Anyone searching for the best solar software in New Zealand in 2026 is usually about to make one of two mistakes. The first is buying nothing and running the business out of a shared drive and a quoting spreadsheet. The second, and the more expensive one, is copying an Australian software stack into a market roughly a twentieth the size, with no certificate scheme to administer, no national feed-in tariff to encode and no distributor-issued dynamic export envelope to respond to. Australian installers carry five licences because Australian volume and Australian regulation make five licences pay for themselves. Most New Zealand installers do three to fifteen jobs a month with two or three people, and every licence past the second one comes straight off the owner’s drawings. Our ranking puts SurgePV first at about NZ$2,180 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, and the more useful advice attached to that is to buy two seats rather than five.
Direct answer. The best solar software in New Zealand for 2026 is SurgePV at roughly NZ$2,180 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, covering 3D design, 8,760-hour simulation, half-hourly self-consumption modelling against retailer buyback rates, AS/NZS-labelled plan sets and proposals in one licence. It does no monitoring, no job scheduling and no accounting. Most New Zealand installers run it alongside exactly two other things: Tradify or simPRO for jobs, and Xero for the books, with monitoring supplied free by whichever inverter brand they fit.
This is the whole-stack page. If you only need the engineering tool, our best solar design software in New Zealand ranking scores ten platforms on AS/NZS 5033, shading and southern-latitude yield. If the closing document is the problem, the best solar proposal software New Zealand guide covers full-price selling and retailer buyback tables. Read this one if you are deciding how many licences to hold at all, and what the total should be in New Zealand dollars.
Why the New Zealand Stack Argument Is About Restraint
Software roundups written for Australia, the United States or Germany all assume the same thing: that the market is big enough, and the regulation heavy enough, that specialisation pays. Australia has more than four million rooftop systems, a certificate scheme with a federal auditor behind it, and distribution networks issuing dynamic operating envelopes. Every one of those facts creates a software category, and an Australian installer who refuses to buy into those categories loses money in a way you can point at.
New Zealand has none of those three things. There is no Small-scale Technology Certificate scheme, so nothing creates certificates, nothing audits the evidence, and no compliance platform exists to sell you. There is no national feed-in tariff, so there is no statutory rate to encode and no degression calendar to track. Export limits are set by each lines company as a static condition of connection rather than recalculated through the day, so there is no control layer to commission. Three whole categories that dominate the Australian stack simply do not have a New Zealand equivalent.
What is left is smaller and more ordinary. You need to design and price a system honestly. You need to keep jobs, crews and invoices from colliding. You need to keep records that satisfy an electrical inspector and a lines company for years. And you need to see whether the systems you installed are still working. That is four jobs, and in New Zealand two licences plus free inverter monitoring covers all four for most firms.
💡 Fast tip
Before you book a demo, count the jobs you lost last quarter and write down why. If none of them were lost because of software, the correct purchase this quarter is none.
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 simulation, and hand you the SLD, BOQ and branded proposal on the call.
Book a free SurgePV demo → Compare pricingThe New Zealand Two-Licence Ceiling
This is our own framework and it is deliberately a ceiling rather than a checklist. Every solar business anywhere has six software layers. The New Zealand test asks, layer by layer, whether the layer is worth a payment in this market at your size, and the default answer is no until the layer is demonstrably costing you money.
- Design, simulation and proposals. One layer, not three, and the only one nearly every New Zealand installer should pay for. Splitting it across vendors makes the customer-facing number drift from the engineered one.
- Job management and field operations. The second licence, and it becomes worth paying for at roughly the point you have a second van and someone other than the owner scheduling work.
- Accounting and invoicing. Already paid for, because essentially every New Zealand trade business is on Xero already and did not think of it as solar software.
- Monitoring. Free with the inverter in almost every residential case, so buying a monitoring platform is a decision that needs a reason, usually a performance guarantee or a mixed fleet you can no longer see.
- CRM. The layer New Zealand installers most often buy too early. Below about forty live opportunities, a well-kept job list in Tradify does the same work.
