annual software line without adding a single new capability. Tools priced per user per year with volume tiers, or priced per company, do not have this shape.
It is a US-shaped product. Aurora’s code intelligence, utility rate libraries, incentive modelling and plan set conventions are built around the American market. Outside the US you lose a large part of what you are paying for. For Indian, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian installers this is decisive, which is why our best solar design software ranking places different tools first in different markets.
Commercial and industrial depth lives in a different product. If your work is genuinely C&I, Aurora’s answer is HelioScope, which is a separate subscription. That is fine, but it means Aurora is not the single-tool answer for a mixed residential and C&I shop.
Heavy in the browser. Large commercial rooftops make the web app work hard. On machines under 16 GB of RAM, designers notice. Budget the hardware refresh alongside the licence.
Not sure which tool your team actually needs? Compare the full category first in our solar design software guide, then book demos on a shortlist of two. Talk to our engineering team →
Who Should Buy Aurora Solar
Here is the reader for whom Aurora is the correct purchase, and for whom we would tell you to buy it over SurgePV without hesitation.
You are a US residential installer with one to three designers, no in-house electrical engineer, and you sell as you design. You need a permit package an inspector in your county will accept, you need a proposal your closer can put in front of a homeowner on the kitchen table, and you need both to come out of the same file. You would rather pay $220 a seat and never think about it than assemble a stack. At three seats that is $7,920 a year, which is a rounding error against a single closed 8 kW job, and the LIDAR accuracy plus the plan set service can cover work you would otherwise hire for.
Two more readers belong here. Teams already deep in Aurora templates with hundreds of saved designs and a trained sales floor: the migration cost is real and the score gap to any alternative does not justify it. And anyone whose finance partner or utility programme names Aurora output specifically, which happens more often than vendors admit.
Who Should Not
Growing teams past roughly five seats. The per-seat monthly model is the wrong shape for you. Model your year-two seat count and compare against a per-user-per-year platform before you renew.
Installers outside the United States. You are paying for US code intelligence and US utility libraries you cannot use. Start from our country rankings instead, such as best solar design software in Canada or the India-focused comparison.
Pure C&I engineering shops. You want a simulation tool with a defensible loss tree, not a residential sales platform. Read our PVsyst review and HelioScope review, or start from commercial solar design software as a category.
Teams whose bottleneck is capture, not design. If your field crews are re-measuring roofs because nobody trusts the model, a drone-first tool solves more than a better simulator does. See our Scanifly review.
Solo installers and very small shops on tight cash. OpenSolar is free and genuinely good for residential design and proposals. Paying $1,620 a year when a free tool covers your workflow is not a decision you can defend. Our OpenSolar review explains exactly how far free goes and where it stops.
Aurora Solar vs SurgePV
Disclosure, stated plainly: SurgePV is a sister product of Heaven Green Energy, and we run it on our own EPC work. That is why we can describe its behaviour on real projects, and it is also why you should weigh the comparison below against the fact that we benefit if you choose it. The scores above were assigned before this section was written and we have not adjusted them.
| Axis | Aurora Solar | SurgePV | Honest read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simulation depth | 9. LIDAR-derived geometry, bankable shade on Premium | 9. 8,760-hour module-level on every paid plan, satellite-derived 3D | Aurora wins on measured obstruction height. SurgePV wins on not gating the report |
| Compliance output | 8. Strongest US plan sets on our bench, sold as a service | 7. SLD, BOQ, DXF/DWG export bundled; multi-country code libraries | Aurora wins in the US. SurgePV wins outside it |
| Proposal workflow | 9. Financing, rates, e-signature, polished | 9. White-label proposals, 9 languages, e-signature, bundled | Line ball. Aurora’s US finance integrations are deeper |
| Price against value | 5. $135 to $220 per user per month, gated | 9. $1,299 per user per year at five seats, nothing gated | SurgePV wins clearly, and this is the whole argument |
| Support and onboarding | 7. Large community, slower standard-tier response in our experience | 8. Faster response, smaller knowledge base to search | SurgePV wins on speed, Aurora on self-serve depth |
| Total | 38 / 50 | 42 / 50 | Four points, all of them on price |
SurgePV’s named weaknesses, in the same table’s spirit. Brand recognition is thin: SurgePV launched in 2025 and your new hire will not arrive knowing it, which is a real onboarding cost Aurora does not have. There is no drone capture, so as-built and survey workflows need Scanifly or an equivalent alongside it. There is no structural stamping, so anything requiring a PE seal goes out to an engineering partner. And the racking database is thinner than the module and inverter databases, which shows up as manual entry on unusual mounting systems.
The honest summary: Aurora is the better product in a US residential vacuum, and SurgePV is the better purchase for most teams once you multiply by seats and years. If money were not a variable we would not tell a US residential shop to leave Aurora. Money is always a variable.
How Heaven Green Energy Uses This In Practice
We run a 12-person engineering team across residential, commercial and industrial work in Gujarat and beyond, and we have used Aurora on US-facing design work through partner EPCs. Three observations from actually operating it rather than demoing it.
