Almost every Sunbase review on the internet makes the same category error. It benchmarks Sunbase against Aurora, HelioScope or PVsyst, marks it down for shallow shading analysis, and concludes it is a weak design tool. That is true and it is beside the point. Sunbase Data is a customer relationship management and field sales platform built for solar and contracting businesses, with proposal generation attached as one module among several. Judging it as a design engine is like judging a delivery van on lap times. This review evaluates it as what it is, scores it on the same five axes we use for every tool on this site, and states clearly which axes it is not trying to win. Pricing starts at a published $59 per user per month and is otherwise quote based, which is itself one of the more significant things a buyer needs to know.
Direct answer. Sunbase is a solar CRM and field sales platform, not a design engine. Its strength is the door to door motion: territory management, GPS rep tracking, in-field quoting and e-signature inside one visit. Pricing starts at $59 per user per month and is otherwise custom quoted. It scores 27 of 50 on our bench, with two axes scored low because it does not compete on them.
If you arrived here comparing sales platforms rather than design tools, the ranked field is in our solar proposal software guide and the American view sits in best solar proposal software in USA. What follows is the honest evaluation of Sunbase itself: what it genuinely does better than a design-first platform, where it stops, and who should sign the contract.
What Sunbase Is
Sunbase Data is a modular business management platform aimed at solar installers, roofing contractors and home services companies. You do not buy a single product. You assemble one from modules: contractor CRM and sales management, proposal and estimation, project management, inventory and asset management, financial tools, and reporting dashboards. That modularity is the design principle and it explains most of the tool’s behaviour, including the pricing.
The origin shows in the feature set. Sunbase was built around the field sales motion that dominates residential solar in North America: canvassers knock a territory, setters book appointments, closers sit at the kitchen table. So the platform carries territory assignment, GPS based representative tracking, route reporting, lead capture from the doorstep and pipeline stages that map to setter and closer handoffs rather than to a generic sales funnel. A rep can pull up a property, produce a quote from a pre configured product catalogue, and get a digital contract signed on a tablet without leaving the driveway.
Proposal and design capability exists inside that flow. Sunbase can produce a layout, size the system, model the finance and generate an interactive white label web proposal. It is competent at this in the way a sales tool is competent: fast, presentable, and calibrated to close a residential customer. It is not calibrated to survive an engineering review, and Sunbase does not claim otherwise. The company positions the platform as a replacement for a stack of separate subscriptions, which is a fair description of its actual value.
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, And Why Two Axes Do Not Apply
We score every tool on this site out of 50 using the Heaven Green 5-Axis Review Bench. The axes are fixed so scores stay comparable across pages. But a fixed bench applied to a CRM produces a misleading number unless the mismatch is stated, so it is stated here rather than hidden.
- Design and simulation depth. Roof accuracy, and whether yield is a physical simulation or an estimate.
- Compliance and documentation output. Single line diagram, bill of quantities, permit plan set, lender grade report.
- Proposal and sales workflow. Branded document, finance math, e-signature, pipeline, CRM.
- Price against value. What you pay against what you get, including what you still have to buy.
- Support and onboarding. Documentation, training, implementation, time to productivity.
Axes 1 and 2 are not contests Sunbase entered. It is a sales platform, and it scores where a sales platform scores.
| Axis | Score | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Design and simulation depth | 3 / 10 | Layout and sizing sufficient for a residential close. No hour by hour module level simulation. Scored low because Sunbase does not compete here, not because it fails at its own job |
| Compliance and documentation | 3 / 10 | No SLD, permit plan set or probabilistic yield report described in its published material as of 2 August 2026. Again, out of scope by design |
| Proposal and sales workflow | 9 / 10 | The reason to buy it. Canvassing, territory, GPS tracking, in-field quoting, digital contracts, e-signature, pipeline built for setter and closer teams |
| Price against value | 5 / 10 | From $59 per user per month, but tiers are unpublished and most deals are quoted, which makes budgeting and comparison hard |
| Support and onboarding | 7 / 10 | Implementation is hands on and modular configuration takes real setup time, which cuts both ways |
| Total | 27 / 50 | Understates it for a sales manager. Overstates it for anyone shopping for a design engine |
Verdict. Twenty seven out of fifty is not a verdict on Sunbase, it is a verdict on the fit between Sunbase and a bench built for design tools. Read axis 3 on its own. If your problem is that eleven reps are working a territory out of a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group, Sunbase solves that problem and a design platform does not.
