Why Branch — not Helioscope, Solesca, or PVCase?

Helioscope's core value is the quality of its energy model — DC losses, 2.5D shading, inverter clipping, derates. Commercial developers trust a Helioscope yield number when they are pricing a PPA, and they should. The design surface exists to make the simulation tractable, not to produce construction documents.

• No real SLD. The generated single-line is a cartoon. No wire gauges per NEC 690.8 or 690.9, no conductor schedules, no fault-current annotation, no equipment bill. A PE cannot stamp it.
• DXF export is a tracing template. Modules come through as blocks on Helioscope-defined layers that do not match any firm's CAD standard. Copy-paste between DXF and DWG is documented-broken — Helioscope's own help center tells users to run the AUDIT command as a workaround. Imagery does not travel. Geolocation is stripped.
• The 10-project-per-month ceiling is enforced. In October 2023 the soft limit became hard. For a firm that spins up preliminary studies for BD and throws half of them away when a prospect doesn't move forward, that cap is punitive. Single-user licensing means no shared pool across engineers.
• 67% price increase after the Aurora acquisition. The base plan went from $95/mo to $159/mo in November 2022 with the vendor's explanation “we need to raise our prices.” Enterprise features got paywalled. The product's roadmap now serves Aurora's residential-sales ICP.

Right tool for yield numbers. Wrong tool for CD production.

Aurora leads the residential solar sales category. Sales Mode, financing integrations, the proposal builder, LIDAR imagery, and SmartRoof auto-tracing are all built to help a commission-based sales rep close a homeowner at the kitchen table. For commercial engineering firms, the friction is in the pricing mechanics.

• SOL Credits charge per design. Residential designs consume 150–220 credits at $0.10 each, or $15–$22 per design. Commercial designs cost $200 per design (2,000 credits). The Aurora AI add-on is $9 per project.
• Aggressive auto-top-up. When your balance hits zero, Aurora charges $3,000 for 30,000 credits automatically. Opting out means you stop being able to work.
• Credits expire in 12 months. Non-refundable. Unused credits are gone.

“Aurora solar is simply an incredibly expensive ripoff. We paid R13 000 for just testing out the software in the first month.”

Aurora will happily sell a commercial engineering firm a seat. It is not designed for that workflow. A $200 commercial design still produces nothing a PE can stamp — the drawing still gets rebuilt in AutoCAD.

Solesca is the newest of the four — founded 2022, CEC-approved July 2025, positioned as “pre-CAD” feasibility for C&I and community-scale projects. Its pricing model is disclosed only in its terms of service.

Volume bundles: 10 credits for $2,850, 50 credits for $13,500, 100 credits for $25,500.

• Non-refundable, full stop. Per §3 of the terms: “All purchases of SOL Credits are final and non-refundable.”
• Non-transferable across organizations, even within the same parent.
• Promo codes and PPP discounts do not apply to credits. You pay rack rate.
• Liability is capped at the credit value of the specific design giving rise to the claim.

For a firm running 50 commercial projects a year through Solesca: $13,500 in credits at volume-bundle rate, non-refundable, on top of the seat subscription, for output explicitly labeled “pre-CAD” that your drafter still rebuilds in AutoCAD before stamp. A project that goes through three rounds of value engineering pays three times.

PVCase is the closest of the four to a serious engineering tool. It lives inside AutoCAD or Civil 3D, generates terrain-adapted layouts with real pile and tracker mechanics, and produces geometry you can stamp. The problem isn't that PVCase is bad — it's that PVCase was built for utility-scale ground-mount developers and its pricing, UX, and complexity still serve that ICP.

• Opaque enterprise pricing. No published number. Historical data points place it around €799/user/month billed annually — roughly $13,000/user/year — plus a required AutoCAD or Civil 3D license ($2,000–$4,000/user/year). True seat cost: $15,000–$17,000/year.
• No self-serve trial. A sales call is mandatory to evaluate.
• Still no automated electrical. PVCase produces great array geometry. It does not auto-generate SLDs, wire sizing, conduit fills, or panel schedules. The drafter still does that work.
• Overkill for under ~1MW. Reviewers say so explicitly. Commercial rooftop is typically 50kW–2MW. PVCase's value concentrates above 5MW.

“PVcase is absolutely the worst user interface I have ever interacted with. Many settings are hard coded and not adaptable to our needs/wants.”

“String cable design is not accurate, and trenching layout is a pain. Software does not always follow user-defined trench routes precisely and sometimes routes cables through unintended paths.”

For an engineering firm doing commercial rooftop work, PVCase means paying for terrain adaptation, trackers, pile optimization, and Civil 3D integration that those rooftop projects will never use.