If you design solar in Australia, you almost certainly know OpenSolar. It is the tool a huge slice of the industry runs their proposals through, and for good reason. But there is a question we hear on nearly every Strategy Call: is the OpenSolar CRM enough to run my whole sales process, or do I need something else on top of it?
This is an honest review from people who integrate with OpenSolar every week. We are not here to talk you out of it. OpenSolar is a genuinely good platform and our clients love it. The point is to be clear about what the built-in CRM handles brilliantly, and the exact place installers tend to hit the wall, so you can make a call that fits how your business actually works.
Short version if you are skimming: keep OpenSolar for design and proposals, and add a follow-up layer for everything that happens between "proposal sent" and "deal signed". Here is the detail.
What OpenSolar is
OpenSolar is a Sydney-founded platform, launched in 2017, built around solar design and sales. Its headline feature is the price: it is free forever for installers, with no per-seat fees and unlimited users and projects. The model is partner-funded rather than subscription-funded, which is unusual and a big part of why it spread so fast.
And spread it has. OpenSolar is used by more than 25,000 solar professionals across 160-plus countries, with over 6 million system designs created on the platform. For design accuracy, proposal quality and sheer reach, it has earned its place. When we say "keep OpenSolar", we mean it.
What the built-in CRM does well
OpenSolar is more than a design tool. It carries a real workflow layer that many installers use as a light CRM, and there is a lot to like.
Design and proposal in one place
The core strength is obvious: you design the system, price it and generate a polished online proposal without leaving the platform. For a rep juggling site assessments and quotes, having the design and the customer-facing proposal joined up is a real time saver. There is no exporting a design into a separate quoting tool and hoping the numbers match. The customer gets a clean, interactive proposal, and you get a design you can stand behind on the roof.
A workflow language built for solar
OpenSolar speaks the language of a solar job. Projects move through stages and milestones - Presold, Sold, Installed - and you can "mark as sold" when a deal closes. That structure maps neatly onto how installers already think about a pipeline, so most teams find it intuitive without much training. It is a solar-native workflow, not a generic CRM bent to fit.
The Project History Tracker
This is the feature more installers should be using. OpenSolar's Project History Tracker logs when a customer opens your email, when they view the proposal and how long they spend looking at it. That is gold. It tells you exactly which leads are warm right now and which have gone quiet, which is the single most useful signal for timing a follow-up.
Where installers hit the wall
Here is the honest part. OpenSolar tells you a customer viewed your proposal three times last night. It does not pick up the phone, send the text or work that lead until it converts. That job still lands on you, and that is where good quotes quietly die.
Follow-up is manual
The Project History Tracker shows you the signal, but acting on it is a manual task. Someone has to notice the proposal was viewed, remember to follow up, choose the right message and send it - across dozens of open quotes at once. On a busy week, when your team is on the tools and the roof, that just does not happen consistently. The proposal that got viewed twice and never chased is the most expensive lead in your business, because you already paid to win and quote it.
There is no SMS or voice follow-up engine
Most solar customers do not reply to a single proposal email. They reply to a well-timed text, a call at the right moment, and a bit of friendly persistence. The built-in CRM was not designed to run outbound SMS sequences, place calls or answer an after-hours enquiry the instant it lands. It is a design and proposal platform first. Multi-channel, always-on follow-up is simply a different job.
It ends at your proposal software
OpenSolar owns the design-to-proposal step. It does not connect the lead sources you pay for, your job management system, your payments and your accounting into one pipeline. So installers end up with the proposal living in one place, leads in another, jobs in a third, and no single view of a customer from first enquiry to install and review. Re-keying the same details across those tools is where hours vanish and things slip.
None of this is a knock on OpenSolar. It is doing exactly what it was built to do. The wall is not a flaw in the design tool - it is the gap between "proposal sent" and "deal signed" that no proposal platform was ever meant to fill on its own.
How to keep OpenSolar and close the gap
The good news is you do not have to replace anything. OpenSolar ships an API with webhooks on its Project, Contact and Event models, which means the proposal activity it tracks can trigger action somewhere else the moment it happens. That is exactly what our OpenSolar integration is built on. You carry on designing and quoting in OpenSolar; the follow-up simply starts happening automatically in the background.
Here is what changes when you add a follow-up engine on top of OpenSolar:
- Sent, viewed and signed become triggers. When a proposal is sent, opened or signed in OpenSolar, that event flows straight into your CRM and starts a follow-up - no one has to notice it manually.
- Andy chases the quote for you. Andy, our AI proposal follow-up agent, watches that proposal activity and follows up by text so viewed-but-not-signed quotes turn back into conversations. It works from your call notes, so the follow-up references the actual conversation, not a generic template.
- Your systems stay in sync. The integration syncs dozens of fields between OpenSolar and your CRM, so one entry updates everywhere and you stop re-keying the same job across tools.
- Every lead gets answered fast. With Piper handling new enquiries around the clock, leads are engaged in seconds rather than hours - so more of them reach the proposal stage in the first place.
That is the whole idea behind Solar AI-Q: integration first, automation second, AI on top. OpenSolar keeps doing what it does best, and the follow-up engine sits across your lead sources, proposals, jobs and payments as one pipeline. If you want the detail on how the quote chase actually runs, we go deep on it in our guide to OpenSolar proposal follow-up, and there is a step-by-step playbook in how to automate proposal follow-up in OpenSolar and Pylon.
Results vary by business, but the pattern is consistent - answer faster, follow up harder, and the same lead flow produces more installs.