Best Permanent Lighting Software for Installers and Dealers

What should permanent lighting software be judged on?#

Three things a seasonal tool never had to care about, because a seasonal quote is mostly feet times a rate.

Jumps. A permanent install has unlit cable running between lit runs: across a valley, over a garage door, down to the next eave. That cable and the connectors cost money and ladder time but no nodes. A tool that only knows lit feet either buries the jump in the per-foot rate (so your bungalow customer subsidises your four-gable customer) or ignores it. The honest way is a jump as its own run type at its own rate, plus a flat amount per jump if you want one. Our permanent per-foot pricing method shows what that adds on a real house.

Nodes and controllers. The customer is buying a count of nodes and at least one controller, and a second zone means a second box. The controller should be a priced line with a quantity, not a percentage hidden in the rate. Node count is footage divided by spacing, so any tool that knows the true footage can produce it; a tool that only produces a picture cannot.

Track versus no-track. A track system runs an aluminum channel and takes longer to cut and hang; a no-track system clips the line to the fascia. They are different products at different per-foot prices, and the quote should say which one the customer is buying. That means two product lines on the rate card.

If a tool passes all three, it can quote permanent work. If it passes none, it is a mockup tool, which is fine as long as you know that going in.

Permr#

Permr is the shortest page in this comparison. The headline is "Close 3x More Permanent Lighting Jobs," the promise is "professional designs in under 2 minutes" on iPhone, Android, iPad and desktop, and the rest is a sign-up form. There is no price, no feature list, no screenshots I could examine and no company name on the page; the search listing calls it a waitlist. The words jump, node, controller, track, measure and quote do not appear.

I will not guess at features that are not published. What I can say is that nothing on the page today lets you price a job, so it fails all three tests by default. If Permr publishes pricing or features, this section gets rewritten the same week.

Strandr#

Strandr is $197 a year with a 7-day trial and is the most used mockup tool in the trade, with 1,700+ contractors on its home page. It lists permanent and architectural lighting as a supported use, and it bundles Inchr, a free photo measuring tool that gives you footage from a reference length. That is real value at the price, and if a picture closes your permanent jobs Strandr will do it fast.

It is still a picture. Strandr's own comparison post says no built-in CRM or invoicing, and neither its product page nor its home page mentions nodes, controllers or jumps. The Inchr footage does not flow into a price because Strandr does not price. Its blog does publish installer ranges for permanent work, $15 to $35 per foot depending on the system, but those are numbers in an article, not a rate card in the app. Full comparison at Strandr alternative.

LightMaster#

LightMaster is the most complete platform in the list: Free (mockups lite), Lite at $24.99 a month or $187 a year (AI mockups, QuickMeasure, CRM, estimates), Standard at $79.99 a month (adds pipeline, scheduling, invoicing and payments, four users) and Professional at $99.99 a month (route planner, crew management, QuickBooks, nine users). Every account starts with 7 days of Professional, no card.

On permanent, the home page says it can "design permanent, year-round lighting with RGB mockups, then manage installs, controllers, service visits, and recurring maintenance." The mockup page draws down-lights along the eave, up-lights on columns and individually lit RGB points, then converts the photo to dusk with AI and can export the animated show as an MP4. For selling a colour-changing system, that render is the best in the field.

Where it stops: nothing on the mockup or measuring pages describes a bill of materials, node count or jump coming out of the render. QuickMeasure gives footage from a photo reference or from a satellite trace with a default +8 percent buffer, and the satellite provider is not named, which matters for the reason in our Street View and satellite measurement rules. Pricing is typed into the estimate from that footage rather than derived from a drawn run. The mobile app is listed as coming soon.

LightQuoter#

LightQuoter is free with every feature and pays for itself with a 2 percent platform fee on payments you collect through Stripe, on top of Stripe's 2.9 percent plus 30 cents; Pro is $497 a year with no platform fee. It has had a dedicated permanent quoting page since May 29, 2026, and it is the closest of the four to a real permanent quote: you trace the roofline on satellite imagery, the footage flows into per-foot pricing, and track, channels, controllers, transformers and labour appear as separate line items. It signs and takes payment.

Two gaps. The permanent page does not mention jumps, no-track systems or node counts; footage is footage. And the footage comes from tracing satellite imagery, with a Street View overlay for the mockup. Aerial imagery undercounts gables and returns because it looks straight down at them, and Google's terms do not allow storing or measuring from its imagery, which is why we designed around it. LightQuoter's own matrix on that page compares itself to Tinsel, Strandr and Holiday Home Concepts and leaves out LightMaster.

GlowBid#

GlowBid is ours, opens to installers on November 1, 2026, and the permanent rate card is the reason it exists. Product lines are separate: permanent track, permanent no-track and C9 seasonal each carry their own per-foot rate by run type, and you can add your own lines. Run types are roofline, ridge line, peak, ground, tree and jump, so the jump is drawn, measured and priced like everything else, at its own rate plus an optional flat charge per jump. Peaks carry a pitch premium and an optional flat per-peak charge; upper storeys carry a percentage; controllers, transformers and timers are add-on lines with quantities. Minimum job, deposit rules and tax are on the same card.