- Compliance and records. Real work, but a storage and discipline problem rather than a licence. Certificates of Compliance, Electrical Safety Certificates and lines company approvals need to be findable in year eight, and a folder structure inside your job tool achieves that.
Layer coverage out of six across our ranked ten: SurgePV 2, OpenSolar 2, Tradify 3, simPRO 3, Xero 2, Fronius Solar.web 1, Enphase Enlighten 1, SolarEdge Monitoring 1, Solar Analytics 1, Zoho CRM 1. Notice that no platform in New Zealand covers more than three, and notice that the two highest-coverage tools are not solar products.
The Top 10 Solar Software Platforms in New Zealand
Pricing is 2026, annualised, in New Zealand dollars, with US list prices converted at roughly NZ$1.68 per US dollar. Half of this list is not design software, which is the point. Ask for a written NZD quote, because several of these vendors publish in USD and bill in it.
1. SurgePV
What it does best. Turning one model into the whole set of documents a New Zealand job needs, and doing the self-consumption arithmetic properly on the way through. Enter an address, get an AI-built 3D roof from satellite imagery, place modules across the tilts a Kiwi hip roof actually has, run the 8,760-hour module-level simulation at half-hourly resolution, value self-consumed and exported kilowatt-hours separately against a named retailer plan rather than one blended rate, then produce the branded proposal alongside the AS/NZS 5033 and AS/NZS 4777.2 labelled single-line diagram and bill of quantities. Because it stores the retailer buyback rate as a configurable table rather than a hardcoded number, a retailer changing its rate is a five-minute edit rather than a rebuild of every template.
Real pricing. About NZ$3,190 (US$1,899) per user per year on Individual, NZ$2,180 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, so NZ$10,900 for five seats. Free trial, no credit card.
Who it suits. New Zealand installers and small EPC firms doing five or more jobs a month, teams working across several lines company areas, and anyone whose battery and self-consumption maths currently lives in a spreadsheet.
Honest limitations. Five real ones for this market. It does no monitoring at all, so the twenty-year job needs another tool, and for an installer with a growing fleet that is the biggest hole in the ranking. It has no job scheduling, crew dispatch or timesheets, so Tradify or simPRO sits beside it. It does not integrate with Xero, which for a New Zealand business is a more concrete annoyance than it would be elsewhere, because Xero is where the invoice actually gets raised. It does not store or generate Certificates of Compliance or Electrical Safety Certificates, so your compliance records live somewhere else. And its New Zealand brand tenure is close to zero against OpenSolar, which small installers here have been using free for years. At five seats it is also simply expensive relative to the size of a typical New Zealand book, which is why most firms here should buy two seats.
2. Tradify
What it does best. Being the job management tool a small New Zealand trades business will actually finish setting up. Built in Auckland for exactly this kind of company, Tradify covers quotes, scheduling, job tracking, timesheets, purchase orders, invoicing and a two-way Xero sync that works without an integration consultant. For a solar business, the underrated part is job attachments: photographs, serial numbers, the Certificate of Compliance and the lines company approval all sit against the job, which is where you will go looking for them when a warranty claim lands in year six. It runs properly within a week rather than a quarter, and for a two-van operation the honest comparison is not Tradify against simPRO, it is Tradify against the group chat that is currently losing you a job a month.
Real pricing. Tradify publishes New Zealand prices in New Zealand dollars excluding GST: Lite NZ$48, Pro NZ$52 and Plus NZ$62 per user per month, with a Custom tier by quote. That is about NZ$2,880 to NZ$3,720 a year for five users, and NZ$1,150 to NZ$1,490 for the two or three users most New Zealand firms actually need.
Who it suits. Owner-operators with a second van, service-heavy installers, and anyone whose scheduling currently lives in one person’s head.
Honest limitations. Nothing about it is solar. No string sizing, no shading, no yield, no export limit logic, no PV-specific commissioning checklist, so you build your own job templates. Job costing, inventory and recurring maintenance contracts are shallower than simPRO, which is exactly what a growing firm outgrows. Reporting is basic once you want margin by job type rather than by job.