Pricing
Sunbase publishes one number and no tiers. The company states that plans start from $59 per user per month, with pricing customised to the deployment. There is no published package table, no feature grid by tier and no self serve checkout. To get a real number you request a quote, and the quote is shaped by user count, which industry workflow you run, which modules you select, and how much implementation and training you need.
Independent listings put real world solar deployments in a wider band than the $59 entry point suggests, with figures in the range of roughly $100 to $300 per user per month reported for full solar CRM configurations. Treat that as an industry observed range rather than a confirmed list price, because Sunbase does not publish it and we could not verify it against the vendor.
⚠️ Watch out
Quote based pricing is not automatically bad, but it changes how you buy. Get the modules, the seat count, the implementation fee and the renewal escalator in writing before signing, and ask specifically what happens to the price when you add ten seats in a growth month.
The other cost is the design licence you keep. We found no SLD, engineering bill of quantities or probabilistic yield report described anywhere in Sunbase’s published product material as of 2 August 2026, so an installer doing anything beyond straightforward residential is paying for a design platform alongside it. Our solar design software pricing guide sets out what that second line item costs.
What Sunbase Does Best
Its best feature is the one that never appears in a software comparison table: it understands that solar sales in a door knocking market is a logistics problem before it is a software problem.
Territory and canvassing management. Sunbase assigns territories, prevents overlap between setters and closers, tracks reps by GPS and reports route results in real time. A sales manager running eleven reps across three suburbs cares about this more than about any shading algorithm. None of the design platforms on our bench carries a territory module, and the generic CRMs we have used were not built around a map, which shows.
Knock to signature in one visit. The proposal module pulls pricing from a pre configured product catalogue, so a rep can generate a quote at the door with the company’s real margins baked in rather than inventing numbers. The digital contract and e-signature complete on the same tablet. Compressing knock, demo, quote and sign into a single appointment is worth more to a residential sales organisation than a few percent of yield accuracy.
One system for the post sale mess. Solar contracting dies in the handoff from sales to operations. Sunbase carries the job into project management, inventory and financial tracking, so the site survey, the permit status, the panel allocation and the payment schedule live where the deal was closed. That continuity is the strongest argument for buying a modular platform rather than three good point tools.
Solar specificity. The CRM was built for solar and contracting field operations rather than adapted from a generic sales tool afterwards. The difference shows in small places: pipeline stages that match a solar job, catalogue structures that understand panels and inverters, roles that match a canvassing organisation.
Ready to talk to an EPC rather than buy software? Our engineers survey your site within 24 hours and send a costed proposal in 48. Request a callback or call +91 63904 05060.
Where Sunbase Falls Short
Four real limitations, none of them strawmen.
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1
Engineering depth stops at the residential close. Sizing and layout are sufficient to sell a rooftop system. They are not an hour by hour, module level simulation, so the yield figure in a Sunbase proposal is a sales estimate and should be treated as one on any commercial job.
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2
No documentation chain we could find. Its published material as of 2 August 2026 describes no single line diagram, permit plan set, or bill of quantities an installer can hand to procurement. On that reading, a Sunbase deployment implies a second design tool for anything that needs a drawing.
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3
Pricing opacity. An unpublished price list means you cannot budget before a sales call, cannot compare like for like against a published competitor, and cannot easily tell whether your renewal is fair.
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4
Modularity has a setup cost. Assembling a platform from six modules means configuration decisions, catalogue building and training before anyone sells anything. Budget weeks, not an afternoon, and put an internal owner on it.
📘 Regulation note
In India, any residential subsidy proposal has to reconcile against the current PM Surya Ghar structure published by MNRE, and [net metering](/glossary/net-metering) approval runs through the state [DISCOM](/glossary/discom). A CRM that quotes a subsidy figure it cannot verify against the scheme creates a customer dispute later, so keep the subsidy math in a tool that tracks the scheme.
