Cloud astrology software built for a practice, not just a chart

What is cloud astrology software?

That description now covers a lot of tools, and they are not interchangeable. Most web based astrology software is a calculator that moved into the browser: you get beautiful wheels, a long list of techniques, and a place to save charts. Steliara is the other kind. The calculation is there, on the Swiss Ephemeris, but the thing it is organised around is the practice: a profile for every person you read for, and the consultation itself recorded, transcribed and summarized onto that profile.

Which one you want depends on whether you are calculating charts or running a practice. The rest of this page is about telling those two apart honestly, including the places where the cheaper tools win.

Is there astrology software that runs properly on a Mac?

Until recently you could not run the reference professional program on a Mac at all without emulation. That has changed: Solar Fire X is a native Mac app for macOS 14 or newer, on Intel and Apple silicon, and Astrolabe says Windows and Parallels are not required. It is US$360 new, or US$99 as an upgrade from Solar Fire 9, which is no longer sold. Astrolabe's support page still says it does not officially support Solar Fire 9 and earlier on a Mac, so that is the case to be careful with if you are keeping an old licence.

So if you want that depth on Apple hardware, buy a Mac-native program: Solar Fire X or Astro Gold. If what you actually want is to stop thinking about this, a browser tool never asks the question: the same workspace opens on the Mac in your study, the Windows laptop at a workshop, and a borrowed machine in a hotel, with nothing installed and no licence tied to a computer. We wrote the longer version of this trade, including what you give up, on the Solar Fire alternative page.

Cloud astrology software compared

Three tools people land on when they search for this, plus the desktop program most of them are leaving. Everything in the table was read off the vendors' own public pages on 2 October 2026.

About the empty cells. "Not mentioned on their site" means exactly that and nothing more: on 2 October 2026 those vendors' public pages did not describe the feature. It is not a claim that the tool cannot do it, and if any of this has changed we would rather hear about it than keep the row.

Where the other cloud tools are the better buy

A comparison that finds nothing good about the alternatives is marketing, so here is the real version. Two of these are better than us at the thing most people search for.

• They cost much less. LUNA is $7.99 a month, or $59.99 for a year. AstroApp has a plan that is free for life. Steliara starts at $24 a month and has no free tier at all. If charts are all you need, you should not be paying us three times the price for the half of the product you will not open.
• They calculate more. LUNA lists 33 house systems; we offer six. AstroApp covers Hellenistic, Medieval, Horary, Vedic, Chinese and financial astrology; we do western natal and transit work. If your technique lives outside that, this is not the tool.
• They write reports you can hand over. Both list report generation. We deliberately do not: the assistant finds facts in the chart and does not interpret, so there is no printed reading to give someone at the end.
• A desktop program still wins on breadth and on ownership. Solar Fire 9 listed 30 house systems, and Solar Fire X covers astro-mapping and Vedic work; none of that is here. A licence you buy once also has no monthly bill, and the program lives on your own computer.

What none of them did, on the pages we read on 2 October 2026, is hold the consultation. That is the whole reason this page exists.

For the desktop side of the same question, with prices and platforms in one table, see what software professional astrologers use.

What the cloud actually costs you

Three fair objections to running your practice in a browser. We would rather answer them here than have you find out in week three.

• There is no offline mode. None. A browser tool needs a connection, so on a train with no signal the installed program is the one that still opens. Plenty of astrologers keep a desktop program for exactly that and use this for everything else, which is a perfectly sensible arrangement.
• Your content stays yours. Section 5 of the Terms says you retain ownership of what you add: charts, profiles, notes and recordings. We hold a licence to host and show it to you, nothing else, and personal data is never sold.
• Getting it out is a request, not a button. Being straight about this: there is no one-click export in the app yet. The privacy policy gives you the right to ask for access to your personal data, a portable copy of it, or its deletion, and we act on that. If a subscription lapses the account turns read-only rather than locking you out, so your charts and records stay reachable while you decide.

Recordings have their own clock. Only the audio is ever recorded, never the video, and only after both sides have agreed on the call. The audio is kept for six months and then deleted automatically; the transcript and the summary stay on the person's profile until you delete them.

What you get that a browser calculator does not

Everything about every person you read for in one place, including the consultations themselves. That is the only sentence on this page that no tool in the table above can write.

• A profile for each person holding their charts, your notes, and every session you have already had with them. No rebuilding someone's story from memory the night before a follow-up.
• The reading run as a video call in the app, with the audio recorded, transcribed and summarized onto that profile afterwards. A two-hour consultation stops being something you half remember.
• Natal and transit charts on the Swiss Ephemeris, with an orb table tuned with a practising astrologer, and a forecast timeline for finding the dates that matter.
• Your existing charts, brought in rather than retyped: ZET, Astro.com, Solar Fire, Astro Gold and Astrolog files open directly, up to 2,000 records each, with likely duplicates flagged first.
• One practice that holds together instead of a chart tool with a video app, a notes app and a spreadsheet arranged around it.

What it costs

No perpetual licence and no per-machine install, which also means the subscription has to keep earning its line in your costs every month. It is fair to say what it buys: not the calculation, which $7.99 elsewhere will do, but the person and the consultation that calculation was for.

AI will never read a chart for you. It just finds the facts faster: the aspects, the exact dates, where a planet sits. The summary captures what you said. You stay the astrologer.