Best Solar Shading Analysis Software Australia 2026

If you are choosing solar shading analysis software in Australia for 2026, the honest starting point is that most Australian shading work is not an engineering problem. It is a speed problem. Australia has the highest residential rooftop solar penetration of any country, that fleet sits overwhelmingly on straightforward pitched tile and Colorbond roofs, and the shading analysis a designer performs is a fast, repeatable near-object check done during or immediately after a sales conversation. Twenty minutes per roof does not work at Australian volumes. The platform that wins our 2026 bench for that job is SurgePV at about A$1,990 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, though OpenSolar is free and this ranking says plainly where free is the better answer.

Direct answer. The best solar shading analysis software in Australia for 2026 is SurgePV at about A$1,990 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, because it produces an 8,760-hour, module-level near-object shading result from a satellite address in a few minutes. OpenSolar remains the strongest free option for solo installers, and PVsyst remains the reference where a commercial project needs a bankable yield report.

This guide is for CEC-accredited designers, installer principals and in-house design teams working residential STC volume and commercial rooftop. It ranks ten tools on shading specifically. For the wider platform decision see our solar design software Australia ranking, and for the physics underneath all of it see the solar shading analysis software pillar.

Why Australian Shading Work Is a Volume Problem

Australia crossed four million rooftop solar installations and its residential penetration sits far above any comparable market, a position tracked in the IEA solar PV overview, 2026. What that number means operationally is that a busy Australian installer is not designing twelve carefully engineered arrays a year. They are quoting several roofs a day, most of them 6.6 kW to 13 kW on a two or three plane pitched roof, and the shading question on each of them is narrow: is there a tree, a neighbouring two-storey wall, a chimney, an aerial, an evaporative cooler or a solar hot water tank close enough to matter, and does it change the string layout.

That job does not need terrain modelling, it does not need horizon files, and on a typical suburban roof it does not need inter-row spacing at all, because the modules sit flush on the pitch. What it needs is a 3D roof from a satellite address in under a minute, obstruction placement that a salesperson can do without a CAD background, and a loss number that is honest enough to survive the customer looking at their own bills a year later.

The failure mode is the opposite of the American one. Australian shading errors are rarely from a bad engine. They come from the designer never opening the shading tool at all because the quote had to go out in ten minutes, or from placing a tree at a guessed height on a satellite tile that is three summers old.

Southern Hemisphere Geometry: North-Facing Arrays and a June Winter

This section exists because imported software templates and imported design habits get it wrong, and the mistake is usually invisible until the numbers come back odd.

In Australia the sun sits in the northern half of the sky. The default orientation for a fixed array is north facing, not south. The worst sun position of the year is at the June solstice, not December. Every rule of thumb written for Europe or North America has both of those inverted, and so do the defaults in a surprising amount of documentation, spreadsheet templates and imported training material. If a tool or a template ever suggests a south-facing array for maximum annual yield in Australia, it was written for the wrong hemisphere and everything downstream of it is suspect.

The number that governs shading is the June solstice solar noon elevation, which is approximately 90 minus your latitude minus 23.44, exactly as in the north but with the seasons swapped.

City	Latitude	June solar noon elevation	Shadow per 1 m of height
Darwin, NT	12.46S	54.1 degrees	0.72 m
Brisbane, QLD	27.47S	39.1 degrees	1.23 m
Perth, WA	31.95S	34.6 degrees	1.45 m
Sydney, NSW	33.87S	32.7 degrees	1.56 m
Adelaide, SA	34.93S	31.6 degrees	1.62 m
Melbourne, VIC	37.81S	28.8 degrees	1.82 m
Hobart, TAS	42.88S	23.7 degrees	2.28 m

Elevations are computed from standard solar geometry; cross-check any specific site against a solar position calculator such as the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory tool, 2026, entering a southern latitude.

Two practical consequences. First, Australia is a mid-latitude market, not a tropical one: Sydney’s 32 degrees is not far off Los Angeles, and Hobart’s 23.7 degrees is genuinely low-sun territory where a neighbouring two-storey wall to the south of the array clears very little in winter. Second, because the shadow falls southward at solar noon, the objects that matter most on an Australian roof are the ones to the north of the array. A designer who instinctively checks the south side is checking the wrong side.

