Most reviews of Arka360 are written either by the company or by someone selling a costlier seat. This one comes from a design bench that receives other people’s Arka360 models and turns them into approval drawings. That vantage point is unusual and it is useful. You see what the model carries, and you see what has to be rebuilt before a file goes to an inspector. Arka360 is a sensible product at a sensible price. The question worth answering is where that price stops buying enough.
Direct answer. Arka360 is a cloud solar design and proposal platform aimed at residential and commercial installers, with real traction among Indian EPCs and in emerging markets. It is priced below the premium US platforms, and for a cost-sensitive installer doing straightforward residential work it is a reasonable buy. Teams that need deeper hourly modelling and drawings from the same model tend to outgrow it, and that is where SurgePV fits.
TL;DR
- Arka360 covers 3D design, shading analysis, and proposal generation in one product, which is genuinely more than many installers get from their current stack.
- The price sits below the premium US platforms. That is a real advantage, not a consolation prize, and it is why the product has traction in India and other emerging markets.
- The honest gap is depth in the engineering layer and what leaves the model. Hourly resolution and drawing output are where a growing team feels the ceiling.
- Arka360 is not the reference for bankable lender-reviewed yield studies. PVsyst still is, so financed work needs a second tool either way.
- SurgePV runs 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, mismatch, and string topology, exports single-line diagrams and DWG from the same model, and includes a white-label proposal at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year.
What Arka360 Is and Who It Is For
Arka360 is a cloud-based platform for designing solar systems and producing the proposal that sells them. A designer builds a 3D model of the site, places modules, runs a shading analysis, and generates a customer-facing document from the same project. Everything happens in the browser.
The product is aimed at residential and commercial installers. Its strongest adoption has been among Indian EPCs and in other emerging markets, where the buying decision is made with a sharp eye on cost per seat and where the alternative is often a spreadsheet plus a drafting seat.
Who it fits well: an installer running residential volume with a small design bench, where the deliverable is a proposal and a layout, and where the current process is manual. For that team Arka360 is a clear upgrade.
Who feels the limits: an EPC whose deliverable is an approval-ready drawing set, a team taking on larger commercial roofs, or anyone whose yield numbers are read by a lender.
Pricing and Why It Genuinely Appeals
Arka360 sits below the premium US platforms on price. That is the single most important commercial fact about the product, and it deserves to be stated without a sneer.
A US-priced seat can cost two or three times what an Indian or emerging-market installer can defend per designer. When margins per kilowatt are thin, a platform that covers design and proposal at a price the business can actually absorb is not a compromise. It is the difference between having a design tool and not having one.
So the fair framing is this. Arka360 is software priced for the market it serves, and it delivers a coherent product at that price. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
For the wider cost picture across the category, see our solar design software pricing breakdown, and the market view in solar software in India.
What Arka360 Does Well
This is the section competitor content usually skips, which is exactly why competitor content usually fails to persuade.
One product covering design plus proposal. A designer models the site and the proposal comes out of the same project. No re-keying, no separate quoting tool, no mismatch between what was designed and what the customer was shown. Plenty of teams still run those as two disconnected steps, and consolidating them removes a real class of error.
3D design in the browser. No workstation, no install, no licence server. A designer can work from a laptop at a site visit. For distributed teams and for companies that hire designers on contract, browser delivery matters more than the feature list suggests.
Shading analysis included, not bolted on. Shading is part of the design flow rather than an export to another tool. That keeps the conversation about panel placement honest from the first pass.
Fit with the market it targets. The product understands the residential and small commercial installer, and the price, the workflow, and the output are all pointed at that buyer. Coherence like that is harder to build than any single feature.
None of that is grudging. Arka360 earned its position in these markets on merit.
Where Arka360 Falls Short
Three honest limitations, none of which make it a bad product.
Depth of the hourly engineering layer. A design tool can report annual production and be broadly right. Resolving what happens at 8am in January on the third string when a parapet clips two modules is a different job. Teams that move into larger or more shaded roofs feel this first, usually when a client asks why the array underperformed the model.
What comes out the other end. A proposal is not an approval file. When the inspector, the utility, or the electrical authority wants a single-line diagram and a drawing set, the model has to feed those drawings or somebody redraws them in a drafting seat. Redrawing costs money, introduces divergence between the design and the drawing, and slows approvals.
