Most reviews of Scanifly are written by people selling a satellite tool. That makes them easy to dismiss, because Scanifly is solving a problem satellite tools quietly paper over. This review is written from a design bench that produces plan sets on other people’s site data every week, including drone-captured data. Scanifly is very good at the thing it is built for. The honest question is not whether it works. It is whether your company wants to run the process it requires.
Direct answer. Scanifly is the strongest tool in the category for drone-based site capture and photogrammetry-derived as-built models. Nothing else measures a real roof as faithfully. The cost is a physical process: hardware, a licensed pilot, and a site visit before design. For companies already visiting site, that is close to free. For teams designing remotely at volume, SurgePV covers design, shading, drawings, and proposals at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year without a drone programme.
TL;DR
- Scanifly leads the category on drone site capture and photogrammetry. The model is the actual site, not an estimate from imagery.
- Its real win is obstruction height. Guessing vent and parapet heights from satellite pictures is the biggest error source in a shading study, and drone capture removes the guess.
- The cost is operational, not just financial. Drone hardware, a trained and licensed pilot, and a survey visit before design.
- Scanifly includes design and shading tooling on top of the captured model, so it is not measurement only.
- SurgePV runs 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, single-line diagrams with DWG export, and a white-label proposal in one licence at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year.
What Scanifly Is and Who It Is For
Scanifly is a solar platform built around drone site surveys. A pilot flies the property, the software processes the imagery through photogrammetry, and the result is a 3D model of the site as it actually stands. Design and shading tools then run on top of that model.
That ordering matters. Most solar design platforms start from satellite imagery and infer a roof. Scanifly starts from a measured capture of the roof in front of you.
Who it fits: residential and commercial installers who already send someone to site before design. If a surveyor, a crew lead, or a sales engineer is visiting anyway, adding a drone flight to that visit is a small increment on a trip you were already paying for.
Who it fits less well: teams that design remotely at volume, teams operating across markets where dispatching a pilot is impractical, and engineering benches that receive site data from someone else and produce drawings from it.
The Drone Requirement and What It Really Costs to Run
This is the honest centre of any Scanifly evaluation, and it has nothing to do with software quality.
To use Scanifly as intended you need three things. A drone. A pilot who is trained and appropriately licensed for commercial flight in your jurisdiction. And a visit to the property before design work starts.
None of those are unreasonable. All of them are process. Hardware needs maintaining and replacing. Pilot certification needs holding and renewing. The visit needs scheduling against weather, property access, and whatever the sales team promised the customer about turnaround.
Scanifly itself sells on tiered subscription. The subscription is rarely the number that decides the outcome. The deciding number is what it costs your company to put a qualified pilot in front of every property before a designer can start.
For a company already running site surveys, that marginal cost is genuinely small. For a company whose designers work from an address and an electricity bill, it is not a software purchase. It is a new operating model.
What Scanifly Does Better Than Anything Else
Being fair here is not a courtesy. It is the whole reason to trust the rest of the page.
Obstruction heights. Lead with this, because it is the strongest argument in the product. A shading study is only as good as the height of the things casting shadows. From satellite imagery, a designer estimates the height of a vent stack, a parapet, an HVAC unit, or a neighbouring tree. That estimate is the single largest error source in most shading studies, and it is invisible in the output. Drone photogrammetry measures those heights instead of guessing them.
As-built site conditions. The captured model shows the roof that exists today, including the alterations, the previous trades’ damage, the equipment nobody documented, and the condition of the surface you are about to mount on. Imagery cannot show you that reliably, especially where it is out of date.
Fewer repeat truck rolls. Because the capture is complete, the questions that normally trigger a second visit are answerable from the desk. Where does the conduit run. How tall is that parapet. Is there room behind the chimney. Every avoided return trip is real money.
Design on a model you trust. Scanifly includes design and shading tooling built on the captured model, so the survey does not sit in a separate silo. The designer works on measured geometry rather than a redrawn approximation.
That combination is not marketing. It is why installers who run their own surveys stay on it, and it is a legitimate reason to buy.
Where Scanifly Falls Short
Three honest limitations, none of them about product quality.
It requires a physical process before design. Everything good about Scanifly depends on a flight happening. If the flight slips, design slips. Weather, access, and pilot availability become design-schedule dependencies. Satellite-first tools have accuracy problems. They do not have scheduling problems.
It assumes your company can run a drone programme. Hardware, licensing, currency, insurance, and airspace rules are ongoing obligations. Small teams often discover that the programme concentrates on one person, and when that person is on leave, capture stops.
It is shaped around capture-led companies. If your deliverable is a drawing set produced from data someone else supplies, most of what you are paying for happens before your work begins. You are buying depth in a job you are not doing.
Put those together and the pattern is clear. Scanifly is excellent, and it is excellent for a specific shape of company.
Scanifly vs SurgePV
| Dimension | Scanifly | SurgePV |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Platform built around drone site capture | Browser based |
| Site model source | Photogrammetry from a real drone survey | Model-driven design in browser |
| Obstruction heights | Measured from the capture, best in category | Modelled in the design environment |
| Hourly simulation | Design and shading tooling on the captured model | 8,760-hour with module-level shading, mismatch, string topology |
| Drawings | Capture and design focus | Single-line diagrams and DWG export from the same model |
| Customer proposal | Not the product’s centre of gravity | White-label proposal layer included |
| Operational requirement | Drone, licensed pilot, site visit per project | None beyond a browser |
| Published price per user per year | Tiered subscription | $1,299 to $1,899 |
| Best fit | Installers who already survey their own sites | Installers and EPCs who need design, shading, and drawings together |
The fair read of that table: Scanifly wins the obstruction-height row outright, and that row genuinely matters. SurgePV wins on the combination after site data exists, one licence carrying the hourly model, the drawings, and the proposal, with no field programme attached.
