If you are reading a PVsyst review in 2026, you are almost certainly deciding between two very different things: buying a specialist simulation seat, or buying a design workflow. PVsyst is emphatically the first. It has been in continuous development since 1992, when André Mermoud began building it at the University of Geneva, and PVsyst SA has operated out of Satigny near Geneva since 2011. Version 8.0 shipped in November 2024 and version 8.1.0 followed in April 2026. At CHF 700 per user per year for the Professional licence, it is also the cheapest serious tool in the category by a wide margin. Our engineering team at Heaven Green Energy has run PVsyst against 200 MW of built projects, and this review is the honest version: what it wins at, where it stops, and who should buy something else.
Direct answer. PVsyst is the reference PV simulation engine and still the report lenders and independent engineers ask for by name. It costs CHF 700 per user per year (roughly €745 or US$865) for the Professional licence, Windows only. It scores 34 out of 50 on our review bench. Buy it if your deliverable is a bankable yield study. It produces no customer proposal, so it is a specialist seat, not a workflow.
This review scores PVsyst on five published axes, states the pricing plainly, and names the reader who should buy PVsyst rather than a cloud platform. That reader exists and there are a lot of them.
What PVsyst Is
PVsyst is a Windows desktop application that simulates the energy output of a photovoltaic system over a full year at hourly resolution, and reports the result as a documented chain of losses from incident irradiance to energy injected into the grid.
It is not a design tool in the drawing sense, and it is not a sales tool at all. You define a meteorological source, a system (modules, inverters, wiring), a 3D shading scene, and a set of loss parameters. PVsyst returns yield, performance ratio, and a loss diagram. That output is the input to somebody else’s decision: a bank’s, an independent engineer’s, an offtaker’s.
The company is small and the software is old in the way that matters. Development started in 1992 and the physics models have been revised, published, argued over in the vendor forum, and revised again for three decades. Meteorological data comes from Meteonorm 8.2, PVGIS, NASA-SSE and NREL NSRDB among others, so the source of your irradiance is a stated, auditable choice rather than a black box. Version 8 added PVsystCLI, a command line interface for batch runs, which matters if you are sweeping hundreds of layout variants.
Four editions exist. Professional at CHF 700 per year is the only one licensed for commercial work. Training and Research is CHF 560, Education is CHF 420, and a Classroom or Student licence is CHF 25, all of which stamp a watermark on outputs. Group discounts run 5 to 20 percent by seat count. If you are comparing that to a cloud platform headline, read our PVsyst price breakdown first, because the licence is not the cost that hurts.
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 5-Axis Review Bench
We score every tool on the same five axes, published so the score can be argued with. This is the Heaven Green 5-Axis Review Bench, and it is the framework we use internally before any licence renewal.
| Axis | What it measures | PVsyst score |
|---|---|---|
| Design and simulation depth | Shading model, loss tree, meteo sources, bifacial, trackers, storage | 10 / 10 |
| Compliance and documentation output | Report a third party will accept, SLD, BOQ, standards labelling | 10 / 10 |
| Proposal and sales workflow | Branded customer output, e-sign, CRM handoff, finance modelling | 1 / 10 |
| Price against value | Total annual cost for the job actually being done | 8 / 10 |
| Support and onboarding | Time to first competent output, documentation, training, response | 5 / 10 |
| Total | 34 / 50 |
The two tens are not generous. On simulation depth, PVsyst separates near shading from the far horizon, which most tools collapse into one factor. Near shading is computed from a 3D scene. The distant horizon is imported as a profile from Meteonorm or PVGIS and applied independently. That separation is why a PVsyst number survives audit.
It goes further on electrical loss. Per the PVsyst documentation, shading on the beam component produces two distinct losses: an irradiance deficit on the cells, and an electrical mismatch loss from series modules and parallel strings responding differently. The Module Layout tool computes the second one from the actual position of every module in the 3D scene. Diffuse irradiance gets a constant shading factor calculated once, because diffuse arrives from the whole sky and does not create meaningful mismatch. That is a physically defensible distinction, and it is precisely the distinction cheap shading tools skip.
