OpenSolar delivers free AI-powered 3D design and proposals globally, while Solar Spine is built for Indian solar operations from sales to commissioning.
In short
OpenSolar combines AI-assisted 3D roof design with proposal generation, a CashFlow milestone-payment engine, and a lightweight project-management CRM. The core platform costs nothing and carries no seat limits, user caps or design caps. The business is funded by commissions from finance companies, hardware distributors, permitting providers and imagery vendors who pay to reach OpenSolar's installer base. Its largest presences are in the US, Australia, UK and New Zealand.
OpenSolar's design engine is its main strength — NREL-validated shading analysis, 3D roof modelling, and single-line diagrams feed directly into a proposal and e-signature flow. Its permitting integrations, however, are US-only; there is no DISCOM tracking, PM Surya Ghar subsidy integration, GST invoicing, or India-based support. The product lacks AI-powered phone calling, WhatsApp messaging, stage gates, escalation or payment-locked dispatch. Effectively, it is a design and sales tool that ends at the signed proposal, not an operations platform.
An Indian rooftop EPC evaluating OpenSolar would likely use it alongside Solar Spine, not instead of it. Keep OpenSolar for free 3D design and shading analysis; adopt Solar Spine for the operations infrastructure OpenSolar lacks: conditional checklists per stage, payment milestones, DISCOM and subsidy tracking, AI telecalling, WhatsApp logging, and role dashboards tied to escalation. Migration requires re-keying project data — OpenSolar has no DISCOM or subsidy fields, so there is nothing to field-map from.
Where OpenSolar wins
- OpenSolar costs nothing to use, with unlimited users, no seat limits and no contract, which eliminates the entry cost every subscription CRM has.
- Its 3D roof design engine, powered by AI and validated by NREL and PVEL for accuracy, generates proposals and shading analyses that feed directly into e-signature and a CashFlow payment-tracking system.
- OpenSolar states 28,000+ professionals across 185+ countries and 200+ finance, hardware and permitting partners, so installers can source financing and equipment without leaving the software.
- A large Help Center, frequent blog content (posts every 1-3 days) and SOC 2 Type 1 attestation all demonstrate credibility and active development.
Where Solar Spine wins
- Solar Spine runs on Postgres in Mumbai with row-level security fences per workspace, keeping your project data in India where it belongs without mixing with any other company's work.
- Every deal carries conditional checklists that auto-populate based on loan type, subsidy scheme and the DISCOM serving each site, instead of generic pipeline stages chosen from a dropdown.
- Stage gates prevent forward progress until checklist items close; payment gates hold material dispatch until the required milestone payment lands; every night overdue work climbs the org chart automatically without human intervention.
- The AI telecaller qualifies inbound leads on the phone 9 am to 9 pm IST, hands off with notes and books visits on named salespeople's diaries; WhatsApp interactions log to the project record, and qualified outcomes flow back to Meta's Conversions API.
- Nine role dashboards, one per job title from telecaller to director, show only the work that person owns, with targets, cash due, stuck projects and escalated items visible at a glance.
Best for
Design shops and smaller installers in markets outside India who want free 3D design and proposals without operations complexity.
Not for
OpenSolar is not for heavy operations tracking or India-specific workflows; Solar Spine is not for roof design or shading analysis. If you are evaluating Solar Spine as an OpenSolar alternative for operations, that split is the one to plan around.
Pricing
OpenSolar
The core platform is free — $0 per user per month, unlimited users, no design caps, no contract. This is funded by commissions from finance companies, hardware distributors and permitting providers, not subscription fees. Enterprise add-ons (API, Imagery Marketplace, premium integrations) have no published pricing; rates are said to be geo-specific.