Who Should Buy Sunbase
The buyer is a sales leader, and identifying that correctly is most of the purchase decision.
- ✓ You run a canvassing team with setters and closers
- ✓ Lead volume is above roughly 100 a month and a spreadsheet has stopped working
- ✓ Your pipeline is residential and the close happens in the home
- ✓ You want sales, projects and inventory in one system
- ✓ You already own, and intend to keep, a design tool
- ✗ You are shopping for a design and simulation engine
- ✗ Your work is commercial, industrial or utility scale
- ✗ You need SLDs and permit sets from the same file
- ✗ Lenders ask you for P90 yield
- ✗ You need a published price before a sales call
The reader for whom Sunbase beats SurgePV outright is the residential solar sales organisation with a field team, where the bottleneck is rep management rather than engineering. If you have twenty canvassers, three closers and a design function you already outsource, Sunbase addresses your actual constraint and SurgePV does not. Buying a design platform to solve a territory management problem is a common and expensive mistake.
Who Should Not
Anyone whose next hire is an engineer rather than a rep should not start with Sunbase.
If your pipeline is moving into commercial rooftops above 100 kW, the binding constraint changes from lead throughput to defensible engineering. The customer’s consultant will ask for the shading assumption, the soiling loss and the performance ratio, and a sales estimate does not answer those questions. At that point you need a design platform first and a CRM second, and our commercial solar design software guide covers the field.
The second group is any installer that only needs a proposal, not a sales organisation. If four people run your whole company and everyone knows every lead, a modular CRM with a configuration project attached is heavier than the problem. A proposal tool with a light pipeline is enough. The ranked options are in solar proposal software and, for India specifically, best solar proposal software in India.
Sunbase vs SurgePV
Disclosure, stated once and plainly. Heaven Green Energy runs SurgePV on its own EPC projects, and SurgePV is a sister product inside the Heaven Group. That gives us first hand operating knowledge and it also gives us a commercial interest. Both facts belong on the page. SurgePV’s own weaknesses are in the table, not in a footnote.
| Axis | Sunbase | SurgePV |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Solar and contractor CRM with proposals | Solar design platform with proposals |
| Pricing | From $59 per user per month, tiers unpublished, quote based | $1,299 per user per year, 5-User Team plan, published |
| Canvassing and territory | ✓ GPS rep tracking, territory assignment | ✗ no canvassing or territory module |
| Pipeline and CRM | ✓ built for setter and closer teams | ✗ pairs with an external CRM |
| Shading and yield | Sales grade estimate | 8,760-hour module level simulation with P50, P75, P90 |
| Single line diagram | ✗ | ✓ auto generated |
| Bill of quantities | Product catalogue for quoting | ✓ full exportable BOQ |
| Drone or LiDAR capture | ✗ | ✗ neither tool captures site data itself |
| Structural stamping | ✗ | ✗ SurgePV does not stamp drawings |
| Racking database | Not applicable | Thinner than its module and inverter databases |
| Brand recognition | Established across solar, roofing and home services | Thin, launched 2025, limited reference base |
| Post sale operations | ✓ projects, inventory, finance modules | Partial, design and proposal focused |
SurgePV’s own proposal output and its design workflow are described on its solar proposals and solar designing pages, which is the fairest way to check the claims in that table against the vendor rather than against us.
These two tools are complements far more often than they are competitors. The genuinely common failure is buying one and expecting it to do the other’s job. A residential sales organisation with a commercial pipeline forming needs both, and the sequencing question, which one first, depends entirely on whether you are currently losing deals to slow follow up or to weak engineering.
How Heaven Green Energy Uses This In Practice
Our own split is the same one this review recommends. Design, simulation, SLDs and BOQs run through SurgePV. Lead capture, follow up and the sales pipeline run through a CRM, and on the Indian residential side that means QuickEstimate’s proposal generator and its pipeline tooling rather than Sunbase, largely because the PM Surya Ghar subsidy math and Indian DISCOM workflows are built in.