The 1 out of 10 on proposal workflow is also not harsh. As of version 8.1.0, we could find no proposal generator in the product and none is listed in the vendor’s feature documentation: no branded PDF, no client-facing web link, no e-signature, no CRM. That reads as a design decision rather than an oversight.
Key takeaway. PVsyst is the only tool on our bench that scores a perfect 10 on both simulation depth and documentation output, and the only one that scores a 1 on sales workflow. It is a specialist instrument. Judging it as a workflow platform misses what it is for.
Pricing
PVsyst publishes its prices, which is rarer in this category than it should be. Professional is CHF 700 per user per year. Group discounts of 5 to 20 percent apply by licence quantity.
| Edition | Price per user per year | Commercial use | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional | CHF 700 | Yes | Full features, includes access to PVsyst 7 |
| Training / Research | CHF 560 | No | Watermarked output |
| Education | CHF 420 | No | Watermarked output |
| Classroom / Student | CHF 25 | No | Watermarked output |
Currency note: CHF 700 is roughly €745 or US$865 at mid-2026 rates, so any source quoting PVsyst at a flat €500 is either quoting an older price step or converting loosely. We have corrected our own older figure accordingly.
The honest cost problem is not the licence. It is everything that has to sit around it. As of the 8.1.0 release, the vendor’s own feature documentation lists no customer proposal output, no single-line diagram drafted to a utility’s labelling convention, and no bill of quantities generator. Teams therefore buy a proposal tool, a CAD seat, and usually a 3D modelling source as well. Our solar design software pricing comparison puts real numbers on that stack. The licence is the cheapest thing in the room and the total is not.
⚠️ Watch out
There is one more cost nobody quotes: the Windows requirement. PVsyst runs on Windows 8, 10 and 11 only. A Mac-based design team has to buy a virtual machine, a Parallels licence, or a second machine per engineer before the software runs at all.
What PVsyst Does Best
Three things, and they are not small.
It is the document other people accept. This is the moat, and no amount of feature parity has dented it. When an independent engineer reviews a project, when a lender sizes debt, when an offtaker challenges a P90, the artefact that ends the argument is a PVsyst report. Not a report “equivalent to PVsyst”. The report. Heaven Designs, our engineering arm, maintains a whole PVsyst resource centre for exactly this reason, and their guide on what makes a PVsyst report bankable exists because clients ask for the format by name.
The loss diagram is legible. PVsyst outputs a waterfall from global horizontal irradiance down to energy injected, with every deduction labelled: horizon, near shading irradiance, electrical shading mismatch, incidence angle modifier, soiling, irradiance level, temperature, module quality, mismatch, ohmic wiring, inverter loss, night consumption. An experienced reviewer can look at that diagram and tell you within thirty seconds whether the model is honest. Heaven Designs has a full walkthrough on how to read a PVsyst loss diagram, and the reason such a guide is possible is that PVsyst shows its working.
The modelling scope is genuinely wide. Unlimited orientations in a single simulation, fixed tilt combined with trackers in one run, bifacial gain, single and dual axis tracking, grid storage and self-consumption strategies, standalone and pumping systems, and an economic module producing net present value, levelised cost of energy and return on investment. Very few tools cover both a 3 kW off-grid pump and a 300 MW tracker plant with the same physics.
Where PVsyst Falls Short
It stops before the deliverable most companies actually sell. A residential or small commercial installer sells a signed contract, not a yield study. PVsyst gets you to a number and hands you nothing you can put in front of a customer. Every proposal, every branded PDF, every financing table is another tool.