For the wider field, see Scanifly alternatives. For the underlying accuracy argument, read solar site survey vs satellite design.
Why These Two Are More Complementary Than Competing
I will say plainly what most competitor pages avoid. SurgePV does not do drone photogrammetry. It is not a site-capture product and it will not replace a survey.
Scanifly captures. A design platform designs. Those are different jobs, and treating them as rivals produces bad buying decisions in both directions.
A company that flies its own sites and hands the resulting geometry to a design bench is running a sensible stack. A company that buys a capture platform hoping it will also solve proposals, drawings, and per-seat design economics is solving the wrong constraint.
The useful question is not which tool wins. It is which half of the workflow is actually holding your projects up.
What Most Buyers Get Wrong About Scanifly
They evaluate the software and never model the flight schedule.
The mechanism is specific. Procurement compares Scanifly’s subscription against a design tool’s subscription, finds them comparable, and approves. Nobody maps the calendar. Then the first busy month arrives. Sales closes eleven deals in a week. There is one pilot. Each property needs access, daylight, and flyable weather. Captures queue behind each other, and design cannot start on any project until its capture lands.
The bottleneck moves from designer hours to pilot days, and the design team looks slow for reasons that have nothing to do with design.
The fix costs nothing and takes an afternoon. Take your last 90 days of closed deals. Plot them by week. Ask how many site visits one pilot can realistically complete in your worst week, allowing for weather and access failures. If closed deals per week regularly exceed captures per week, you need a second pilot or a second path to a site model before you sign, not after.
Try the software behind this review
Everything after the site visit, on one licence
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.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy Scanifly if you already send someone to every property before design, or you want to. Complex commercial roofs with dense rooftop equipment, retrofit work on buildings with no reliable documentation, and any market where imagery is stale all reward measured capture. If change orders from unmapped obstructions are eating your margin, this is the correct purchase.
Buy SurgePV if the bottleneck sits after site data exists. That covers most installers running mixed residential and commercial work and most EPCs whose deliverable is a drawing set. One licence spanning design, shading, and proposal, at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year, with no field programme to maintain.
Buy both if you fly your own sites and still need per-seat design economics, drawings, and a proposal layer for a team that never touches a drone.
Buy neither yet if you are doing a handful of systems a month. At that volume the constraint is lead flow, not capture or design throughput.
Verdict
Scanifly is a genuinely excellent product whose real price tag is written in operations, not on the invoice.
That is the opinionated version and I will stand behind it. If you already visit site, Scanifly is often the best money in your stack, and the obstruction-height accuracy alone can justify it. If your designers work remotely at volume, you are not evaluating software. You are deciding whether to start a drone programme, and that decision deserves an honest conversation about pilots, weather, and scheduling before anyone compares feature lists.
For most installers and EPCs, SurgePV is the better buy for the design half of the workflow. One licence spanning design, shading, and proposal, 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, mismatch, and string topology, and single-line diagrams with DWG export from the same model. See it on your own project at surgepv.com/demo.
Where the constraint is drafting or modelling capacity rather than software, our solar 3D pre-design team builds the model and shading study from whatever site data you have. Get the sample design pack or talk to our team.
Conclusion
- Scanifly earns its reputation on measured obstruction heights. If guessed heights are corrupting your shading studies, it fixes the actual problem.
- Model the pilot’s calendar before you sign. Capture capacity, not licence cost, is what breaks in a busy month.
- Capture and design are separate purchases. Decide which half is holding your projects up, then buy for that half.
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 Scanifly worth the price? For an installer who already sends someone to site, often yes. The captured model removes guesswork that quietly damages shading accuracy and triggers repeat truck rolls. For teams designing remotely at volume, the subscription is the small part of the cost and the drone programme is the real commitment.
What is Scanifly best at? Drone-based site capture and photogrammetry-derived as-built models. Obstruction heights measured rather than estimated, complete as-built site conditions, and fewer return visits. It leads the category on all three.
Do I need a drone and a licensed pilot to use Scanifly? Yes. The product is built around a drone survey, which means hardware, a trained and appropriately licensed pilot, and a visit to the property before design starts. That is the honest operational overhead behind the subscription.
Can SurgePV replace Scanifly? Not for capture. SurgePV does not do drone photogrammetry and will not survey a site. It covers the work after site data exists: 8,760-hour simulation with module-level shading, single-line diagrams with DWG export, and a white-label proposal. Many teams run a capture tool and a design platform together.
What is the best Scanifly alternative? It depends which job you are replacing. For the design, shading, drawing, and proposal workflow, SurgePV at $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year, in one licence. The wider field is ranked in our Scanifly alternatives guide, and the cost picture across the category sits in solar design software pricing.
Does drone capture actually improve shading results? Yes, and the mechanism is specific. Shading loss depends on obstruction height, which satellite workflows estimate. Measured heights remove that error. The method itself is covered in our guide to shadow analysis for solar rooftops.
Related: the ranked field is in Scanifly alternatives, the accuracy argument is in solar site survey vs satellite design, the method is in shadow analysis for solar rooftops, and the cost picture is in solar design software pricing.
