The Solar Labs Review 2026: Now Sold as ARKA 360

If you are searching for a The Solar Labs review in 2026, the first useful thing to know is not a feature or a price. It is that the name has moved on. The India-origin design platform that built its reputation as The Solar Labs is now sold as ARKA 360, and the old domain no longer serves the product. That matters, because most of the reviews still ranking for this term describe a product page that no longer exists. This review covers what the software actually is today, what the vendor publishes for pricing, what it genuinely does well, where the fit runs out, and which alternatives deserve a look before you sign an annual plan. Where we could not verify something, we left it out.

• SurgePV runs $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year with ALMM-aware modules, PM Surya Ghar bands, DISCOM tariffs, IS code clearances and multi-country coverage in one licence.

Short version. The Solar Labs is an India-built solar design and proposal platform, now sold under the ARKA 360 name, with published India plans from ₹46,000 to ₹1,00,000 a year before GST. It fits Indian residential and small commercial installers well because it was scoped around their workflow. It fits less well where lender-grade yield reporting or single-licence multi-country compliance is the requirement.

What The Solar Labs Actually Is Today

The Solar Labs was an India-headquartered software company building cloud tools for solar installers: preliminary sales quotations, optimised system design, and customer-facing proposals. That description still fits the product. What changed is the label on the box.

The vendor’s own help centre carries a legacy article titled “Hands-on with The Solar Labs” that walks through the Design Studio, while every current marketing page, plan list and support surface uses ARKA 360. Meanwhile a direct check of thesolarlabs.com in August 2026 returns unrelated content, not a redirect and not a product page. On that evidence the name reads as a legacy label rather than a live brand, even where it still lingers in help documentation and third-party directories. The software itself is being actively sold under the current name, so this is a naming change to verify with the vendor, not a sign that the product has gone away.

We are stating this plainly rather than reviewing a ghost, because it changes how you should shop. Any feature list, screenshot or price you find attached to The Solar Labs name is undated at best. Verify everything against the current product before you budget against it.

Verified Pricing

Credit where it is due: the vendor publishes prices openly, which is unusual in solar design software. Most competitors in this bracket hide behind a contact form.

For India, the published plans are as follows.

All India figures are before 18% GST. Separate regional price lists exist for other markets, and plan inclusions have changed before, so confirm current terms with the vendor rather than budgeting from this table alone. Our Arka 360 review covers the current-brand plan detail in full.

What we could not verify. No pricing published under The Solar Labs brand itself. Any INR or USD figure you see attached to that name should be treated as stale unless the vendor confirms it. We also found conflicting third-party numbers for the non-India plans and have deliberately left those out rather than repeat a figure we could not stand behind.

Genuine Strengths

These are real advantages, not politeness before a sales pitch.

It was built for Indian workflows, not translated into them. This is the single biggest thing the product has going for it, and it is easy to underrate if you have never watched a team fight a US tool. Most solar design software sold in India was scoped for North American or European buyers first. The financial model assumes generation credited against a retail utility bill. The compliance layer assumes NEC. The module catalogue is weighted toward brands an Indian EPC will never quote. Starting from an Indian premise instead means the defaults are closer to right in the first hour, and Indian installers notice that immediately.

Browser-based, with no install friction. A designer needs a laptop and a login. There is no workstation spec to argue about, no licence dongle, and no version drift between the office machine and the site engineer’s laptop. For a growing EPC hiring junior designers, day-one productivity is a real cost line, and cloud delivery cuts it.

Design carries through to a proposal in one tool. The platform runs the actual sequence an installer runs: 3D roof model, shading study, generation report, then a customer-facing techno-commercial proposal. That last step is where a lot of engineering-first software gives up and hands you a spreadsheet. Removing the rebuild between design and quote is worth more to a residential team than another decimal place of yield accuracy.

Shading and 3D modelling depth for the price band. Shading simulation across the year with heat map output, terrain handling, and CAD export sitting on every published India plan is a reasonable feature load at ₹46,000 a year. Against tools costing three times that, the gap in core residential design output is smaller than the price gap suggests.

Open pricing. Publishing a plan table lets a buyer self-qualify without a sales call. In a category where “contact us” is the norm, that is a genuine courtesy and it earns trust.

Limitations We Are Confident Of

Bankable yield reporting is not the centre of gravity. The clearest evidence is the product’s own plan structure: PVsyst export appears on the Premium tier. That is a sensible design decision, and it also tells you where lender-grade modelling is expected to happen. If your pipeline includes project-finance C&I or PPA deals, expect a second licence and a second workflow for the yield report. That is not a criticism of the software’s honesty, it is a scoping fact you should budget for.

Multi-country work means multiple editions. The vendor publishes distinct regional editions and separate price lists. For a team selling in one market that is clean and probably cheaper. For a team quoting across India plus the Gulf, Africa or Southeast Asia, it means configuration effort repeats per region rather than living in one compliance layer.