The lesson that transfers regardless of vendor is about which number reaches the customer. In one 60 kW commercial job in Morbi the sales estimate and the simulated yield differed by enough to change the payback story materially once real shading from an adjacent shed was modelled. The proposal that went out carried the simulated number. A CRM proposal is the right document to close a homeowner and the wrong document to sign a commercial customer, and the discipline is knowing which one you are in.
Where drawings have to be stamped or a structure checked before a commercial roof is loaded, we route the work to Heaven Designs structural and civil engineering, because neither a CRM nor a design platform substitutes for a stamped calculation.
For readers who are here as solar buyers rather than software buyers:
- Residential Solar: 1 to 10 kW rooftop with PM Surya Ghar subsidy handled for you.
- Commercial Solar: 10 to 100 kW with ROI and accelerated depreciation modelling.
- Solar EPC: turnkey delivery with performance guarantees.
- Solar Calculator: subsidy and 25 year savings in 60 seconds.
Market context on solar sales technology and installer consolidation is tracked by Mercom India and pv magazine, and global installed capacity benchmarks come from the International Energy Agency and IRENA.
Related Software Reviews
Same five axis bench, applied consistently.
Category level guides: the solar design software pillar and the best solar design software ranking.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Sunbase cost?
Sunbase states that plans start from $59 per user per month, but publishes no tier table and no feature grid, so every real deployment is custom quoted. The quote depends on seat count, the industry workflow you run, which of the six modules you select, and implementation and training scope. Independent listings report full solar CRM configurations landing considerably higher, in a roughly $100 to $300 per user per month range, which we treat as an industry observed estimate rather than a confirmed vendor price.
Is Sunbase a design tool or a CRM?
It is a CRM and field sales platform first. Proposal and layout generation exist as a module, and they are good enough to produce a persuasive residential proposal, but the platform’s centre of gravity is lead management, canvassing, territory control, digital contracts and post sale project tracking. Buying it expecting a design and simulation engine is the most common mistake reviewers and buyers make with this product.
Can Sunbase produce a single line diagram or permit set?
Not that we can find. Sunbase’s published product material as of 2 August 2026 describes no single line diagram, permit plan set or engineering bill of quantities, and the company does not position the tool as producing them. Any installer submitting permit applications or handing drawings to an electrical contractor needs a design platform alongside it. For straightforward residential work in markets where the electrical contractor produces the drawings, this matters less than it does for commercial submissions.
Does Sunbase do shading analysis?
Only at the level a sales proposal needs. We found no hour by hour, module level simulation and no P50, P75 or P90 output described in its published material as of 2 August 2026, so the yield figure should be treated as a sales estimate. This is not a defect in a CRM, it is the scope of one. If your customer or a lender will interrogate the yield, produce that number in a simulation platform and carry it into the Sunbase proposal.
Who is Sunbase actually built for?
A residential solar or contracting business running a field sales organisation: canvassers working assigned territories, setters booking appointments, closers signing in the home, followed by an operations team that needs the job to survive the handoff. If that describes your company and your bottleneck is rep management rather than engineering, Sunbase is aimed squarely at you and a design platform is not.
What is the main alternative to Sunbase?
It depends which half you want. For solar CRM and field sales the comparison set includes purpose built solar CRMs and the sales modules inside proposal platforms. For proposal generation with real engineering behind the number, compare design first platforms instead. Our solar proposal software guide ranks the field, and the best solar proposal software in USA page covers the American market where door to door selling is heaviest.
Is Sunbase suitable for commercial and industrial solar?
Not on its own. Commercial buyers and their consultants interrogate the shading assumption, the soiling loss, the performance ratio and the probabilistic yield, and a sales grade estimate does not answer them. Sunbase can still run the pipeline and the post sale project tracking on a commercial job, but the engineering and the customer facing yield number have to come from a simulation platform.
How long does Sunbase take to implement?
Longer than a single seat proposal tool, because you are configuring a modular platform rather than switching one on. Product catalogues, pricing rules, territories, pipeline stages, user roles and reporting all need setting up before the first rep sells anything. Plan for weeks rather than days, assign an internal owner, and treat the implementation scope as part of the price you negotiate.
Stop paying for four tools. Design it all in one.
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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.