| Tier | ₹ / user / month | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core platform (design, sell, manage) | ₹0 | $0 USD per user per month — free forever, unlimited users, no design caps, no contract. Confirmed directly on opensolar.com/free/ and opensolar.com/pro/. |
| Paid add-ons (API, Imagery Marketplace, premium finance and permitting integrations) | Not published | No public price list on opensolar.com. Enterprise Services, OpenSolar API and Imagery Marketplace are named but unpriced; opensolar.com/api/ states rates are geo-specific with no dollar amount disclosed. |
Read from https://www.opensolar.com/free/ on 8 September 2026
Solar Spine
Solar Spine price list, the same numbers Razorpay charges
Feature by feature
| Capability | OpenSolar | Solar Spine |
|---|---|---|
| Solar-specific | ||
| Solar sales and install stages out of the box | Partly. Project Management CRM ships with configurable pipeline stages shown as a Kanban (e.g. Lead/Design/Selling) — generic and design/sales-centric, not a prebuilt solar EPC install-to-commissioning stage set. | Yes. 7 sales stages and 17 project stages seeded on day one, all editable. |
| Stage checklists that change with loan, subsidy and DISCOM | No. No per-stage task checklist that changes with loan, subsidy or DISCOM type was found; the CRM page describes assigning actions and due dates, not conditional checklists. | Yes. 57 checklist items; loan, subsidy and DISCOM-specific tasks appear only where they apply. |
| DISCOM net-metering steps tracked | No. Permitting Integrations are explicitly US-only; no DISCOM or net-metering concept exists anywhere on the site. | Yes. Net-meter paperwork branches for BRPL, BYPL, TPDDL, PVVNL, NPCL, DHBVN and UHBVN. |
| PM Surya Ghar and subsidy tracking | No. No subsidy-application-tracking feature of any kind was found; India and its subsidy schemes are never mentioned on the site. | Yes. PMSG submission, DCR certificate, GBI and central subsidy redemption as dated tasks. |
| kW as a native field with kW reporting | Yes. kW is the native unit for system sizing throughout the design tool; residential systems are described as 3 to 15 kW, small commercial up to 100 to 250 kW. | Yes. Every deal and project carries capacity; dashboards and targets report in kW. |
| Roof design, shading and proposal generation | Yes. AI-assisted 3D auto-design (Ada), sub-panel shading analysis, digital surface mapping, mounting and single-line-diagram tools are the core product's strength and feed directly into the Sales Machine customer proposal. | No. Solar Spine does not do roof design. Use a design tool and track the job here. |
| Execution | ||
| Tasks written automatically with due dates when a stage opens | Partly. CRM page mentions Assign actions, set due dates and Auto-assign actions by project role or team member, implying some automation, but no explicit statement that tasks are auto-created the moment a stage opens. | Yes. Nobody types the checklist; each task carries the date it was given when the stage opened. |
| Overdue work escalates up the org chart on its own | No. Only visibility into overdue work is described (see upcoming or overdue work across your team via an Activity Center) — no automatic escalation up an org chart was found. | Yes. Every night a late task climbs one rung and keeps climbing until someone acts. |
| A stage cannot be advanced with open checklist items | No. No evidence that a project is blocked from moving to the next pipeline stage while checklist items remain open. | Yes. The advance button is unavailable until the stage's items are closed. |
| Documents verified by ops before work proceeds | Partly. Document upload, organise, merge and send is supported, but no ops-verification step gating stage progress was described. | Yes. A document is done when ops marks it correct; a rejection goes back to the person who photographed it. |
| A different first screen per role | Partly. Custom roles and permissions exist, but no distinct first-screen dashboard per role (owner, sales, ops, telecaller) is described. | Yes. Nine roles, nine first screens, from telecaller to director. |
| Field use on a phone: photos, tasks, call outcomes | Partly. The product is responsive across devices (tablet, smartphone, iOS, Android, PC, Mac) but there is no native app-store app and no described field features like site-photo capture or call-outcome logging. | Yes. Every screen works on a phone; documents are photographed at the customer's house. |
| Money | ||
| Instalment schedule per project | Yes. CashFlow supports milestone-based collection: deposits, progress payments and final balances, plus standalone invoice-based payment requests, with status tracked. | Yes. 10/70/20 or whatever you agreed, with due dates and outstanding balance visible to all. |
| Material cannot dispatch until payment is collected | No. No mention of material or hardware dispatch being blocked until a share of payment is collected; Shop and CashFlow payments appear to be separate, unlinked flows. | Yes. Thresholds per stage, set by the workspace; the default is the one the first customer ran. |