It is not the bankability reference. For lender-reviewed yield studies, PVsyst remains the tool independent engineers expect. That is a scope fact rather than a flaw, but it has a budget consequence: any financed project means a second licence regardless of what you pay Arka360.
Put those together and the pattern is consistent. Arka360 handles the design and the sale. The engineering artefacts around it live somewhere else.
Arka360 vs SurgePV
| Dimension | Arka360 | SurgePV |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Cloud, browser based | Browser based |
| Core job | 3D design, shading analysis, proposal | Design, shading, drawings, proposal |
| Hourly simulation | Design and proposal oriented | 8,760-hour with module-level shading, mismatch, string topology |
| Drawings | Design plus proposal focus | Single-line diagrams and DWG export from the same model |
| Customer proposal | Included in the product | White-label proposal layer included |
| Licence scope | Design plus proposal in one product | One licence spanning design, shading, and proposal |
| Price position | Below the premium US platforms | $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year |
| Best fit | Cost-sensitive residential and small commercial installers | Installers and EPCs who need design, shading, and drawings together |
The fair read of that table is not that one product is good and the other bad. Arka360 wins the price row and it wins on fit for a residential installer who needs design and a proposal. SurgePV wins on what the engineering layer resolves and on drawings leaving the same model.
The ranked field of competitors sits in our Arka360 alternatives guide, and the India-specific picture is in best solar design software in India.
What the Engineering Layer Actually Has to Resolve
This is the part of the comparison that is technical rather than commercial, so it is worth being concrete.
A full-year hourly model runs 8,760 steps. At each step, the sun sits somewhere specific, and every obstruction on that roof casts a shadow that lands on specific modules. Module-level shading means the model knows which modules are hit, not just that the array as a whole lost some irradiance.
That distinction drives mismatch. When one module in a series string is shaded, it constrains the current through the whole string. The loss is not proportional to the shaded area. It is set by the electrical topology, which means the answer depends on how you wired the array, not just where the shadow fell.
So string topology has to be part of the model. Change the stringing and the annual number changes, sometimes materially, on the same physical layout. A model that cannot express the strings cannot answer the question, and a designer optimising stringing by intuition is guessing.
On a clean unshaded residential roof, none of this matters much. On a commercial roof with parapets, plant, and vents, it decides whether your production estimate holds. That is the honest boundary.
Drawings, and Why the Same Model Matters
The second half of the argument is about output.
An approval file needs a single-line diagram. In many jurisdictions it needs a drawing set an authority will accept. If those are drawn separately from the design model, two things follow. Every revision has to be applied twice, and the two versions drift. Drift is what causes an inspector to find that the drawing shows a different inverter count from the layout.
SurgePV produces single-line diagrams and DWG export from the same model that ran the simulation. One source, one revision path. For an EPC where the drawing set is the deliverable rather than the proposal, that is the difference between a design tool and an engineering tool.
If your constraint is drafting capacity rather than software, our electrical and CEIG drawings bench produces approval-ready sets on whatever platform you already run.
Try the software behind this review
See what an hourly model resolves on your own roof
SurgePV runs 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, exports the single-line diagram and DWG from the same model, and ships a white-label proposal. $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year.
Book a free SurgePV demo →No credit card. 20-minute walkthrough on one of your own projects.
What Most Buyers Get Wrong
They compare seat prices and never price the drafting hours the seat leaves behind.
The mechanism is easy to trace. A team buys a design platform at a defensible seat cost. Approval drawings are not produced by that platform, so they get made somewhere else, usually by a drafter on a CAD seat or by an outsourced bench paid per drawing. That cost lands in a different budget line, often under operations rather than software, so nobody ever adds the two together.
Then the revisions start. An inspector queries a conductor size. The layout changes. The design is updated in the platform and the drawing is updated separately by hand. Each revision consumes drafting hours that were never in the software comparison, and each one is an opportunity for the drawing and the model to disagree.
