Solset AI vs Pylon: pay per design, or pay per workspace?

Pylon is a Sydney company whose design and proposal tool is sold the way a print shop sells pages: a few dollars per project, no monthly fee, unlimited users, five free projects to start. It is popular with small Australian and UK installers, and its comparison pages against OpenSolar and HelioScope are the model other vendors copy.

Where Pylon is ahead

• Pricing simplicity: $4 for a standard project and $10 for a pro project, with no subscription at all. If you quote ten jobs a month, that is a trivial bill.
• Battery design against real retailer tariffs: Pylon’s battery tool uses Australian time-of-use rates and shows payback for solar-plus-storage combinations. Solset AI sizes a battery from the customer’s load shape and bill, with the tariff typed in rather than pulled from a retailer library.
• High-resolution imagery in select countries, and integrations with Xero, ServiceM8, Mailchimp and Nearmap.
• Reviews: a Capterra profile with a published score. Solset AI has no review profile with enough reviews to quote.

Where Solset AI is ahead

• The CRM is not an add-on. Pylon’s CRM costs extra per user per month; Solset AI’s CRM is the Free plan, and the design, quotation, procurement, project and invoice all sit on the same customer record.
• Pay per design exists here too: a single design can be bought with no subscription, and the first design in a new workspace is free.
• Engineering beyond the layout: a structural analysis with wind loads, a STAAD export, a single-line diagram, cable sizing to IEC, DXF import of CAD roof plans and PAN file import for modules.
• Country rules: GST, PM Surya Ghar slabs and ALMM flags for Indian workspaces, switched off elsewhere. Pylon’s tariffs and imagery are built for Australia and the UK.

Pricing, side by side

Pylon: $4.00 per Standard project, $10.00 per Pro project, bought as credit packs, unlimited users, five free Standard projects with no card; the Solar CRM is an add-on from $49 per user per month, card payments cost 2.5% and e-signature $0.80 per project. Figures are from the competitor’s own website, read on 8 October 2026; check their pricing page before relying on them.

Solset AI prices per workspace, not per user: a plan covers the company, extra seats are an add-on, and the Free plan never expires and needs no card. Subscriptions are billed in rupees or dollars, and the Design Studio can also be used one roof at a time with pay-per-design credits. Every figure is on the plans page, where it is read from the live catalogue rather than typed into a blog post.

Who should choose which

If you are a one- or two-person installer in Australia or the UK who wants a proposal in two minutes and nothing else, Pylon is hard to beat on price. If you need the quotation to turn into a purchase order, an installation schedule and an invoice without re-entering anything, and you want to pay for the company rather than per seat, Solset AI is the better fit.

If Pylon fits the way you sell, use it; the point of this post is that you can decide from the facts. If the job after the proposal is where your margin leaks, start a free Solset workspace, add one real enquiry and take it to a quotation. Our other comparisons are on the compare page.