A PhotoPills alternative for iPhone, compared honestly

The short version

PhotoPills is the reference tool in this category and it is a fair price for what it does. On the App Store it is a single purchase of 10.99 USD, rated 4.7 out of 5 from about 1,500 ratings, and it is far more than a sun and moon planner: it carries depth of field, hyperfocal, long exposure and timelapse calculators, a plans manager for organising shoots, and a large library of tutorials built up over years.

Sunlit is a newer and narrower tool. It is free to install with a free tier that does not expire, and one optional purchase at 9.99 EUR. It does one thing: where the sun, the moon and the galactic centre are, how sure it is about that, and what your own skyline does to the answer.

If you want one app to plan a whole shoot including the exposure maths, buy PhotoPills. If you want a precise, offline ephemeris that is honest about its own uncertainty, and you want to try it before paying anything, Sunlit is worth a look.

Where PhotoPills is the better buy

• You want the exposure arithmetic in the same app. Sunlit has no depth of field, hyperfocal, long exposure or timelapse calculator and none is planned in what ships today.
• You plan shoots as projects. A plans manager that keeps a shot list against dates and locations is real work that Sunlit does not do. Sunlit saves places and nothing more.
• You learn from tutorials. PhotoPills has years of published guides and a community around them. Sunlit has this website.
• You want a proven track record. Roughly 1,500 ratings at 4.7 is evidence. A new listing with no ratings is not.
• You do not want advertising. PhotoPills is paid and shows none. Sunlit's free version shows advertising, loaded by Google's ad kit over the network, and you have to buy Sunlit Pro to remove it.

Where Sunlit is different

• You can try the real thing for nothing. Today, at the place you are standing, is free forever in all four views. It is not a trial and there is no countdown.
• It states its uncertainty. The AR view shows the heading uncertainty in degrees at all times. The UV and irradiance figures are labelled clear sky models everywhere they appear, because they are computed from geometry and an ozone climatology rather than measured.
• It does not invent times. Rise and set come from a numerical solver rather than an interpolation, so grazing events and high latitudes come out right, and polar day and polar night are reported in words instead of a time that never happens.
• Your horizon, not a flat one. Sweep the camera along the real skyline and Sunlit stores it as 36 sectors of ten degrees, then gives you the sunrise you will actually see and the periods when the sun is up but behind the ridge.
• It names why there is no Milky Way window. Twilight, moonlight, season, or a core that never clears the horizon. Each of those has a different answer.
• It runs with no connection. Every astronomical figure is computed on the iPhone, and 34,106 cities with their coordinates, elevations and time zones are carried inside the app, so a search works in aeroplane mode.

An honest way to decide

Install Sunlit, since that costs nothing, and use the free tier on a real shoot. If the sun path, the azimuth readouts, the twilights and the AR view are the whole of what you were going to use a planner for, the 9.99 EUR opens the rest. If you find yourself wanting the exposure calculators and a plans manager next to them, that is PhotoPills telling you it is the right tool, and 10.99 USD is not much for a decision that clear.