Standards and Accreditation: What Actually Bears on Shading

The Australian compliance stack is tight, but very little of it speaks to shading directly, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than inventing a requirement.

AS/NZS 5033 governs PV array installation and safety, and AS/NZS 4777.2 governs inverter grid interaction. Neither prescribes a shading analysis method. Where they touch shading is indirect but real: string voltage and current limits interact with how you split a shaded roof across MPPT inputs, and the array design decisions you make to reduce mismatch have to stay inside those limits. That is the practical intersection, and it is why a shading tool that also does string layout is more useful in Australia than one that only reports irradiance.

The accreditation and certificate stack matters more. Small-scale Technology Certificates under the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme are administered by the Clean Energy Regulator, and STC creation requires the system to use approved products and be installed and signed off by an accredited installer. The Clean Energy Council maintains the approved module and inverter lists that gate that eligibility. Installer and designer accreditation itself moved out of the CEC in 2024 to a separate body, Solar Accreditation Australia, which now administers accreditation for installers and designers. If your internal documentation still says CEC accreditation, it is out of date.

No Australian rule requires you to hand a customer a shading study. That is a commercial norm rather than a regulated deliverable, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What it means for tool selection is that you are optimising for internal accuracy and sales credibility, not for satisfying an auditor.

DNSP Export Limits Change Which Hours Matter

This is the Australian equivalent of the time-of-day argument, and it runs in the opposite direction to California’s.

Every Distributed Network Service Provider sets its own export limits, and across most of the country residential export is capped, frequently at 5 kW per phase and in some areas lower or at zero on constrained feeders. At the same time feed-in tariffs have fallen a long way, so the economics of an Australian residential system now rest on self-consumption rather than on export revenue.

Put those together and a midday kilowatt hour is often the least valuable one on the site. If the array is already clipping against an export limit at noon, or exporting at a feed-in tariff worth a few cents, then a shading loss in the middle of the day may cost the customer almost nothing. A shading loss at 8am or at 4pm, when household load is real and the alternative is buying at the retail rate, costs the full retail rate. Market operation data published by AEMO shows the same pattern at grid scale, with the middle of the day now the lowest-value period in high-solar regions.

The requirement this creates is different from the American one. You do not need to price hourly loss against a complex export tariff table. You need the shading tool to show you when the loss falls in plain terms, morning, midday or afternoon, and ideally to interact with a load profile and battery so the proposal reflects what the shade actually costs the household.

The 90-Second Shading Pass

Our internal frame for Australian volume work is deliberately small. We call it the 90-Second Shading Pass, and it is the minimum a designer should complete on every residential quote before it leaves the office. If it takes longer than 90 seconds in your tool, the tool is wrong for the job.

1. Confirm the hemisphere settings. Array azimuth defaults to north. Worst-case month is June. Verify once per tool, not per job.
2. Sweep the northern side. Trees, neighbouring two-storey walls, garages, and anything within roughly twice its own height of the array edge. That radius comes straight from the shadow multipliers in the table above.
3. Place the on-roof objects. Chimney, flue, aerial, evaporative cooler, solar hot water tank, whirlybird. These are the most commonly skipped items and the most commonly disputed.
4. Check the string split. If any obstruction shades part of one plane, put the affected modules on a separate MPPT input or specify module-level electronics. This is where the shading model earns its money.
5. Read the loss by time of day. Morning, midday, afternoon. If the loss is midday and the site is export capped, say so in the quote rather than discounting the price.
6. Photograph the obstruction on site. One dated photo from the array location, taken at install survey, costs nothing and settles any later argument.

Steps four and five are what separate a designer from a quoting tool. Step six is the one nobody does and everybody regrets.

Not sure your shading numbers hold up? Our design team reviews Australian residential and commercial arrays and will tell you plainly where the model is wrong. Request an engineering review.

Top 10 Solar Shading Analysis Tools in Australia Compared

Prices below are quoted in the vendor’s own billing currency first. Almost every platform on this list bills in US dollars, including the two Australian-founded ones, so an AUD figure is a conversion rather than a price. Approximate AUD figures use roughly A$1.53 per US dollar and move with the exchange rate. Confirm before you commit.