The interface is from a different era. Nested modal dialogs, dense parameter panels, terminology that assumes you already know the physics. This is defensible for a research instrument and painful for a production team. Realistically, an engineer needs weeks of supervised work before their PVsyst output should be trusted, and months before it should go to a lender unreviewed. That is the largest hidden cost of ownership and it is why the support and onboarding axis scores 5.
Windows only, desktop only, single user. No browser access, no real time collaboration, no shared project state. Two engineers on the same project pass .PRJ files around. Version control is a folder naming convention and a prayer.
The 3D scene is work. Building a shading scene in PVsyst means constructing it, by hand, from primitives. There is no satellite import, no address-to-roof automation, no drone mesh ingestion. For a utility site with clean rows that is fine. For a cluttered urban rooftop with six chimneys, a stair block and a neighbouring building, it is an hour of modelling that a cloud tool does in a minute.
- ✓ The report format lenders and independent engineers request by name
- ✓ Near shading and far horizon modelled separately, not merged
- ✓ Electrical shading mismatch computed from real module positions
- ✓ Published, auditable loss tree from GHI to grid injection
- ✓ CHF 700 per year, published, with volume discounts
- ✓ Batch simulation through PVsystCLI since version 8
- ✗ Zero customer-facing proposal output
- ✗ No single-line diagram or bill of quantities generation
- ✗ Windows only; no Mac, no browser, no mobile
- ✗ No collaboration or shared project state
- ✗ 3D shading scenes built by hand from primitives
- ✗ Weeks to competence, months to unsupervised lender output
Get a design workflow audit. Tell us what you ship each month and which tools you pay for. Our engineers will map the stack and show you where the duplicate spend is, at no cost. Talk to our team.
Who Should Buy PVsyst
This is the section that matters, so here it is without hedging. Buy PVsyst if your deliverable is a number somebody else will audit.
- Independent engineers and technical advisors. Your entire product is a third party trusting your yield estimate. There is no substitute and there is no argument. Buy the Professional licence.
- Utility-scale developers raising project finance. The lender’s technical advisor will run PVsyst. If you have not run it yourself first, you are negotiating blind on a P90 you did not model.
- C&I EPCs signing performance guarantees. If your contract carries a generation warranty with a penalty attached, you want the loss tree that the arbitrator will recognise. Our own guide to P50, P90 and P99 yield reports exists because these numbers get litigated.
- Research groups and universities. The Education and Classroom tiers at CHF 420 and CHF 25 are close to free, and the physics documentation is the best teaching material in the field.
- Anyone modelling an unusual topology. Mixed tracker and fixed-tilt in a single run, agrivoltaic geometry, pumping systems, off-grid with storage strategies. The scope is wider than any cloud tool’s.
For these five readers, PVsyst beats SurgePV, and we will say so on our own site.
💡 Fast tip
Buy one PVsyst seat for the engineer who signs off yield, not one per designer. Group discounts start at 5 percent, but most teams over-buy seats they open twice a year.
Who Should Not
Residential installers. You need an address, a roof, a layout, a price and a signature, in one sitting, ideally on a laptop at the customer’s kitchen table. PVsyst does none of that. Look at a cloud design and proposal platform instead, and start with our best solar design software ranking.
Small commercial teams under 500 kW per project. The engineering rigour PVsyst offers exceeds what a 200 kW rooftop actually requires, and the workflow cost is real. A tool that produces a single-line diagram, a bill of quantities and a branded proposal from the same model will ship more projects per engineer.
Mac-first design teams. Adding a virtual machine per engineer to run one application is a real annual cost and a real support burden.
Anyone whose bottleneck is proposal turnaround, not yield accuracy. If your close rate is limited by how long it takes to get a quote out, buying a better simulator solves nothing. Our solar proposal software guide is the right starting point.