| Daily overdue payment alerts to owner and manager | No. CashFlow page describes payment status tracking but no automated daily overdue-payment alert to owner or manager. | Yes. 7 am every day, to the person who owns the collection and their manager. |
| A bounced cheque reopens the instalment | No. Listed payment methods are direct, credit, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and bank transfers (Stripe-powered) — cheque is not listed, and no bounce-handling logic is described. | Yes. Yes |
| GST invoices and quotes from the same record | No. CashFlow generates invoices automatically, but no GST or India tax-compliance handling is mentioned anywhere on the site. | Yes. Invoice creation is a stage in the pipeline; the subscription itself is GST-invoiced too. |
| Leads and calling | ||
| Meta lead ads land in the system within minutes | No. AI Lead Gen is an embeddable website estimate widget only; no Meta or Facebook Lead Ads integration is described. | Yes. Ad leads arrive marked hot at the top of the calling queue inside five minutes. |
| PIN-code check on incoming leads | No. No PIN or postcode serviceability check on incoming leads was found; the consumer-facing page instead helps homeowners find trusted solar professionals, a marketplace-matching feature, not a company's service-area gate. | Yes. Leads outside the PIN codes you serve are kept out of the AI caller's queue. |
| AI caller that qualifies leads and books visits | No. Confirmed no AI voice-calling feature exists; AI Lead Gen is purely a web widget that produces an initial AI design, with no phone-based qualification. | Yes. Optional. Calls 9 am to 9 pm IST, books the visit on a named salesperson's day, hands off with notes. |
| Built-in telecalling queue with daily batches and outcomes | No. No built-in telecalling queue or daily call-batch workflow was found on the Leads, AI Lead Gen or any other pages. | Yes. Queues built and ordered before the caller sits down; one outcome vocabulary for humans and the AI. |
| Lead outcomes written back to Meta | No. Consistent with the absence of any Meta or Facebook Lead Ads integration, no lead-outcome writeback to Meta was found. | Yes. Qualified, converted and disqualified statuses flow back through the lead sheet into Meta's Conversions API, so the account optimises for buyers, not form-fillers. |
| WhatsApp messaging and automation | No. Zero mentions of WhatsApp anywhere in the homepage HTML or the pages checked (Leads, CashFlow, CRM, Pro). | Partly. Click-to-chat and logged WhatsApp interactions. No automated messaging. |
| Reporting | ||
| Owner dashboard: kW against target, cash due, stuck projects | No. No dashboard combining kW against target, cash due and stuck projects was found; no /dashboard, /report, /insight or /analytic page exists in the sitemap. | Yes. Yes |
| Per-person monthly targets and attainment | No. No per-person monthly target and attainment feature was found on the CRM, roles or permissions pages. | Yes. Yes |
| Ask the business a question in plain English | No. The only AI-chat surface found is Chat with OpenSolar AI under Support — a help-centre assistant, not a plain-English query tool over live project data. | Yes. Director and GM only. Finding, evidence, table, caveat, next step, from live data. |
| Data | ||
| Data hosted in India | No. Trust Center states production systems run from AWS Asia-Pacific (Sydney) with no India-specific hosting or data-residency commitment. | Yes. Postgres in Mumbai (ap-south-1); documents in a private store. |
| Tenant isolation at the database level | Partly. Trust Center states Data is logically separated between customers to ensure privacy but gives no architectural detail beyond that one line. | Yes. Row-level security fences every workspace; identity documents are visible only to the project chain. |
| Pricing and support | ||
| Pricing model | Not applicable. There is no subscription pricing model — the core product is free per user with unlimited seats, monetised via partner commissions rather than a flat, per-user or per-project fee. | Yes. Flat per company: ₹10,000 a month or ₹99,999 a year plus GST. Unlimited users. |
| Prices published in INR | No. No INR pricing exists anywhere on the site; there is no priced tier to denominate, and no India-specific page. | Yes. Yes |
| Free trial without a card | Yes. Not framed as a time-limited trial — the core platform is free forever with no card required, which meets and exceeds the row's requirement. | Yes. 30 days, no card, no call. |
| Setup or onboarding fee | No. No setup or onboarding fee is mentioned on the /free/, /pro/ or other pages checked; paid add-on onboarding costs are not publicly disclosed. | Yes. None. Send the filled setup form and the workspace configures itself. |
| India-based support in IST | No. No India office, India phone or email, or IST support hours mentioned anywhere; registered address and support content centre on Australia, US, UK and New Zealand. | Yes. Email, replies within one business day, from Mumbai. |
Switching from OpenSolar
- Export your projects and customer list from OpenSolar via the admin panel; the platform may support bulk export or you may need to use the Enterprise-gated API. Verify this capability before committing to a migration.