3. Fronius Solar.web
What it does best. Free fleet visibility on hardware a large share of New Zealand installers already fit. Solar.web gives per-site production, fault codes, alerting to the installer as well as the owner, energy flow visualisation where a smart meter is fitted, and remote configuration on supported models, which occasionally converts a truck roll into a phone call. In a country where driving to a site can mean two hours each way, remote diagnosis is worth more than the feature list suggests.
Real pricing. Included with the hardware. Premium tiers add historical granularity for a small per-inverter monthly fee.
Who it suits. Residential installers standardised on Fronius, which describes a meaningful slice of the New Zealand market. The same argument applies to SolarEdge, Enphase and Sungrow fleets.
Honest limitations. Hardware locked, and a fleet built over six years is rarely single-brand. Consumption data needs a meter fitted, which many earlier New Zealand installs do not have, so the monitoring you inherit is generation-only and therefore useless for a battery retrofit conversation. No design, no proposals, no work orders, no compliance records.
4. Xero
What it does best. Being the financial spine every New Zealand solar business already has and rarely uses fully. Xero was founded in Wellington and is close to universal among New Zealand trades, which means your accountant, your bank feed, your GST return and your payroll are already in one place. For a solar installer the parts that matter beyond invoicing are project tracking, which lets you see gross margin per install rather than per month, and the Tradify or simPRO connection that stops someone retyping every invoice. Treat it as part of the software stack rather than as an accounting afterthought and you get job-level profitability without buying anything new.
Real pricing. Roughly NZ$35 to NZ$115 per month per organisation depending on plan, so about NZ$420 to NZ$1,380 a year, plus payroll per employee.
Who it suits. Every New Zealand solar business, without exception, and particularly anyone who cannot currently say which job type makes money.
Honest limitations. It is accounting software. No design, no scheduling worth the name, no monitoring, no compliance capture, no CRM beyond a contact list. Project tracking is a light module rather than real job costing, so a firm running multiple crews on complex commercial work will still want simPRO. It also will not tell you a quote has gone quiet, which is a job management problem rather than a bookkeeping one.
5. OpenSolar
What it does best. Being free and being familiar. OpenSolar covers residential design, a proposal and a light pipeline at no licence cost, monetised through hardware and finance partners, and a large share of small New Zealand installers already know the interface. For a one-van business under four jobs a month, it is genuinely difficult to argue against, and this ranking will not pretend otherwise.
Real pricing. NZ$0 for the core platform, which makes it cheaper than SurgePV and every other paid tool on this page. From 16 April 2026 OpenSolar begins charging for API Access on a per project basis and for Connectors as a flat monthly fee, but it publishes no rates and they differ by country, so budget for an unknown rather than a number we have invented.
Who it suits. Owner-operators, new entrants, and anyone whose priority is a presentable document tomorrow rather than engineering depth.
Honest limitations. Its New Zealand tariff layer is thin. Retailer buyback rates, time-of-use export bands and lines company export limits all need manual template work, and the default financial model is closer to an Australian or American shape than a New Zealand one. Shading and yield modelling are lighter than a dedicated hourly engine, so the sold number and the engineered number can drift on a shaded Wellington site. Documentation output stops short of a plan set an electrical worker wants. Our OpenSolar alternative comparison works through the trade in detail.
6. Enphase Enlighten
What it does best. Module-level visibility that makes a fault report specific. On a microinverter system Enlighten shows per-module production, so a shading problem, a failed unit or a dirty panel is identifiable from the office rather than from the roof. For a New Zealand installer selling into tree-heavy suburbs and complex roof shapes, the diagnostic granularity reduces the number of site visits that end in a shrug. The homeowner app also absorbs a real share of support calls, because the customer can see their own system before they phone you.
Real pricing. Included with the hardware. Installer fleet tooling is included; some advanced consumption analytics require the Enphase metering hardware.
Who it suits. Installers standardised on Enphase microinverters, and anyone whose service load is dominated by partial-shade complaints.
Honest limitations. Hardware locked in the strictest sense in this list, because it only exists where you fitted Enphase. Consumption data requires the metering kit, which is an extra install cost. No design, no proposals, no scheduling, no accounting. It also gives you no view of the rest of your fleet, so a mixed-brand installer ends up with Enlighten open in one tab and Solar.web in another.
