Heliora vs PhotoPills vs PeakFinder

If you want a free, no-install tool that computes the sun, moon and eclipse geometry for a spot and checks it against the real terrain horizon, open Heliora. If you want an augmented-reality viewfinder, offline operation, or the full photographic calculator set, buy PhotoPills. If you want to know the name of the mountain in front of you with no signal, buy PeakFinder.

They overlap, but they are not the same tool, and nobody is served by a comparison that pretends otherwise. What follows names each one's advantages before it names Heliora's.

Heliora's claim is the combination, not any single row. Each piece below exists somewhere else; we are not aware of another tool that puts all of them behind one free URL with nothing to install. If you find one, tell us and this page will say so.

• A full 360° ray-cast horizon, computed for you. 360 rays, one per compass degree, decoded from AWS Terrain Tiles at roughly 110 m ground sampling, with Earth-curvature correction. Sunrise and sunset are recomputed against that profile automatically. You do not mark an obstacle; the whole skyline is the obstacle.
• Line-up scans gated on that horizon. Pick a summit, and Heliora scans 18 months for full-moon or naked-eye-planet alignments behind it, then discards the crossings that terrain would hide or that happen in daylight. The filter is the point: an unfiltered list of azimuth crossings contains nights you cannot photograph.
• Free, with no account and no key. No sign-up, no paywall, no tier. Every data provider behind it is free and keyless.
• Every view is a URL. ?lat=&lng=&date=&t=&sky=1 plus optional tlat/tlng for a target pin. Times are pin-local, so a shared link renders the same moment in any browser timezone, and answer engines can construct one directly.
• It runs in a browser. Desktop or phone, same URL. PhotoPills has no browser version.
• Eclipses rendered against the terrain. Any solar eclipse from 2024–2035, from any pin, with contact times, obscuration, corona and sky darkening, plus the ridge that may take the low sun mid-event drawn where it actually is.
• 20-year clear-sky climatology per pin and hour, from Open-Meteo's ERA5 archive. It is history, explicitly not a forecast: the odds that this hour of this date has been clear at this spot.

A vendor-written comparison is only credible if it states its own limitations. Here they are:

• No offline mode. Elevation tiles are fetched on demand. Cached tiles survive in the browser, but a first visit to a new area needs a connection.
• No AR. Built, shipped, and switched off after it proved unreliable in the field.
• No photographic calculators. No depth of field, no exposure, no time-lapse, no gear database.
• Terrain resolution is ~110 m. Rock pinnacles, buildings and narrow gaps in a ridge can be missed. Terrain-adjusted times are typically accurate to 1–3 minutes, not seconds.
• Lakes and rivers render as land. Water detection is sea-level only.
• It is an independent project running on free infrastructure, with no paid support tier and no native mobile app.

All of this, plus the accuracy bounds and a ray-cast bug we shipped and published, is on the method & accuracy page.

Heliora is newer than either app, so instead of years of releases it can point to independent coverage. Around the 12 August 2026 solar eclipse, four outlets wrote about Heliora, none of them prompted by us:

• Il Post (Italy) wrote about Heliora twice, on 9 August and 12 August 2026, including a walkthrough of the time slider and coordinate entry.
• Internazionale (Italy) wrote about Heliora on 11 August 2026.
• t-online (Germany) covered Heliora on 12 August 2026 in a dedicated article, with a screenshot of the app.
• Heliora was also linked from CERN's eclipse-safety announcement for its Geneva site (10 August 2026), as a way to find a viewing spot. That page is a safety notice from CERN's HSE department, not a review or an endorsement of Heliora.

Is there a free alternative to PhotoPills?

Heliora is free and needs no account, no install and no payment. It covers the planning subset of what PhotoPills does (sun and moon paths, rise and set times, golden hour, Milky Way, eclipses) and adds a 360° terrain horizon ray-cast from real elevation data, so it can tell you when a ridge actually takes the sun rather than the flat-horizon time. It is not a full replacement: PhotoPills has an AR viewfinder, works fully offline, and includes depth-of-field, field-of-view, exposure and time-lapse calculators that Heliora has no equivalent for. If you want a free tool for the geometry-and-terrain half of the job, Heliora does that. If you want the whole photographic toolbox in your pocket with no signal, PhotoPills is worth the ten dollars.

Is there a web version of PhotoPills?

No. PhotoPills is an iOS and Android app; as of August 2026 there is no browser or desktop version, and reviewers list this as a standing limitation. Heliora is browser-only and works the other way round: it runs on any modern desktop or mobile browser with nothing to install, and every view is a shareable URL carrying latitude, longitude, date, time and an optional target pin, so a planned shot can be sent to someone else as a link that opens on exactly that minute.

PhotoPills vs PeakFinder: which should I use to plan a moonrise shot behind a mountain?

They solve different halves. PeakFinder renders an offline 360° panorama from a built-in elevation model, names over 1,000,000 summits, and can overlay the sun and moon trajectory for a date you pick, so it is the best tool for identifying which peak you are looking at and seeing the moon path against that skyline. PhotoPills answers the inverse question with its Find tool: it searches forward in time for the dates and times the moon reaches an azimuth and elevation you specify, and its black obstacle pin gives the elevation angle to one point you mark. Heliora combines the two directions: it ray-casts the full 360° terrain horizon from your viewpoint, then scans the next 18 months for full-moon and naked-eye-planet line-ups behind a named summit, discarding the candidates that terrain or daylight would hide. All three are legitimate answers; Heliora's is the free browser one.

What does PhotoPills do that Heliora does not?

Several things. PhotoPills has a 3D AR view that overlays the sun, moon, Milky Way, celestial equator and Polaris on the live camera; Heliora's AR is currently disabled. PhotoPills works fully offline; Heliora needs a connection to fetch elevation tiles. PhotoPills carries depth-of-field, field-of-view, hyperfocal, exposure, long-exposure and time-lapse calculators, plus a plans manager and a large body of tutorials, and has been actively developed since 2013 with a reputation to match. Heliora has none of those. PeakFinder likewise works offline and names summits at a scale Heliora does not attempt: its database covers over 1,000,000 peaks worldwide.

Do PhotoPills and PeakFinder account for terrain?

Both do, in their own way. The difference is scope and automation, not presence. PeakFinder renders the real skyline from a built-in elevation model, so terrain is what you are looking at. PhotoPills lets you drop a black obstacle pin on a point and reports the elevation angle from your position to it, drawing the sun or moon azimuth line dashed when that obstacle would hide the body; altitudes can also be entered by hand. That is a check against one point on one bearing, performed by you. Heliora casts 360 rays from your pin, one per degree of compass bearing, decodes the elevation profile along each, and uses the resulting horizon automatically: sunrise and sunset are recomputed against it, and line-up scan results are filtered by it without being asked. Accuracy bounds and known limitations for that method are published in full.

How were these figures checked?

Prices, platforms and feature claims were read from each product's own published material on 17 August 2026, not from memory: the PhotoPills App Store listing and PhotoPills user guide, and the PeakFinder App Store listing and peakfinder.com. Prices are the US App Store figures and vary by store and region. Software changes; if something here is out of date or wrong, tell us and it will be corrected.