Conventional solar stills are suffered from low productivity, but attractive due to their simple construction and less investment. Besides various design modifications, the incorporation of energy storage materials (PCMs) has shown considerable impact on increasing the solar still's night productivity and overall performance. In this study, to find the comparative viability of the solar still, enviro-economic analysis of some designs added with PCMs has been carried out using the uniform approach of interest rate, maintenance cost, salvage value, and life span of the system. In the passive designs, pyramid-shaped v-corrugated PCM-loaded solar still yielded 94% higher than solar without PCM. Considering the twenty-year life span, 44 tCO2 will be mitigated with distillate production cost of 0.0084 $/kg and a payback period of 1.9 years. The study revealed the feasibility of using PCM-added solar stills in remote locations, enhancing the productivity in the range of 8–94% and lowering the payback period in the range of 1.1–5.6 years, respectively, at 0.05 $/kg selling rate of water in the market.