7. simPRO
What it does best. Job management for a solar business that has genuinely outgrown Tradify. simPRO handles quoting, scheduling, crew dispatch, timesheets, job costing against budget, purchase orders, asset registers, recurring maintenance contracts and invoicing, with GST and New Zealand payroll realities handled rather than translated. The asset register and the recurring service module are the parts that matter for solar, because they turn a maintenance agreement into something you can administer across a few hundred sites instead of a promise you forget.
Real pricing. Not publicly listed. Simpro publishes no rate card at all; its pricing page routes to a quote, and the quote depends on user count, the add-on modules you take and a one-off setup fee. Any per-user figure you see in a software directory is a third-party estimate, not a Simpro price, so treat the job management line as a quote you have to go and get.
Who it suits. Installers running three or more crews, firms with a real commercial service book, and anyone whose margin is leaking somewhere they cannot see.
Honest limitations. For most New Zealand installers this is too much software. It knows nothing about photovoltaics, implementation is a project rather than a signup, and a half-configured simPRO is worse than a whiteboard. At New Zealand volumes the licence cost can exceed the design tool by a factor of two, which is the wrong shape for a business doing fifteen residential jobs a month.
8. SolarEdge Monitoring
What it does best. Optimiser-level data and remote commissioning support on SolarEdge systems, which are common on New Zealand roofs precisely because so many of them are shaded or multi-faceted. The installer portal gives fleet alerting, per-optimiser production, remote firmware and parameter access, and a layout view that maps data onto the physical roof, which shortens the diagnosis of a specific underperforming string considerably.
Real pricing. Included with the hardware, with extended data retention available on paid tiers.
Who it suits. Installers standardised on SolarEdge, and anyone whose typical job involves shading severe enough to justify optimisers in the first place.
Honest limitations. Hardware locked, same as the others. Consumption monitoring needs the meter fitted at install, and retrofitting it later is a truck roll. Reporting for a commercial client with a performance guarantee is thinner than a dedicated O&M platform. No design, no proposals, no job management, no compliance storage.
9. Solar Analytics
What it does best. Hardware-agnostic monitoring that compares actual output against a modelled expectation rather than against yesterday, and captures household consumption at fine granularity. That distinction is commercially useful: it is the difference between telling a customer their inverter is derating and telling them it was cloudy. For a New Zealand installer the consumption side is the more valuable half, because half-hourly load data is the only honest basis for a battery retrofit quote in a market where the export rate is set by the retailer and can move.
Real pricing. A monitoring device is commonly NZ$450 to NZ$750 supplied and installed, with a subscription around NZ$110 to NZ$200 per site per year.
Who it suits. Installers with a fleet under maintenance across several inverter brands, anyone selling battery retrofits, and firms offering a performance guarantee.
Honest limitations. It is a monitoring layer only, and it is a paid one in a market where the free inverter portal is usually adequate. It needs hardware at the site, which is an install cost and a truck roll on retrofit. New Zealand support and retailer tariff coverage are lighter than in Australia, where the product was built. For a single-brand residential fleet with a diligent installer, the marginal value over Solar.web or Enlighten is small.
10. Zoho CRM
What it does best. Cheap, configurable pipeline management for the specific New Zealand problem of quotes that go quiet during a long lines company approval wait. Configure stages around your real process, including connection application submitted and approval received, and the follow-up stops being a memory exercise. The wider Zoho suite covers desk, forms and books if you want one vendor, and it sits comfortably on top of Xero rather than competing with it.
Real pricing. Zoho publishes per-user list prices on its own pricing page and prices them per country, in New Zealand dollars among others. There is a free edition for up to three users, then Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate, each quoted per user per month with a discount for annual billing. Take the current New Zealand figure from Zoho rather than from a range on a comparison page.
Who it suits. Sales-led installers, commercial-focused firms with a long cycle, and anyone carrying more than about forty live opportunities.