#	Tool	Price, vendor’s billing currency	Shading method	Best for
1	SurgePV	US$1,299/user/yr on the 5-User Team plan (~A$1,990)	8,760-hour, module level, satellite 3D	Teams running volume residential plus C&I
2	OpenSolar	Core platform free; add-on rates not published	Hourly 3D near-object	Solo installers and small teams
3	SolarPlus	USD, not AUD: Starter US$135/mo, Pro US$260, Complete US$450 on annual pre-pay	Hourly with load and battery modelling	Self-consumption and battery-heavy quoting
4	Aurora Solar	US$135/user/mo Basic, US$220 Premium, billed annually (~A$207 to A$337)	Hourly, LIDAR assisted where available	Large residential sales operations
5	HelioScope	US$159/mo Basic, US$259/mo Pro (~A$243 to A$396)	Hourly, component level	Commercial rooftop and string mismatch
6	PVsyst	CHF 700/user/yr Professional, annual subscription	Hourly with detailed near-shading scene	Bankable commercial yield reports
7	Scanifly	Not publicly listed	Drone photogrammetry site model	Complex or contested sites
8	SolarEdge Designer	Free	Hourly, optimiser-aware	SolarEdge specialist installers
9	Solar Pathfinder	US$299 to US$349 instrument, US$219 Assistant software	Reflective dome field measurement	Field verification on treed sites
10	PVcase	Not publicly listed	Terrain aware, ground mount	Regional ground mount and terrain

1. SurgePV

SurgePV wins the Australian bench on the specific job that dominates the market: satellite address to 3D roof to hourly, module-level shading result in a few minutes, with the string and MPPT consequence visible rather than inferred. The shadow analysis module is included on every paid plan. SurgePV bills in US dollars: US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, US$6,495 for five seats, or about A$9,950 at A$1.53 per dollar, with Individual seats at US$1,899. That is not the cheapest number on this page and we are not going to pretend it is. Aurora Basic at US$1,620 a year undercuts a SurgePV Individual seat, five PVsyst Professional seats at CHF 3,500 cost less than five SurgePV seats, and OpenSolar’s core platform is free. Hemisphere handling is correct out of the box, which sounds trivial and is not.

The reason it beats OpenSolar on this list despite costing money is depth and control: module-level string aggregation, an hourly loss breakdown you can read by time of day, and commercial rooftop capability in the same tool, so a team does not need a second licence when a 100 kW warehouse job appears.

Named weaknesses, plainly. First, it is not free, and for a genuinely solo installer doing four jobs a month OpenSolar is the correct commercial answer regardless of feature depth. Second, no Australian financier or independent engineer names SurgePV in a scope, so on a commercial project with debt attached you will still produce the PVsyst report. Third, it has no drone or field-capture path of its own, so obstruction heights rely on your survey discipline: on a heavily treed Blue Mountains or Adelaide Hills site, pair it with Scanifly or a Solar Pathfinder reading. Fourth, its Australian retail tariff and DNSP export-limit libraries are less complete than a locally built tool like SolarPlus, which matters if your proposals lean hard on self-consumption modelling.

2. OpenSolar

OpenSolar was founded in Australia, its core platform is free to installers for any number of users, and it is funded through hardware and finance partnerships rather than licences. OpenSolar has said that API Access, charged per project on creation, and Connectors, charged as a flat monthly fee, become chargeable from 16 April 2026, but it has not published those rates and they vary by geography, so an Australian team can budget nothing today and cannot yet be quoted a 2026 add-on figure. Its 3D near-object shading is genuinely competent for residential work and it is fast, which is the property that matters most here. For a large share of Australian installers it is the right answer and no argument about engine depth changes that.

Where it is limited is control and engineering depth. The commercial model puts partner surfacing inside your workflow, the shading engine is oriented to sales-stage accuracy rather than to a report an independent reviewer will pick over, and commercial rooftop work quickly outgrows it. Our Aurora versus OpenSolar comparison covers the trade-off at more length.

Best for. Solo installers and teams under about five people doing residential STC volume.