- Prepare a CSV: customer name, phone, email, location, current stage, system capacity in kW, and loan or subsidy type. Upload the CSV to Solar Spine's customer import; the system sequences each project to your workspace and populates stages with conditional checklists based on loan type and DISCOM.
- Keep OpenSolar running for 3D design and shading analysis; store any exported project documentation in Solar Spine's project document section for the operations team.
- DISCOM type, subsidy scheme, net-meter tracking and GST invoice data have no equivalent in OpenSolar — these fields become new entries in Solar Spine. You are not field-mapping; you are building the operations layer that didn't exist.
- Test the migration with one or two projects before moving your entire backlog, since the two platforms solve different problems and run different data models.
Questions people ask
Can I use OpenSolar and Solar Spine at the same time?
Yes. Most Indian teams do exactly this. Keep OpenSolar (or a similar free design tool) for 3D roof design and shading analysis; adopt Solar Spine as the operations and sales-execution layer. OpenSolar stops at the proposal; Solar Spine covers stages, checklists, payments, telecalling and DISCOM tracking.
Does Solar Spine replace design tools like OpenSolar?
No. Solar Spine does not do roof design or shading analysis. It covers sales and installation operations from inbound lead to commissioning: stage gates, per-stage checklists that branch on loan and DISCOM type, payment gates and role dashboards, none of which OpenSolar's design and proposal tools address. Pair it with a design tool for the full workflow.
Is there an OpenSolar integration?
Not today. Export your customer and project list from OpenSolar as CSV and upload it to Solar Spine's customer import. The rest is manual re-entry of DISCOM type and subsidy scheme, data OpenSolar doesn't capture, plus any payment terms already agreed, since the two platforms don't share a payment record.
Which costs less for a 12-person team?
OpenSolar costs ₹0 for 12 users forever. Solar Spine costs ₹10,000 a month (₹11,800 including GST) or ₹99,999 a year (₹1,17,999 including GST), for unlimited users, so the same price for 1 user or 100. For a 12-person team using both, the yearly total is ₹1,17,999.
Where does Solar Spine store my data?
In a Postgres database in Mumbai (AWS ap-south-1). Every workspace is fenced at the database level with row-level security; no other company's projects are visible, and documents are stored in a private, workspace-isolated file store. You can export your data at any time, and nothing about the fence changes if you lapse or cancel.
What if I am already paying for OpenSolar Enterprise add-ons?
OpenSolar Enterprise layers (API, Imagery Marketplace, premium finance integrations) do not have published pricing. If you are on them, confirm with OpenSolar whether they offer bulk export via the API so you can extract your data for migration. The core platform stays free no matter what you add.
Other comparisons
Run one real project through it this month. You will know by the end of it.
30 days free, no card, no call. Then ₹10,000 a month for the whole company, however many people you put on it.