Honest limitations. This is the layer most New Zealand installers buy too early and then abandon. It is generic: no solar proposal engine, no design, no buyback logic, no production data, and it does nothing useful until somebody spends real time configuring it. Below forty live opportunities a well-kept job list in Tradify does the same work for free, and an unconfigured CRM is a monthly charge for a database nobody opens.
All 10 Compared: Layer, NZD Price and Best Fit
The layer column is more useful than the price column, because most of these tools are not substitutes for one another.
| # | Platform | Annual cost (NZD, 5 users) | Layers covered | Key capability | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SurgePV | NZ$10,900 | Design, simulation, proposals, plan sets | Half-hourly self-consumption against a named retailer plan | Installers doing 5+ jobs a month |
| 2 | Tradify | NZ$2,880 to NZ$3,720 (NZ$48 to NZ$62/user/mo ex GST) | Field ops, light CRM, records | Fast to implement jobs with Xero sync | Two-van and three-van firms |
| 3 | Fronius Solar.web | Included with hardware | Monitoring | Free single-brand fleet visibility | Fronius-standardised installers |
| 4 | Xero | NZ$420 to NZ$1,380 | Accounting, light project costing | Margin per job, not per month | Every New Zealand solar business |
| 5 | OpenSolar | NZ$0 core; API and Connector fees from 16 Apr 2026 not published | Design, proposals | Free and already familiar | Owner-operators under 4 jobs a month |
| 6 | Enphase Enlighten | Included with hardware | Monitoring | Per-module fault identification | Microinverter fleets in shaded suburbs |
| 7 | Simpro | Not publicly listed, quote only | Field ops, job costing, assets | Recurring service contracts at scale | 3+ crews with a commercial service book |
| 8 | SolarEdge Monitoring | Included with hardware | Monitoring | Per-optimiser data mapped to the roof | SolarEdge-standardised installers |
| 9 | Solar Analytics | ~NZ$110 to NZ$200 per site | Monitoring, consumption analytics | Expected-versus-actual across brands | Mixed fleets and battery retrofit sellers |
| 10 | Zoho CRM | Published per user per month, priced per country by Zoho | CRM | Pipeline automation across approval waits | 40+ live opportunities |
Verdict. Buy the design and proposal licence first, because it is the only layer where a bad tool changes the number the customer signs. Buy job management second, at the point a second van exists. Everything else waits for a specific reason: a mixed fleet you cannot see, a performance guarantee you have sold, or a pipeline you have genuinely lost track of.
Half-Hourly Self-Consumption Is the Load-Bearing Capability
In markets with a statutory feed-in tariff, the financial model is arithmetic on a published number. New Zealand has no such number. What a customer earns for an exported kilowatt-hour is whatever their retailer chooses to pay, commonly between 7 and 17 cents, sometimes with a time-of-use export band, and always changeable with notice. What they avoid paying is closer to 30 cents. That gap is the whole business case, and it means a kilowatt-hour used in the house is worth roughly two to four times one sent to the grid.
That single fact reorganises which software capability matters. A tool that reports annual generation and multiplies it by a blended rate is not modelling a New Zealand system, it is modelling an average one. The correct model is half-hourly generation against half-hourly household load, with the surplus valued at the retailer buyback rate and the rest valued at the retail import rate for that plan. The Electricity Authority governs distributed generation connection under the Code and publishes the market structure that explains why buyback is a retail decision rather than a regulated one.
The practical consequences run through every layer of the stack:
- The design tool needs a load profile input. Half-hourly consumption data is available to the customer from their retailer, and a proposal built on real data instead of an assumed profile is a different document.
- The retailer must be named in the proposal. A quote that says “buyback rate” without naming the plan is unverifiable, and if the retailer moves the rate the customer will decide you misled them.
- Battery sizing becomes a data question rather than a preference. Evening load is what a battery is bought to serve, and evening load is exactly what an annual generation figure hides. Sizing arithmetic is worth cross-checking outside your primary tool with this battery sizing guide.
- Monitoring feeds the next sale. Twelve months of measured consumption from an existing customer is the strongest battery retrofit asset there is, which is the one solid argument for paying for monitoring in New Zealand.