PVsyst vs SurgePV
Disclosure, stated plainly: SurgePV is a sister product of Heaven Green Energy, and we run it on our own EPC projects. That is first-party operating experience and also a commercial interest. Read the table with both facts in view.
| Axis | PVsyst | SurgePV | Honest verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simulation depth | 10 / 10. Separate near and far shading, electrical mismatch from module positions, 30+ years of model revision | 8 / 10. 8,760-hour module-level simulation, P50/P75/P90, bifacial | PVsyst wins. Not close on exotic topologies |
| Lender acceptance | The format most often named by reviewers in our experience | Produces a yield report in the format C&I reviewers typically ask for; in our experience it is not the document a project-finance lender names | PVsyst wins |
| Documentation output | 10 / 10 loss tree; no SLD, no BOQ | Auto single-line diagram, BOQ, DXF/DWG export | Split. PVsyst for the yield study, SurgePV for the drawing set |
| 3D scene creation | Manual, from primitives | AI 3D roof from a satellite address | SurgePV wins on rooftop, ties on clean ground-mount |
| Proposal workflow | None | White-label proposals in 9 languages, e-signature | SurgePV wins |
| Platform | Windows desktop, single user | Browser, multi-user, shared project state | SurgePV wins |
| Price | CHF 700 per user per year | $1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan | PVsyst is cheaper per seat. Compare stacks, not seats |
| Brand recognition | Three decades of it | Launched 2025, thin recognition, has to be explained to reviewers | PVsyst wins |
| Drone and as-built capture | None | None | Neither. Buy a capture tool if you need this |
| Structural stamping | None | None | Neither. This is an engineering service, not software |
| Racking database | Not applicable | Thinner than its 70,000+ module and 12,000+ inverter databases | Named weakness |
SurgePV’s own weaknesses are in that table on purpose. It launched in 2025, so brand recognition is thin and a bank’s technical advisor may not know the name. It does not do drone capture. It does not stamp structural drawings. Its racking database is the weakest of its three component libraries. Any comparison that hid those would not be worth reading.
Verdict. These two tools are not competing for the same purchase. PVsyst is a simulation instrument bought per specialist. SurgePV is a workflow bought per designer. A serious C&I or utility firm frequently runs both: SurgePV for design, layout, drawings and proposals, PVsyst for the one document the lender names. If you can only buy one, the deciding question is whether your revenue depends on a signature or on an audit.
How Heaven Green Energy Uses This In Practice
We run both, and the split is not sentimental.
Across our 200 MW of built capacity, PVsyst is opened for roughly one project in eight. Those are the ones with debt attached, a performance guarantee in the contract, or a client whose technical advisor asked for the format. For those, our engineers build the 3D scene by hand, use the Module Layout tool for the electrical mismatch number, and issue the standard PVsyst PDF. On our own projects at that end of the market we have not had another format accepted, so we have stopped trying to argue otherwise.
The other seven projects in eight never touch it. A 60 kW factory rooftop in Morbi or a 12 kW residential system in Ahmedabad needs a layout, a shading check, a single-line diagram, a bill of quantities and a proposal the customer can read. Running PVsyst for that is an hour of modelling to produce a document the customer cannot use. We design those in SurgePV, and where the electrical detail needs a second opinion we check string sizing against the free Qbits Energy string-sizing calculator before the design goes to procurement.
One field observation worth passing on. On a 2.4 MW ground-mount job, the PVsyst near-shading electrical loss came out 1.9 percentage points higher than our cloud model’s estimate, because the row spacing at the site’s latitude put the bottom cell string of the front row in shadow for longer than the simplified model assumed. That is the gap PVsyst is paid to catch. We reworked the inter-row pitch and recovered most of it. If you want the physics behind that, our solar shading analysis software guide covers the model differences in detail.
Where our EPC team helps directly:
- Industrial Solar EPC: 100 kW and above, turnkey, with performance guarantees backed by modelled yield.
- Commercial Solar: 10 to 100 kW rooftop with net metering and financial modelling handled.
- Ground Mount and Solar Parks: land-based projects where the shading geometry actually decides the return.
- Solar Calculator: a 60 second sizing and savings estimate before any of the above.