3. SolarPlus

Also Australian built, SolarPlus is the tool that most directly reflects how Australian residential economics actually work, because it models load profiles, battery dispatch and self-consumption alongside the array. For the shading question specifically that is more valuable than it sounds: it lets you answer “what does this shade actually cost the customer” rather than “what percentage of irradiance is lost”, which is exactly the distinction export limits create.

One thing to correct, because plenty of Australian write-ups get it wrong including earlier versions of this page: SolarPlus prices in US dollars, not Australian dollars, despite the Australian origin. On annual pre-pay it is US$135 a month for Starter, US$260 for Pro and US$450 for Complete, or US$150, US$300 and US$520 billed monthly, with Enterprise quote-only. Commercial capacity is capped at 900 kW, 2 MW and 3.9 MW by tier. If you budgeted an AUD number off a directory listing, you under-budgeted by roughly half.

Its 3D and shading interface is less polished than SurgePV’s or Aurora’s and the learning curve is steeper than its price suggests.

Best for. Installers whose proposals are built around self-consumption and battery sizing.

4. Aurora Solar

Aurora brings the deepest residential design workflow of any global platform and a strong irradiance engine. In Australian metros where high-quality remote imagery is available it produces very good shading with little designer effort, and for a large sales operation the consistency across dozens of reps is worth real money.

Aurora publishes US dollar prices: Basic US$135 per user per month billed annually, US$159 monthly, and Premium US$220 billed annually, US$259 monthly, each covering one user and 50 projects a month. At A$1.53 per dollar that is about A$207 and A$337 a seat a month. The old Grow, Scale and Run tiers no longer exist. Two things follow that are worth stating plainly. Aurora Basic at US$1,620 a year is cheaper than a SurgePV Individual seat at US$1,899, so on pure licence cost Aurora wins that comparison. But LIDAR modelling and bankable shade reports sit on Premium rather than Basic, and plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion, so the shading capability this page ranks on is the US$220 tier and not the US$135 one. Against a free Australian-built alternative that most customers cannot tell apart, either tier is a hard sell at Australian residential margins, and data coverage advantages are weaker outside the major metros.

Best for. Large residential sales operations that can amortise the seat cost across high volume.

5. HelioScope

HelioScope earns its place on commercial rooftop work. Modelling shading, string layout and inverter selection together means you see the mismatch consequence of a shadow directly, which on a 200 kW warehouse roof with a row of plant obstructions is the whole question. It is fast and the output is clean.

For residential Australian work it is the wrong tool: too much setup, not enough 3D fidelity on complex pitched roofs. See our HelioScope versus PVsyst comparison for where the engineering depth line falls.

Best for. Commercial rooftop designers who need string-level shading fast.

6. PVsyst

PVsyst remains the reference for any Australian commercial or utility project where a financier, an independent engineer or a corporate offtaker wants a yield report they recognise. Its near-shading scene editor is detailed, its loss diagram is the artefact reviewers read, and its acceptance is universal.

PVsyst bills in Swiss francs as an annual subscription rather than a perpetual licence: CHF 700 per user per year for Professional, with Education at CHF 420, Training and Research at CHF 560, Student and Classroom at CHF 25 and PVsystCLI at CHF 3,000, and group discounts of 5 to 20 percent by quantity. Five Professional seats are CHF 3,500 a year, less than five SurgePV seats at US$6,495. On licence cost alone PVsyst beats us.

It is entirely wrong for residential volume. Building a shading scene takes far longer than the whole sales conversation, and no Australian residential business can run it on every job. Keep one seat for the commercial work. Our engineering sister company’s PVsyst resource centre is a reasonable starting point if you are building that capability.

Best for. Bankable commercial and utility yield reporting.

7. Scanifly

Scanifly flies the site with a drone and produces a measured photogrammetric model, which means obstruction heights are measured rather than estimated. On a heavily treed site, or a commercial roof with plant nobody documented, that is a step change in accuracy over satellite imagery.

Scanifly does not publish pricing, on any basis, so budget it from a quote rather than from a directory listing. The cost that is easier to pin down is operational: a pilot, a drone, CASA compliance obligations for commercial drone operation and a site visit before you can quote. Very few Australian residential businesses can insert that into a same-day sales process, which is why it sits at seven despite being the most accurate geometry source on the list.