Our solar plus storage design software comparison covers the tools that handle this properly, and the concept behind the numbers is defined in our net metering glossary entry, which is worth reading precisely because New Zealand does not have it.
Sizing a system or sanity-checking a payback? Use our solar calculator for a fast estimate, then speak to our engineering team about the design behind it.
Lines Company Records and the Compliance Storage Job
New Zealand has roughly 29 electricity distributors, and each one runs its own distributed generation connection process. Vector in Auckland and Northland, Orion in Christchurch, Powerco across Taranaki and the Bay of Plenty, Wellington Electricity, Aurora Energy in Otago and the rest each have their own application form, their own export limit policy and their own approval timeline. A design and a promised switch-on date that hold in one network can be wrong in the next.
There is no software product that manages this for you, and no market big enough to make building one attractive. What exists instead is a records discipline, and the software question is only where the records live. Three sets of documents have to be findable years later:
The connection record. The application, the approval, the agreed export limit and any conditions attached to it. This is what you produce when a customer asks in year four why their inverter is limiting, or when a lines company queries a site.
The Certificate of Compliance. Under the Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010, prescribed electrical work requires a Certificate of Compliance issued by the person who did or supervised it, and the record must be kept for seven years. The regulator here is WorkSafe New Zealand Energy Safety, and it is worth reading the requirements directly rather than relying on what a software vendor tells you they cover.
The Electrical Safety Certificate and the record of inspection. Where required, the ESC and any inspection record go to the customer and stay in your file. A grid-connected PV installation touching the mains is not a job where a missing certificate is a small administrative problem.
📘 Regulation note
Certificate of Compliance records must be retained for seven years under the Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010. If those certificates currently live in one electrician's phone or a personal email account, your record-keeping obligation is one staff departure away from failing, and no design tool will notice.
The cheapest way to solve this is to attach every document to the job in Tradify or simPRO, name files consistently, and never let a job close without the connection approval, the CoC and the commissioning photos attached. That is a process decision costing nothing. The expensive way is to buy a document management product, and in a market this size that purchase is very hard to justify.
Monitoring: Let the Inverter Brand Decide
Monitoring is the layer where New Zealand installers most often overthink the purchase. In a market where the vast majority of residential systems carry a Fronius, SolarEdge, Enphase or Sungrow inverter, the monitoring platform arrives with the hardware, costs nothing more, and is adequate for a single-brand fleet. The decision worth making is not which monitoring platform to buy, it is which inverter brand to standardise on, because that choice quietly selects your monitoring for the next decade.
Three situations genuinely justify paying for a monitoring layer on top:
- A mixed fleet you can no longer see. Four brands means four portals, four logins and four alert formats. At a few hundred sites that is a day a week of someone’s time, and a hardware-agnostic platform such as Solar Analytics starts to pay.
- A performance guarantee you have sold. If a commercial contract obliges you to prove output against an expectation, you need weather-normalised performance ratio reporting that an inverter portal does not produce.
- A retrofit pipeline you want to build. Consumption data is the sales asset, and the inverter portal on a system installed six years ago probably has none.
Below those three, the free portal is the correct answer and the money is better spent elsewhere. Practical behaviour worth insisting on regardless of which platform you land on is set out in our guide to how to monitor solar generation, and the direction of travel on automated fault detection is covered in why AI is the future of solar operations and maintenance. A useful starting template for the service visit itself is this annual maintenance checklist.
One New Zealand-specific note. The national grid already runs at roughly 80 to 90 percent renewable generation according to MBIE energy statistics, so a monitoring report framed around carbon avoided lands weakly here. Frame it around dollars avoided and dry-year price exposure, which is what a New Zealand customer actually worries about, and which EECA material tends to reinforce.
The Stack a New Zealand Installer Should Actually Buy
This is the prescription by business type, in New Zealand dollars. Note how few licences appear in each one, and note that two of the five shapes never buy a solar-specific product beyond the design tool.