If you want to see how PVsyst stacks against the cloud tools on a like-for-like basis, our PVsyst alternative guide ranks the replacements, the HelioScope vs PVsyst comparison covers the closest C&I contender, and the solar design software pillar frames the whole category. Sibling reviews in this series cover Aurora Solar, RatedPower and Scanifly.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does PVsyst cost in 2026?
The Professional licence is CHF 700 per user per year, published by PVsyst SA. That is roughly €745 or US$865 at mid-2026 rates. Training and Research is CHF 560, Education CHF 420, and a Classroom or Student licence CHF 25, but all three watermark their output and are not licensed for commercial work. Group discounts run from 5 to 20 percent depending on the number of seats. The licence is the cheapest part of running PVsyst; the surrounding tools cost more.
Is PVsyst still the industry standard for bankable yield reports?
On the projects we see, yes, and we are not aware of anything that has displaced it in 2026. Lenders, independent engineers and technical advisors in our experience ask for a PVsyst report by name rather than for an equivalent. The reason is auditability: the loss diagram shows every deduction from global horizontal irradiance to grid injection, near shading and far horizon are modelled separately, and the electrical mismatch loss is computed from actual module positions. A reviewer can check the working. That is a genuine moat and we have not seen a cloud platform break it.
Does PVsyst run on Mac?
No. PVsyst supports Windows 8, 10 and 11 only. Mac users run it through Parallels, VMware Fusion, Boot Camp on older Intel hardware, or a Windows virtual machine in the cloud. Each of those adds cost and a support burden, and 3D scene manipulation is noticeably slower in a virtual machine. For a Mac-first design team this is a real barrier and one of the more common reasons teams look at browser-based tools instead.
Does PVsyst generate customer proposals?
No. PVsyst produces an engineer-facing PDF report intended for technical review and lender submission. There is no branded proposal template, no interactive web proposal, no e-signature, no customer-facing financial summary and no CRM handoff. Teams that need those pair PVsyst with a separate proposal platform, or move design work to a tool that bundles both. On our bench this is the single largest structural gap in the product, and it is consistent with how the vendor positions PVsyst as an engineering instrument.
How long does it take to learn PVsyst properly?
Plan on weeks, not days. A capable electrical engineer can produce a plausible simulation in an afternoon. Producing one that survives an independent engineer’s review takes considerably longer, because the defaults for soiling, module quality, mismatch, and degradation all need justification and the 3D shading scene has to be built correctly. Our internal expectation is that a new engineer’s PVsyst output is reviewed by a senior for at least three months before it goes out unsupervised.
What is the difference between near shading and far horizon in PVsyst?
Near shading comes from objects in the 3D scene: adjacent rows, chimneys, trees, parapets, neighbouring buildings. PVsyst computes it hour by hour from geometry and splits the result into an irradiance loss and an electrical mismatch loss. The far horizon is the distant skyline, imported as an elevation profile from Meteonorm or PVGIS and applied as a separate factor. Most simpler tools merge the two into one shading percentage, which hides where the loss is actually coming from.
Is PVsyst worth it for residential solar?
Rarely. A 3 to 10 kW rooftop system does not carry project finance, does not usually carry a generation penalty, and the customer cannot read a PVsyst report. The modelling effort per project is high because the 3D scene is hand-built, and the output does not move the sale forward. Residential installers are better served by a cloud tool that goes from a satellite address to a branded proposal in one session. Keep PVsyst for the jobs where a third party will audit the number.
Can PVsyst and a cloud design tool be used together?
Yes, and this is what most serious C&I firms actually do. The cloud tool handles the address, the 3D roof, the layout, the single-line diagram, the bill of quantities and the customer proposal. PVsyst is opened only for the projects that need a lender-grade yield study, typically anything with debt, a performance guarantee or an independent engineer attached. Running both costs less than the delay caused by forcing either tool to do the other’s job.
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