Brand and continuity risk. A rename is not a fault, but it is a diligence item. If you are signing an annual plan on the strength of reviews written under an older name, ask directly about product roadmap continuity, data portability and what happens to legacy accounts. Get the answer in writing before you commit.

We are not going to claim the product lacks any specific feature we could not test. Several capabilities we would want to assess, including depth of DISCOM tariff coverage and how ALMM filtering is handled, were not verifiable from published material, so we have left them as open questions for your own trial rather than asserting an absence.

Who Should Buy It

Buy it if most of these describe you.

• You are an Indian residential or small commercial installer, and rooftop work is the bulk of your pipeline.
• Your bottleneck is turning enquiries into signed proposals fast, not producing lender-grade yield studies.
• You sell inside one market and have no near-term plan to quote across borders.
• Your budget sits in the ₹46,000 to ₹1,00,000 per year band and predictable published pricing matters more than negotiated enterprise terms.
• You want new designers productive in days, without a workstation build or a training programme.

At that profile the product is a sound, honestly priced choice, and arguing against it would be a pitch rather than a review.

Who Should Not Buy It

• Teams whose revenue depends on bankable yield reports. If a lender, an IPP or a PPA counterparty expects a formal yield study as standard output, you are buying a second licence anyway. Price the pair, not the plan.
• Teams quoting across several countries from one office. Regional editions duplicate work that a single multi-market compliance layer would absorb.
• Utility-scale and large ground-mount developers. The product’s demonstrated depth is rooftop residential and commercial. Large-array layout optimisation is a different discipline.
• Buyers who need documented compliance breadth as a procurement condition. If your tender or client requires named IS code clearances, ALMM-filtered catalogues and DISCOM tariff sourcing to be evidenced from the tool, verify each one in trial rather than assuming.

Alternatives Worth Comparing

SurgePV, for compliance breadth and multi-market work. SurgePV runs $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year depending on team size. The argument for it is not that the India-built incumbent is weak, because it is not. The argument is scope. SurgePV ships an ALMM-aware module database, PM Surya Ghar subsidy bands, a DISCOM tariff library covering the major state utilities, and IS code clearances, and it carries NEC, IEC and AS/NZS alongside them in the same licence. Design, 8,760-hour module-level shading, financial modelling and white-label proposals sit in one seat rather than splitting across plans or a second tool. For an Indian EPC that stays Indian and stays residential, that breadth is capability you may not use. For a team whose next two years include C&I bankability, export work, or tenders that ask you to evidence code clearances, it is the difference between one workflow and three. The switching comparison walks the migration path.

PVsyst, when the contract names it. Some financing agreements specify PVsyst output by name. In that case the question is not which tool is better, it is which tool the lender accepts. Use PVsyst for the bankability report and something faster upstream. Our PVsyst review covers where the substitution works and where it does not.

HelioScope, for engineering-led commercial work. If your mix tilts to large commercial rooftops and ground mounts, HelioScope’s layout flexibility and yield reporting fit better than a residential-first workflow. It is not positioned as a proposal tool, so most teams pair it with something that is. See the HelioScope review.

For the wider India picture, the solar design software India guide sets out the full requirement set: IS code clearances, ALMM filtering, PM Surya Ghar subsidy structure and DISCOM tariff coverage, with every major platform scored against each. The pricing comparison puts annual costs side by side.

Verdict

The Solar Labs earned its reputation honestly. Building solar design software from an Indian premise, when nearly every competitor was retrofitting a US product, was the right call and Indian installers were right to reward it. As ARKA 360 it remains a credible, openly priced, browser-based platform that does residential rooftop work well and carries it through to a proposal without a rebuild step. If that is your business, buy it and stop reading comparison tables.

Our recommendation tilts to SurgePV for a narrower reason than “it is better.” It is a scope argument. The compliance layer runs deeper on the India requirements that increasingly appear in tenders and subsidy paperwork, the design-to-proposal path and the bankable yield output live in the same licence rather than across two, and the multi-market coverage means a team exporting beyond India does not maintain parallel configurations. At $1,299 to $1,899 per user per year that is a higher line item than a ₹46,000 Lite plan, and it should be, because it is absorbing work you would otherwise pay for twice.

About This Comparison

Pricing, features and product positioning described here were checked in August 2026 using publicly available vendor information. Vendors change pricing, packaging and capabilities without notice, and several do not publish prices at all. Treat every figure as a starting point for your own enquiry rather than a quotation, and confirm current terms directly with each vendor before making a purchasing decision.

All product names, logos and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Reference to them here is for identification and comparison only and does not imply any affiliation with, sponsorship by, or endorsement from those companies. SurgePV is a Qbits Energy product, so treat this as a vendor comparison written by an interested party and weigh it alongside independent sources and your own trial of the tools.

Where we could not verify a claim from a primary source we have said so in the text rather than repeating it. If you believe anything here is inaccurate or out of date, contact us and we will review and correct it.