Aurora Solar vs. OpenSolar: Which One Actually Fits Your Solar Installation Company?

Every residential solar installer eventually hits the same question long before they think about accounting software: can a rep close a deal without ever sending someone to the roof? Both platforms answer it — the right pick depends on crew size, not features.

By The StackMatch Research Team

Aurora Solar vs. OpenSolar: which fits your crew size?

$350/moAurora Solar — 3-100 employees

$0/moOpenSolar — 1-50 employees

50 employeesWhere OpenSolar's ceiling stops

Prices reflect base plans for each platform.

Aurora Solar and OpenSolar both do remote solar design, shading analysis, and proposal generation — the explicit goal of both is letting a rep close a deal without a site visit. That's not a features-checklist question; it's a crew-size question, because Aurora Solar is priced and built for a company running up to 100 employees, while OpenSolar's free tier is built for shops up to 50. Picking between them is really picking which growth stage you're designing your sales process for.

Monthly cost comparison

Aurora Solar: $350/mo — built for 3-100 employees

Aurora Solar's replaces-list explicitly includes eliminating in-person, site-visit-only quoting — it's built to let a rep design a system and generate a financed or cash proposal remotely, on the spot, during a first call. That capability is worth the $350/mo only if reps are actually using it that way; a shop that pays for Aurora Solar but still sends someone to the roof before every close is paying for a feature it isn't using.

OpenSolar: $0/mo — built for 1-50 employees

OpenSolar covers the same core ground — shading analysis, financing integrations, permit-ready plan sets — at no monthly cost, which makes it the obvious starting point for a shop under 50 employees. Its own replaces-list is narrower than Aurora's: it explicitly covers manual satellite-imagery design and spreadsheet proposal building, but doesn't claim to eliminate in-person site-visit quoting the way Aurora does. For a smaller shop still building a fully remote sales process, that gap may not matter yet.

The Aurora-vs-OpenSolar decision weighs crew size and integration reach — not which platform has more features.

Fit comparison

Criterion	Aurora Solar	OpenSolar
Monthly cost	$350	$0
Team size range	3-100	1-50
Shading analysis
Financing integrations
Permit-ready plan sets
Replaces in-person site-visit quoting
Direct Google Local Services Ads integration

Running both platforms doesn't double your spend the way most overlapping tools do — OpenSolar is free — but it does mean two proposal formats and a design team split across logins for zero added coverage.

The actual decision rule

OpenSolar's 50-employee ceiling is a hard data point, not a soft recommendation — plan the switch before you hit it.

Under ~50 employees: OpenSolar covers the core design-and-proposal job at no cost, and is the right default while the sales team is still small enough that a design manager can enforce one consistent proposal format by hand.
Approaching 50 employees: this is the real decision point — OpenSolar's plan is built for shops up to 50 employees, so a company growing toward that ceiling should plan the Aurora Solar migration before hitting it, not after.
Above 50 employees, or running Google Local Services Ads at volume: Aurora Solar's direct LSA integration and higher headcount ceiling generally justify the $350/mo outright.

Under ~50 employees and not yet running paid lead-gen at volume, OpenSolar is almost always the right fit. Once you're scaling past that ceiling or leaning hard on Local Services Ads, Aurora Solar's $350/mo buys you headroom you'll need anyway.

One thing worth naming directly: a lot of "best solar installer software" content online is written by, or paid by, the vendor with the bigger affiliate budget — which tends to be the more expensive platform. That's exactly the incentive our engine is built to be blind to; it ranks purely on your team-size fit, not on which vendor pays the biggest bounty.

Run the free audit with your real headcount and current spend to see which one — plus the rest of your stack — actually fits.

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