- One-van owner-operator, 1 to 4 jobs a month. OpenSolar free for design and proposals, plus Xero Standard for the books, plus whichever inverter portal comes with the hardware. One paid licence, roughly NZ$700 to NZ$1,400 a year all in. Do not buy a CRM, do not buy monitoring, do not buy job management. Your bottleneck is lead flow, and no software on this page fixes that.
- Two-van residential installer, 8 to 20 jobs a month. Two SurgePV seats for design and proposals, plus Tradify for three users, plus Xero. Two paid licences plus accounting. Tradify publishes NZ$48 per user per month on Lite, NZ$52 on Pro and NZ$62 on Plus excluding GST, so three seats are NZ$1,730 to NZ$2,230, and the whole shape lands near NZ$6,500 to NZ$8,000 a year. This is the most common New Zealand shape and it is where the two-licence ceiling holds most firmly. Monitoring stays free with the inverter.
- Residential plus light commercial, five staff. Five SurgePV seats at NZ$10,900, plus five Tradify seats at NZ$2,880 to NZ$3,720 excluding GST, plus Xero at about NZ$1,380. Roughly NZ$15,200 to NZ$16,000 a year. Add Zoho CRM only if the commercial pipeline has passed forty live opportunities, which is later than most people think.
- Service and battery retrofit specialist. Tradify or simPRO first, because the service book is the business, plus Solar Analytics on the fleet for consumption data and cross-brand triage, plus a single SurgePV seat for the design work retrofits still need. Tradify is a published rate, Simpro is not: Simpro quotes on user count, modules and a one-off setup fee, so only the Tradify and SurgePV lines can be budgeted from published prices. The inversion matters: here the job tool is the primary purchase and the design tool is the accessory.
- Commercial and industrial EPC. SurgePV for design, proposals and plan sets, plus PVsyst where a lender or an insurer names the report format, plus simPRO for crews and job costing, plus Xero. Three paid licences. Simpro publishes no prices, so the crew and job costing line here comes from a quote rather than a rate card. This is the only New Zealand shape where a third and fourth licence is straightforwardly justified.
The pattern is the same across all five. Design and proposals is the layer worth consolidating into one licence, because splitting it costs money and lets the sold number drift from the engineered one. Job management is the second purchase and should follow the second van rather than precede it. Accounting is already bought. Monitoring is already bought. Everything else needs a specific reason, and in a market this size “the Australians have it” is not one.
Pros and Cons: Standardising on SurgePV in New Zealand
- ✓ Half-hourly self-consumption decides your quotes
- ✓ You work across several lines company areas
- ✓ You want the AS/NZS plan set from the sold design
- ✓ Battery quotes currently live in a spreadsheet
- ✗ Scheduling and invoicing are the real mess (Tradify)
- ✗ You do fewer than four jobs a month (OpenSolar)
- ✗ Seeing a mixed fleet is the problem (Solar Analytics)
- ✗ A lender names PVsyst by report format
SurgePV wins this ranking on bundled layer coverage and on modelling self-consumption at the resolution New Zealand requires. It loses on monitoring, which it does not do at all, on job scheduling and timesheets, on Xero integration, on Certificate of Compliance storage, and on New Zealand brand tenure against OpenSolar. Those are real gaps rather than marketing caveats, and in a small market they matter more than usual, because a firm here has fewer people available to work around them. Any vendor claiming to cover the whole New Zealand stack is describing a roadmap.
How Heaven Green Energy Helps
Heaven Green Energy has delivered more than 10,000 solar installations with an in-house design and engineering team, so we evaluate software as an operator rather than a reviewer. Our test for the best solar software in New Zealand is whether the number that reaches the customer survives the engineer, the lines company, the inspector and five years of retailer rate changes without moving. That test is why we rank a bundled design and proposal platform first, why we rank general business tools alongside solar ones, and why we tell most New Zealand firms to stop at two licences.
- Solar EPC services for turnkey design, supply and installation with performance guarantees.
- Commercial solar for 10 to 100 kW systems with full financial modelling.
- Industrial solar for 100 kW and above with bankable yield reporting.
- Heaven Designs solar design software resource centre for the engineering-services view of the same tools.
Neutral market context for a board paper or a finance submission comes from the International Energy Agency and IRENA country profiles.
