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Solar Design Lab vsAurora Solar
Aurora is a strong sales and proposal surface, and if it wins you deals, keep it. The catch is that the sale is one part of the job. The planset, the SLD, the calcs, the AHJ-specific structural. Aurora's answer is templated generation you edit in AutoCAD, or a plan-set service team on their Enterprise tier. Solar Design Lab is the other half done differently: a live engineering tool your own team runs.
What Aurora Solar does well
- Strong shading model and roof layout tools
- Solid proposal builder, widely adopted in residential
- Single workflow for design + the sales conversation
Where it starts to break
As volume goes up, the workflow becomes the bottleneck.
Today's loop
Designgenerate or requestexportedit in AutoCADreviseresend
- Need to change the SLD? Aurora exports a DWG so you can edit it in AutoCAD. By their own docs, diagram changes happen outside the platform
- Plan sets come from templated instant generation or their service team (Enterprise tier). Either way, the engineering isn't live in your design: revisions mean re-export or re-queue
- List pricing runs $159-$259 per user per month, and real spend climbs from there with imagery credits, add-ons, and Enterprise-gated features
- Tough jurisdictions (HVHZ Florida wind uplift, site-specific structural) need engineering derived from the site as you design it, not generated after the fact
- Three rounds of layoffs in two years and a founder-CEO transition. Worth weighing when you're betting your permit workflow on a vendor's roadmap
The real limitation
Proposal tools stop where permit engineering starts. Aurora's answer is a template or a queue. Ours is a live engine.
A different approach
Your team does the design. The platform does the engineering, no manual CAD.
- The SLD is live in the platform. Change the design and the diagram, conductor sizes, and OCPDs update with it. No DWG export, no AutoCAD round-trip
- Engineering derives live from the design: wire sizing, OCPD propagation, voltage drop, ground paths. Nothing hand-entered, nothing templated
- Complete packet in one engine: SLD, electrical, structural, roof layout, BOM, AHJ-specific labels
- AHJ rules checked per county as you design, deepest in Florida, including HVHZ wind uplift and site-specific structural
- $50 per planset. No seats, no credits, no service queue
- Keep Aurora for the sales side and run the permit set through Solar Design Lab. Plenty of shops do both
- Need it stamped? Request a PE stamp inside the app
The workflow shift
The same job, without the round-trip.
Aurora Solar
Designgenerate or requestexportedit in AutoCADreviseresend
Solar Design Lab
Designcheckfile
You don't need another sales tool. You need the tool that finishes the permit set: the SLD, the calcs, the labels, the tough jurisdictions.
Quick application · no credit card.