Best for. Complex, contested or heavily vegetated sites, and commercial as-built work.

8. SolarEdge Designer

Free, browser based, and genuinely useful if you specify SolarEdge, because it models optimiser behaviour under partial shade rather than treating the string as monolithic. On a shaded Australian pitched roof where module-level electronics are the mitigation being sold, that is the most direct way to show the customer what the optimisers recover.

The obvious limitation is that it is a vendor tool. It will not help you compare a SolarEdge solution against a string inverter with a different topology, and it should never be your only shading model.

Best for. SolarEdge specialist installers demonstrating optimiser benefit on shaded roofs.

9. Solar Pathfinder

The Solar Pathfinder is a reflective-dome field instrument that captures the whole sky including obstructions in one reflection, then processes it into monthly solar access percentages. It is manual, cheap and hemisphere-agnostic provided you use the correct sun-path diagram for southern latitudes, which is the step Australian users most often get wrong.

It earns a place in Australia for exactly one reason: on a treed site where the customer is nervous and the satellite tile is stale, a dated field reading from the array location ends the discussion. It is not a design tool.

Pricing. Solar Pathfinder bills in US dollars and publishes its prices: the instrument is US$299 to US$349 depending on configuration, the Assistant software is US$219, and PV Studio 2 is US$289. Buy the instrument together with software and the vendor takes 5% off. At about A$1.55 to the dollar that is roughly A$465 to A$540 for the instrument and about A$340 for Assistant, both approximate. Add Australian shipping and duty on top.

Best for. Field verification on treed residential sites; carry one per crew, not per designer.

10. PVcase

PVcase is terrain-aware ground-mount design inside CAD, and it is the right tool for a regional Australian ground mount on a sloped paddock where inter-row spacing has to respect real grade. Given the June elevations in the table above, a Victorian or Tasmanian ground mount on a south-facing slope needs materially wider rows than a flat-plane calculation suggests, and PVcase is the tool that gets that right.

PVcase does not publish pricing and sells on quote only, and it requires an AutoCAD licence on top, so the real figure is whatever the quote says plus AutoCAD. For rooftop work it is irrelevant regardless of what it costs.

Best for. Regional ground mount with real terrain.

Verdict. Solo installer: OpenSolar, and spend the saved licence money on a Solar Pathfinder. Team of three to twenty running residential plus commercial: SurgePV as the daily tool. Any commercial project carrying debt: add a PVsyst seat, no exceptions. Battery-led self-consumption specialists: look hard at SolarPlus.

Mistakes Australian Designers Make on Shading

1. 1
   Using a northern-hemisphere template or default. South-facing optimum azimuth and a December worst case are both wrong here, and the resulting design fails quietly.
2. 2
   Skipping on-roof objects. Evaporative coolers, solar hot water tanks and flues cause more real Australian shading complaints than trees do.
3. 3
   Quoting an annual shading percentage with no time-of-day context. On an export-capped site a midday loss and an afternoon loss have very different values.
4. 4
   Ignoring the string split. Putting shaded and unshaded modules on the same MPPT input turns a small shading loss into a large one.
5. 5
   Selling optimisers as a complete fix. Module-level electronics reduce mismatch, they do not restore irradiance the module never received.

Point five is worth expanding, because it is the most commonly oversold claim in Australian residential sales. Module-level power electronics recover the mismatch component of a shading loss, which can be substantial, but the shaded module still produces only what its reduced irradiance allows. Our shading loss glossary entry sets out the split, and string current mismatch explains the part optimisers actually address. The correct sales line is that optimisers recover part of the loss, with the modelled number attached.

Should an Australian Installer Pay for Shading Software?

The break-even is not really about features. It is about how many quotes a shading error touches before you notice it. A solo installer catches their own mistakes. A ten-person sales team does not, and that is what a paid tool with enforced defaults is actually buying.

