There is no single best solar design tool — there is the one that fits how your projects actually run. This page sets out the questions that decide it, and shows exactly what SolarSimPro hands over so you can judge it against your own work.
Most comparisons of solar design software list features side by side. That is rarely how the decision gets made in practice. What decides it is where the tool sits in your workflow — how many separate programs a project has to pass through before a client sees a proposal, and how many of those handovers can go wrong.
Broadly, the category splits three ways:
SolarSimPro is built so that one model serves all three: the layout you draw is the layout that is simulated, and the simulated yield is the yield in the financial model and in the proposal. There is no export-import step between them.
A module count is not a deliverable. Ask whether the tool exports a dimensioned, georeferenced drawing your installers can set out from — and in what coordinate system.
A single annual shading percentage tells you very little. Ask whether near shading is ray traced hour by hour, whether row-to-row shading responds to spacing changes, and whether the result feeds the yield automatically.
Estimating capital cost from a €/kWp rule of thumb breaks down on sloping ground. Ask whether the bill of materials is derived from the actual layout — table count, cable lengths, transformer rating.
Change the row spacing and see how much has to be redone by hand. In a single-model tool the module count, shading loss, yield and payback all update together.
Installation, licence dongles, IT approval and per-machine licences all have a cost that never appears on the price list.
Screenshots are not deliverables. Ask for the actual report and CAD files a project produces.
Rather than describe it, here are real outputs from real projects. These are the files themselves, not screenshots:
It is designed for the stage between first screening and the technical annex of a proposal: deciding whether a site is worth building, how much fits on it, what it will produce, what it will cost and what the return looks like — and then producing the drawings and reports that carry that decision forward.
It is not a detailed electrical design package, and it does not replace the stamped construction drawings a licensed engineer must produce. The reports state this explicitly, because a tool that overstates its scope creates risk for the person who signs the drawing.
It covers layout, ray-traced near shading, an 8,760-hour yield simulation with P50/P90, bill of materials and financial analysis in one model. For pre-feasibility and proposal work that is the whole chain. For bankable independent energy yield assessments, an independent review is still required — the reports say so explicitly.
Yes. It runs in a current browser, so there is no difference between Windows, macOS and Linux. There is nothing to install and no dongle.
Yes. Site boundaries can be imported from KML/KMZ, DXF or CSV, or drawn directly on the map. If a DXF contains elevations the layout follows them; otherwise elevations come from a digital elevation model.
A scaled DXF setting-out plan with a title block, coordinate schedules, table blocks and optional terrain analysis layers, written in a projected coordinate system. A 3D KMZ and a DAE model for external shading scenes are also produced.
Per user, monthly or annually, with two months free on annual billing. Everything in the application you buy is unlocked — no project limits, no watermarks and no gated modules.