OpenSolar
Free, end-to-end solar design, sales and project management software for solar professionals.
By OpenSolar · 4.0/5 Value-Position score (estimate)
Positioning guardrails
Best for
- Residential and small commercial solar installers designing and quoting systems
- Solar sales teams that need fast, accurate proposals plus a built-in CRM
- Installers managing projects end to end, from design through to commissioning
- Small solar businesses that cannot justify per-seat design software licences
Ideal size: 5–200 people · Small to mid-size solar installer or sales organisation scaling without licence fees
Not for
- General contractors on non-solar building projects
- Utility-scale developers needing asset management, SCADA or grid modelling
- Firms requiring on-premise deployment or deep custom ERP integration
Value metrics scorecard
Time-to-Value
1–2 weeks (self-serve)
~14 days to first production value
Total Cost of Ownership
On request
Free of charge for solar professionals, with no licence fee. Optional paid services and add-ons are referenced (e.g. OpenSolar CashFlow payments).
Implementation Friction
1/5
Engineering + admin effort required
Value-Position score
out of 5 · model estimate
Full cost breakdown
Mandatory implementation fee
None
Seat tiers
Free accounts for solar professionals; no published seat tiers or minimums
Add-on costs
- OpenSolar CashFlow (payments) — card or transaction fees may apply; pricing not published
Company & support
Who is behind OpenSolar, and how your team gets help once it is live.
Company
- Founded
- 2017 · 9 yrs in business
- Headquarters
- Not recorded
How you get support
- PhoneNot listed
- EmailNot listed
- Live chatNot listed
- Support portal / ticketsAll plans
- Community forumNot listed
- Help centre / docsAll plans
- Dedicated account managerNot listed
- In person / on-siteNot listed
- Hours
- 24/7
- Response time
- Not stated
Vendor states free accounts get dedicated 24/7 ticket-based support, plus help-center articles and videos and live regional training webinars.
“Not listed” means the vendor’s public pages don’t mention that channel, not that it is unavailable. Ask about it during evaluation.
Market position
Where OpenSolar sits against its closest alternatives. Pick any two of cost, speed, friction and buyer score, and up to 9 companies to compare.
Quadrant view
Typical annual cost × Time-to-value
The lines cross at the median of the solutions shown, so about half sit on each side of each line.
Companies on the chart 6 / 10
- OpenSolar
- Workiz
- Siteline
- Billd
- AutogenAI
- Buildr
Add or change companies
Up to 10 companies including OpenSolar. Listed closest first.
Stack fit signal
Compatibility with standard B2B ecosystems.
No supported MCP path today, so it cannot be driven from an AI client.
AI & MCP readiness
What OpenSolar ships in AI, and what it asks of your ecosystem.
AI features shipped
The only explicitly documented AI feature is an AI chat in the Help Center that answers questions from OpenSolar's articles and videos. The About page calls the platform 'AI-powered' but names no model, training practice or governance detail.
Your data & models
- Trains on your data
- Not recorded — ask the vendor
- Runs on
- Not recorded
- AI pricing
- Not recorded
In your ecosystem
- AI connection
- Not supported
- Model key
- Not recorded
- AI usage audit
- Not recorded
Compliance attestations
* IAPP AIGP certifies individuals, not products. It means named staff hold the credential — not that the platform does.
Bottom line
OpenSolar is a free, cloud-based platform for solar professionals: design systems, build proposals, manage customers and run projects end to end. Founded in 2017 and used by 28,000+ active solar pros across 185+ countries, it replaces paid solar design and sales licences with no-cost SaaS on AWS, backed by training webinars and 24/7 ticket support. Best for residential and commercial solar installers and sales teams rather than non-solar field service or utility-scale asset management.
Frequently asked questions
Is OpenSolar really free, and where is the catch?
The vendor states the platform is 100% free of charge to solar professionals and that its mission is to remove expensive software licences. It is monetised instead through partner and provider relationships and optional services such as OpenSolar CashFlow payments, which may carry transaction fees. No licence or implementation fee is published.
How long until our team is productive?
OpenSolar is self-serve cloud software with no mandatory implementation fee and no published onboarding programme to buy. The vendor supplies a Help Center, live regional webinars and onboarding help, so most teams can design and quote within days to a couple of weeks rather than a multi-month rollout.
What support is included on a free account?
The support page states that a free OpenSolar account includes dedicated 24/7 ticket-based support, access to help-center articles and videos, an AI chat in the Help Center, and live training webinars covering software basics, finance, design and account setup.
How secure and compliant is the platform?
The Trust Center reports SOC 2 Type 1 attestation against the AICPA Trust Services Criteria for security, availability and confidentiality, with the report available under NDA. Hosting is on AWS in the Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region with multi-availability-zone redundancy, encryption at rest and in transit, daily backups and documented incident response. No ISO 27001, HIPAA or FedRAMP claim is published.
Does OpenSolar use AI, and does it train on our data?
An AI chat answers questions from OpenSolar's help articles, and the About page describes an 'AI-powered platform'. The sources do not name any underlying model provider, do not state whether customer data is used to train models, and publish no AI audit or AI-pricing detail, so those points should be confirmed directly with the vendor.
Will it fit our existing stack?
OpenSolar runs as browser-based SaaS natively on AWS with third-party integrations to mapping and financial providers. The available sources do not document Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Microsoft 365 or SAP connectors, nor any public API or MCP server, so integration-heavy buyers should validate requirements before adopting.