Run the arithmetic once. Take last quarter’s projects, count the drawing revisions, multiply by what an hour of drafting costs you, and add it to the licence fee. Many teams find the true cost per project sits well above the seat price they compared. That number, not the sticker, is the one that should decide the platform.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy Arka360 if your work is mostly straightforward residential, price per seat is a binding constraint, and your main need is a design plus a proposal from one tool. That is a real and common situation, and paying more for depth you will not use is not clever. Be honest that this describes you before you assume it does not.
Buy SurgePV if you need the hourly model, the drawings, and the proposal to come from one place. That covers most EPCs and most installers moving into commercial work, where the approval set is the deliverable and where shading is complicated enough that mismatch matters.
Buy PVsyst alongside either if a lender or independent engineer reviews your yield. Neither platform replaces it for that specific reader.
Change nothing yet if you are doing a handful of simple systems a month. At that volume your constraint is lead flow, not modelling depth.
Verdict
Arka360 is a well-priced product that a lot of teams keep using about a year past the point it stopped fitting.
That is my opinionated position. The product is not the problem. The problem is that growth changes the job. A company that bought Arka360 for residential proposals is, two years later, quoting commercial roofs, arguing with inspectors about drawings, and explaining production shortfalls to clients. Nothing about the platform broke. The work moved.
For teams still doing the job Arka360 was built for, it remains a reasonable buy and I would not talk anyone out of it. For installers and EPCs whose output is now an engineering deliverable, SurgePV is the better fit: 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, mismatch, and string topology, single-line diagrams and DWG export from the same model, and a white-label proposal layer, all on one licence at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year. See it on your own project at surgepv.com/demo.
Want to see what an approval-ready set looks like first? Get the sample design pack or talk to our team.
Conclusion
- Arka360 earns its price. For residential design plus proposals at a cost an emerging-market installer can defend, it is a fair buy and a coherent product.
- Price the drafting hours, not just the seat. The revisions your platform cannot produce are the hidden line item in every software comparison.
- Financed work still needs PVsyst. Budget the second licence before you rank platforms on price.
More from our network
Disclosure and accuracy note
Commercial relationship. Heaven Designs and SurgePV are part of the same group. Treat our recommendation of SurgePV as a vendor making its own case, not an independent verdict. We have tried to describe every other product fairly, and to say plainly where a competitor is the better choice.
Pricing. All prices are indicative, compiled from public sources when this page was written. They vary by tier, region, contract term and exchange rate, and change without notice. Several vendors quote rather than publish, and some price in currencies other than the US dollar, so a converted figure moves with the exchange rate. Confirm current pricing with the vendor before you decide anything.
Trademarks and corrections. All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners, and are used here for identification and comparison only. Their use does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by those companies. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
FAQ
Is Arka360 good software? Yes, for what it targets. It covers 3D design, shading analysis, and proposal generation in one cloud product aimed at residential and commercial installers. Its adoption among Indian EPCs and in other emerging markets reflects a genuine fit between the product, the workflow, and the price.
How much does Arka360 cost? Arka360 is priced below the premium US design platforms, which is a real part of its appeal. Pricing varies by plan and market, so confirm the current figure with the vendor rather than trusting any review’s number, including this one.
Can Arka360 replace PVsyst? No. For bankable yield studies that a lender or independent engineer reviews, PVsyst remains the reference. Teams doing financed projects run a second licence regardless of which design platform they choose.
Is Arka360 good for commercial projects? It can be used for commercial work, and many teams do. The strain shows up as roofs get more obstructed and as the deliverable becomes an approval drawing set rather than a proposal. Those two pressures are what usually start a platform review.
What is the best Arka360 alternative? For installers and EPCs who need design, shading, and drawings together, SurgePV at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year. It runs 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, mismatch, and string topology, produces single-line diagrams and DWG export from the same model, and includes a white-label proposal layer. The wider field is ranked in our Arka360 alternatives guide.
Should a small residential installer switch away from Arka360? Usually not. If your roofs are simple, your volume is modest, and your deliverable is a proposal, the extra engineering depth will sit unused while the higher seat cost is charged every month. Revisit the decision when commercial inquiries become routine or when drafting revisions start eating real hours.
Related: the ranked field is in Arka360 alternatives, the India view is in best solar design software in India and solar software in India, and the cost picture across the category is in solar design software pricing.