The footage comes from your own photo, scaled from a known length like a 16 ft garage door, and every run carries a source tag (reference-scaled or manual) and a confidence level. Runs angled away from the camera get a foreshortening warning so you type the tape length. The quote PDF carries the drawing, footage by run, line items, a scope block and the disclaimer that photo measurements are estimates confirmed on site. The customer signs on their phone with a SHA-256 fingerprint on the document, Stripe takes the deposit, and the invoice carries a payments ledger.

The limits, plainly. No AI photo-real render; the mockup is your drawn runs lit on your own photo. No manufacturer SKU catalogue, so the bill of materials comes out in your names, not Trimlight's or Gemstone's. No QuickBooks sync. It is new, and nobody has run a November on it yet. Founding pricing is $299, $499 and $699 a year for Core, Pro and Ultimate ($499, $899 and $1,299 regular; $69, $119 and $169 a month), 7-day trial with no card, 30-day money-back, 100 founding places, USD at launch. Details on the pricing page.

The same house through each tool#

A two-storey with a one-storey garage bump-out and two front gables, front elevation only: 122 ft of roofline (48 ft on the garage and porch, 74 ft upstairs), four peak runs totalling 48 ft, three jumps totalling 16 ft, one controller. This is the house from our permanent per-foot pricing article, and it takes about ten minutes to draw in the free roofline tool.

In Permr and Strandr you get a picture of that house lit; the footage stays in your head or in Inchr. In LightMaster you get a dusk render and one QuickMeasure footage number to type against a rate. In LightQuoter you get a satellite trace, a per-foot roofline line and separate lines for track, controller and labour; the 16 ft of jumps is inside the roofline footage or missing. In GlowBid, on the default track card ($25 per foot roofline, $28 peaks with a 15 percent pitch premium, $12 per foot of jump, 10 percent per upper storey, $250 controller; our own $25 per jump and $40 per peak flat charges added), it comes out like this:

Those are GlowBid's default rates plus two flat charges we set ourselves; you replace all of them with your own costs. Switch the product line to no-track and the same drawing reprices at $20, $23 and $10 per foot without redrawing anything. The jump, the peak and the controller are lines the customer can read, and they came from the drawing, not from memory.

When to choose them instead#

Choose Strandr if you close on the picture, already have quoting and payments you like, and want the cheapest, fastest mockup with the biggest decoration library. At $197 it is hard to argue with.

Choose LightMaster if you want the best-looking permanent render on the market and a full CRM, scheduling, payments and QuickBooks under one login, and you are comfortable typing the price from a footage number. Check the mobile app status first.

Choose LightQuoter if you are a seasonal shop adding a few permanent jobs, most deposits come by card, and $0 up front matters more than the 2 percent. It does more of the permanent workflow than any tool but ours, and it is free to find out.

Wait on Permr until it publishes a price and a feature list. There is nothing to evaluate today.

Choose GlowBid if jumps, peaks, controllers and the track-versus-no-track question are where your quotes go wrong, or if you want the drawing, the footage and the price to be one object.

Moving your permanent quoting to GlowBid#

Photos. Whatever tool you used, the photos are yours. Upload the same photo; there is no importer for Strandr, LightMaster or LightQuoter projects and I am not promising one.

Rate card, 20 minutes. Two product lines (track and no-track) with per-foot rates for roofline, ridge line, peak and jump; a pitch premium and a storey premium; flat per-jump and per-peak charges if you want them; controller, transformer and timer as add-ons; minimum job, deposit percent, tax. If you are a dealer, your manufacturer's dealer price is your floor; the dealer software page has a starting table.

First quote, 15 minutes. Address for the live Street View preview (display only, never stored), your photo on the canvas, scale from the garage door, draw the runs, check any run flagged as foreshortened against your tape, send the PDF, get it signed and deposited on the driveway.

Run both for a week. Quote your next few houses in both. Where the old render looked better, tell us. Where the jump line saved you a cable argument, you will know. Both money-back windows are 30 days.

Mistakes when buying permanent software#

• Buying on the render. A dusk render sells the job and then the crew finds the jump that nobody priced. Ask the vendor to show you a quote with a jump on it before you pay.
• Assuming one per-foot number covers track and no-track. It does not, and the customer who picked no-track will ask why they paid track money.
• Tracing satellite imagery for a permanent quote. Gables and returns read short from above, and Google's terms do not allow measuring from its imagery. Take your own photo and say on the quote that it is an estimate confirmed on site.
• Ignoring the controller line. A second zone is a second box; if the box is a percentage, the second one is free.
• Buying a seasonal tool's "permanent mode" without checking for agreements. A permanent sale needs a warranty clause and a service response clause, not a takedown window.
• Choosing on price alone. Free with a 2 percent fee is $120 on a $6,000 job; $197 for a picture is $197 plus whatever you pay to quote. The right question is what the tool costs per signed job.