Sundial
Sun Seeker alternative for checking from home
Sun Seeker is a paid phone app that overlays the sun's path on your camera view, which is hard to beat when you're standing on the spot. Sundial is a free browser map for checking a place before you go: it draws the surrounding buildings in 3D and shows where their shadows fall at any time of year.
Princes Street Gardens on a June eveningWhat Sun Seeker does well
Sun Seeker is made by ozPDA, the app brand of Ajnaware Pty Ltd in Sydney. It first launched on iOS in 2009 and is now on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Android.
Its best-known feature is the augmented reality view. Hold up your phone and the camera shows the sun's path across the sky with each hour marked, so you can see straight away whether the tree, the hill or the neighbour's extension in front of you will block it. No map data can match what the camera actually sees.
There's plenty more. A flat compass view shows the sun's direction, height and the shadow length ratio. A map view puts solar direction arrows on each hour. You can choose any date and any place, and its App Store listing says 40,000+ cities and custom locations are available offline. It lists civil, nautical and astronomical twilight, golden and blue hours, UV index, solar irradiance and eclipses, and it can send notifications for sun events such as golden hour. There's a widget and a watch app too.
For professional shade studies, the same developer sells Sun Seeker Pro for macOS, which analyses a photo sphere to list the sunlight hours at a spot for any day of the year.
What it costs
Sun Seeker is a paid app. As of October 2026 it's £11.99 on the UK App Store ($11.99 in the US) and £7.99 on Google Play in the UK.
Where Sundial is different
Sundial is free and runs in the browser, so there's nothing to install and no account. It's built for looking at a place from somewhere else: a flat you're about to view, a holiday rental, a client's garden, a venue for an outdoor event.
Search the address and Sundial draws every building within 300 m in 3D from OpenStreetMap, then casts their shadows for the date and minute you pick. The sun's arc for the day sits over the rooftops with the June and December solstice arcs beside it. The Sun hours view colours each patch of ground and roof by its hours of direct sun that day, which is handy for comparing two gardens or two sides of a street. Every view has its own link, so you can send exactly what you're looking at to someone else.
What Sundial doesn't have: augmented reality, a compass, notifications, offline use, twilight times, UV or eclipse data.
Side by side
| Sun Seeker | Sundial | |
|---|---|---|
| Price (October 2026) | £11.99 iOS, £7.99 Android | Free |
| Where it runs | iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Android | Any current browser |
| Augmented reality camera view | Yes | No |
| Works offline | Built-in cities and custom locations | No |
| Buildings and their shadows | Seen through the camera on site | 3D from OpenStreetMap, from anywhere |
| Any date and location | Yes | Yes |
| Golden hour, twilight, notifications | Yes | No |
| Sun-hours heatmap for an area | No equivalent listed | Yes |
| Shareable link to the exact view | No equivalent listed | Yes |
Which one to use
Use Sun Seeker when you're on site. At a viewing, on a photo shoot or out on a walk, the AR view shows the real obstructions in front of you, including trees, hills and anything built since the map was last updated. It's also the one to use for golden hour alerts.
Use Sundial before you go, or when you can't get there. In Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh on 21 June, the sun sets at 22:04 on a bearing of about 317°, well round to the north-west. The link above opens the gardens at 21:30 that evening so you can see which side the buildings shade first. Then drag the date to December, when the noon sun only reaches 10.6°, and compare on the sun path map.
Plenty of people would use both: Sundial to shortlist places, Sun Seeker to confirm on the day.
Limits. Sundial's building heights come from OpenStreetMap, with a typical height assumed where none is mapped. Only individually mapped trees appear, always in full leaf. Hills, cloud and buildings more than 300 m away aren't modelled, so check anything important on site.