Related Country and Global Software Guides
- Best Solar Design Software in New Zealand: 10 Ranked
- Best Solar Proposal Software NZ: Top 10 Ranked
- Best Solar Software in Australia: Top 10 Tools
- Solar Design Software 2026: 7 Tools Compared
- Best Solar Software in the UK: Top 10 Platforms
- Best Solar Design Software: The Global Ranking
Compare Other Markets and Tool Categories
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best solar software in New Zealand in 2026?
SurgePV ranks first overall at about NZ$2,180 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, covering 3D design, 8,760-hour simulation, half-hourly self-consumption modelling against retailer buyback rates, AS/NZS plan sets and proposals in one licence. OpenSolar remains the right free answer for a one-van installer. Neither does monitoring, scheduling or accounting, so Tradify, Xero and the inverter brand’s own portal each own a layer that no all-in-one platform replaces in this market.
How many software licences does a New Zealand solar installer need?
Two for most firms, which is fewer than an Australian business of the same shape needs. A bundled design and proposal platform is the first purchase, because it decides the number the customer signs. A job management tool such as Tradify is the second, and it should follow the arrival of a second van rather than precede it. Accounting is already bought because you are already on Xero, and monitoring is already bought because it came with the inverter. A third licence needs a specific reason.
How much does a New Zealand solar software stack cost per year?
A two-van residential installer commonly lands between NZ$6,500 and NZ$8,000 a year. A five-person firm covering residential and light commercial lands between NZ$15,200 and NZ$16,000. Five SurgePV seats are NZ$10,900, Tradify publishes NZ$48 to NZ$62 per user per month excluding GST so five seats are NZ$2,880 to NZ$3,720, and Xero runs NZ$420 to NZ$1,380 a year. Simpro publishes no prices at all and quotes on user count, modules and a one-off setup fee. Monitoring is usually NZ$0 because the inverter brand supplies it.
Why is a New Zealand software stack smaller than an Australian one?
Because three Australian software categories have no New Zealand equivalent. There is no Small-scale Technology Certificate scheme, so no certificate creation or audit-evidence platform is needed. There is no national feed-in tariff, so there is no statutory rate or degression calendar to encode. Export limits are set statically by each lines company rather than issued as dynamic operating envelopes, so no control or orchestration layer has to be commissioned. Copying an Australian stack into New Zealand buys three products for problems you do not have.
What does New Zealand solar software need to model that overseas tools miss?
Half-hourly self-consumption against a named retailer plan. Buyback is set by the retailer, commonly 7 to 17 cents per kWh against an import rate near 30 cents, and it can change with notice. A tool that multiplies annual generation by one blended rate overstates the value of export and understates the value of a battery. The lines company export limit also has to reach the financial model, because a capped connection changes the yield the customer actually monetises.
Which solar monitoring software should a New Zealand installer use?
Whichever one came with the inverter. Fronius Solar.web, SolarEdge Monitoring, Enphase Enlighten and Sungrow iSolarCloud are included with the hardware and are adequate for a single-brand residential fleet. Pay for a hardware-agnostic platform such as Solar Analytics only when one of three things is true: your fleet spans four brands and nobody can see it, you have sold a performance guarantee that needs weather-normalised evidence, or you want consumption data to drive a battery retrofit pipeline.
How should Certificate of Compliance records be stored?
Attached to the job in your job management tool, not in an inbox. Prescribed electrical work requires a Certificate of Compliance under the Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010, records must be kept for seven years, and WorkSafe New Zealand Energy Safety is the regulator. Tradify and simPRO both hold documents and photographs against a job, which is the cheapest workable answer. Buying a separate document management product is very hard to justify at New Zealand volumes.
Do New Zealand solar installers need a CRM?
Usually not until much later than they buy one. Below roughly forty live opportunities, a well-kept job list in Tradify tracks quotes and follow-ups perfectly well and costs nothing extra. A CRM such as Zoho earns its place once the lines company approval wait means quotes sit for weeks and follow-up stops happening reliably, or once more than one person is selling. An unconfigured CRM is a monthly charge for a database nobody opens.
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.