How Heaven Green Energy Helps

We are a solar EPC with more than 10,000 installations behind us, and our in-house design team runs the same shading workflow described above on every project we build. Australian installers use us for design support, second opinions on contested yield numbers and overflow capacity during quoting peaks. Routes in:

• Solar EPC services for engineering support including shading and yield review.
• Commercial solar for rooftop C&I work where string layout and mismatch decide the return.
• Industrial solar for large-roof and ground mount projects with terrain interaction.
• Solar calculator for fast first-pass sizing before any modelling begins.

If the shading question is part of a wider tooling decision, read the best solar software Australia overview and the best solar proposal software Australia ranking. The New Zealand design software ranking covers the nearest comparable market, the US shading ranking shows how differently the same tools are judged where the report is contractual, and the solar design software pillar frames the category. For inverter-side behaviour under partial shade, clipping explained from our sister engineering team is a useful companion, alongside the tilt angle and azimuth glossary entries.

Shading Analysis in Nearby Markets

Australia sits between two very different shading regimes, the temperate southern latitudes and the tropics to its north, so both of these are useful comparisons.

• Best solar shading analysis software in Singapore
• Solar shading analysis software: the global guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a shading analysis required by Australian standards?

No. AS/NZS 5033 and AS/NZS 4777.2 govern array installation, safety and inverter grid interaction, and neither prescribes a shading analysis method or requires a shading report as a deliverable. Shading studies are a commercial norm in Australia rather than a regulated obligation. Where the standards do bear on shading is indirectly, through the string voltage and current limits that constrain how you split a shaded array across MPPT inputs.

Which body accredits Australian solar designers in 2026?

Solar Accreditation Australia. Accreditation for installers and designers moved out of the Clean Energy Council to Solar Accreditation Australia in 2024, and that is the body that administers it now. The Clean Energy Council still maintains the approved module and inverter product lists, and using approved products remains a condition of creating Small-scale Technology Certificates under the scheme administered by the Clean Energy Regulator.

What is the June solar noon elevation in Sydney?

About 32.7 degrees. Sydney sits at roughly 33.87 degrees south, and June is the southern hemisphere winter solstice, so solar noon elevation is approximately 90 minus 33.87 minus 23.44. At that elevation a 1 metre obstruction casts a shadow of about 1.56 metres at solar noon. Melbourne is lower at about 28.8 degrees and Hobart lower again at 23.7 degrees, so the same obstruction shades considerably more in the southern states.

Do Australian arrays face north or south?

North. In the southern hemisphere the sun sits in the northern half of the sky, so a north-facing array maximises annual yield, which is the exact inverse of the northern hemisphere convention. This is the single most common error in imported design templates and training material. Check your software’s default optimum azimuth once on a known Australian site, because a tool that suggests south-facing was configured for the wrong hemisphere.

Does an export limit change how much shading costs?

Yes. Most Australian DNSPs cap residential export, commonly around 5 kW per phase and lower on constrained feeders, and feed-in tariffs have fallen a long way, so system value now comes from self-consumption. If the array is already export-limited at midday, a midday shading loss may cost the household very little. The same percentage loss at 8am or 4pm, when household load is being served, costs the full retail rate.

Is OpenSolar good enough for shading analysis?

For a solo installer doing residential STC work on simple pitched roofs, yes. Its 3D near-object shading is competent and fast, and it costs nothing. It becomes insufficient when you move into commercial rooftop work, when you need module-level string aggregation to make MPPT decisions, or when a yield number has to survive external review. At that point a paid tool such as SurgePV, or PVsyst for bankable work, is the correct step.

How long should a residential shading check take?

Under 90 seconds per roof, which is the basis of our 90-Second Shading Pass. Confirm hemisphere settings, sweep the northern side for obstructions within roughly twice their own height of the array, place on-roof objects such as flues and evaporative coolers, check the string split, and read the loss by time of day. If your tool cannot do that in 90 seconds, designers will skip it on busy days, and a skipped check is worse than an imperfect one.

Do optimisers fix a shaded Australian roof?

Partly. Module-level power electronics recover the mismatch component of a shading loss, which on a partly shaded string can be a large share of the total. They do not recover irradiance the shaded module never received. Selling optimisers as a complete fix is the most common overclaim in Australian residential sales. Model the array both ways, quote the recovered percentage from the model, and put that number in the proposal rather than a general claim.