The LIDAR advantage is real but geographically uneven. On US suburban addresses with good coverage the 3D model comes back accurate enough that we stopped double-checking obstruction heights after the first month. Push outside dense LIDAR coverage and the accuracy converges with satellite-derived competitors, and the premium you are paying for it stops making sense. Check coverage for your actual service territory before you buy on this feature.
The plan set service changed our staffing math, not our software math. Paying per plan set is cheaper than a full-time drafter until you cross roughly 25 permit packages a month. Past that, in-house drafting wins. We ran the crossover on our own volume and it is worth running on yours.
Tier gating creates a decision you make twice. Every installer we have watched start on the entry tier upgraded within two quarters, because one lender or one disputed production estimate forced a shade report. Budget the higher tier from month one and you will not be surprised.
On our own projects we now design in SurgePV because the economics at our seat count are not close, and we route stamped structural work and permit packages to Heaven Designs regardless of which design tool produced the layout. String sizing sanity checks go through the free QBits Energy string sizing calculator before anything reaches procurement, because a design tool that silently accepts an out-of-range string is a design tool that will eventually cost you an inverter.
If you want the deeper cost model rather than the review, our Aurora Solar pricing analysis runs the five-seat and ten-seat scenarios in full, and our solar design software pricing comparison puts Aurora next to every other platform on a single table. For the wider category, start at the solar design software pillar.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Aurora Solar worth the money in 2026?
For a US residential installer with one to three designers and no in-house electrical engineer, yes. At $220 per user per month billed annually on Premium, Aurora can cover work you would otherwise hire for: accurate remote site assessment, permit-ready plan sets and a closing proposal from one file. It scores 38 out of 50 on our bench, the highest US residential score we have recorded. For teams above roughly five seats, or for anyone working outside the United States, the value case weakens sharply because per-seat monthly pricing scales faster than the benefit does.
How much does Aurora Solar cost per user?
Aurora publishes three plans as of 2026: Basic at $135 per user per month billed annually or $159 billed monthly, Premium at $220 billed annually or $259 monthly, and Enterprise at custom per-project pricing. Both Basic and Premium include a 50 project per month allowance. Plan sets are sold as a separate service with their own per-package price. A five-seat team on Premium billed annually costs $13,200 a year in licences before any plan set spend.
Does Aurora Solar include shade analysis?
Aurora includes shading in its simulation on all tiers, but the bankable shade report, the document you hand to a lender, a utility programme or a customer disputing production, is restricted to Premium and Enterprise. This is the single most common surprise for buyers who budget on the Basic price. If a shade report is part of your normal deliverable, price yourself at the Premium tier from the start rather than planning to upgrade later.
Is Aurora Solar the same as HelioScope?
No. Aurora acquired Folsom Labs, the maker of HelioScope, in a deal announced in 2021 and completed in 2022, so the same company owns both. They remain separate products with separate subscriptions and separate pricing. Aurora is a residential-first design and proposal platform. HelioScope is a commercial and industrial simulation tool with a detailed loss tree. Owning one does not give you the other, and there is no combined discount published.
What is the best free alternative to Aurora Solar?
OpenSolar, without much argument. It is genuinely free for the full in-platform workflow, funded by hardware manufacturers, distributors and finance partners rather than by installer subscriptions, and it covers residential design plus branded proposals well. It is weaker than Aurora on engineering depth and documentation output, so it is not a like-for-like swap for a team that ships permit sets. Our free solar design software guide sets out exactly where each free option stops.
Does Aurora Solar work outside the United States?
It functions, but a large share of what you pay for does not travel. Aurora’s code intelligence, plan set conventions, utility rate libraries and incentive modelling are built around the US market. Installers in India, the Gulf, Southeast Asia and Africa lose most of that value while paying the full seat price. Use a platform with the relevant country libraries instead, and see our country-specific rankings for a shortlist that fits your market.
How long does it take to onboard a designer onto Aurora?
Plan on two to three weeks to unsupervised competence for a designer who has used any 3D design tool before, and four to six weeks for someone coming from spreadsheets and AutoCAD. Aurora’s documentation and community are strong, which shortens the curve. The slower part is not the software, it is standardising your own template library and proposal defaults so that two designers produce comparable output. Budget that internally rather than expecting the vendor to solve it.
What are the biggest reasons installers leave Aurora Solar?
Three, in the order we hear them. Seat cost as headcount grows, because the per-user monthly model doubles when the team doubles. Tier gating, when a capability the buyer assumed was included turns out to sit a tier up. And geography, when a team expands outside the US and finds the code and rate libraries do not follow. Engineering quality is almost never the reason. Our Aurora Solar alternatives page ranks where those teams go.
Stop paying for four tools. Design it all in one.
SurgePV replaces Aurora + HelioScope + PVsyst + a separate proposal tool in a single license. AI 3D roof in under 60 seconds, bankable 8,760-hour simulation, auto-SLD, BOQ, DXF/DWG export and branded proposals.
Free trial, no credit card · $1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team planDisclaimer: SurgePV is our own product. It is built by the Heaven Group, the same company as Heaven Green Energy, so treat this as a recommendation from its maker.