Ekahau AI Pro Reviews

• Importing DXF/DWG floor plans
• Autoplanner
• Customizable report templates

Importing more than 200 floor plans of 50 buildings has been easily accomplished because layers could be deselected before importing.

The Autoplanner feature gave us the opportunity to sketch a channel grid as well as the raw placements of access points.

It provides easy reporting using our own report templates.

• Batch reporting for large projects with many project files

I have used it since 2008.

Technical support is excellent; quick feedback and appropriate solutions.

Setup is done very easily.

If in doubt, buy the Professional Edition to have all features activated (e.g., 3D planning). Have NIC-300 USB stick (multiple NICs recommended for several measurements in parallel) as well. Otherwise, you will not have the opportunity to measure SNR.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated AirMagnet and NetPlanner.

From my experience, Ekauhau has always been very interested in improving their software by listening to users' demands and requirements. From my point of view, they successfully ease the complex process of designing wireless LAN on a professional level.

When you have a new site to plan, with ESS you can easily create a good plan to begin to understand the solution and the challenges. This way, you can create a Bill of Materials to buy what will work for your business requirements.

With ESS, we were able to understand what will be necessary to create a plan to support the company headquarters building with more than 2000 people in a high-density environment.

Today, ESS doesn't support mixed outdoor-indoor environments. We have port and railroad environments that can't be created and exported to the WiFi management solution because ESS can´t support it.

In the ESS, we don't have an easy way to select access points and then select an external antenna for it. This is a very common situation when you are testing what could be the best solution for an environment.

Anther important point is that Ekahau Mobile doesn't have GPS support. We can't do outdoor site surveys as easily as we can in the ESS.

I have worked with Ekahau since I was a Nortel Network Pre-sales Engineer, that is, more than 10 years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

For some operations, such as report generation, it requires a lot memory (more than 16GB RAM).

Customer service provides fast answers.

Sometimes, it takes technical support time to understand a new feature request.

We previously we worked on a project with AirMagnet Survey. This tool was provided by the company that was supporting us on the project.

Initial setup was easy but only with the training course it was possible to get all of the tool's potential.

Implementation was done by an in-house team.

The ROI was quick because we can save money doing it ourselves and we could develop internal knowledge.

This is a professional solution that can be very useful for planning and troubleshooting, but it is not cheap. It can make sense when you are a WiFi Engineering Company or you have médium-large WiFi environments.

For small environments, I recommend Ekahau Mobile.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options.

• Planning a WiFi network: You can estimate the number of APs you need without error. It works fine!
• It is perfect for knowing the problems of a WiFi network. You can see the radio state.

With this tool, you can plan the WiFi network without error.

This tool needs too many of the resources (RAM) of your PC.

I have used it for five years.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The customer service answers quickly and correctly. If you have a problem, they solve it.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The use of this tool is very easy. In addition, you have many tutorials on the Ekahau website.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

• Import Autocad layers into Ekahau

The speed, accuracy, and reliability has improved the way my organization functions.

I have used it for two years.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

We have replaced all AirMagnet kit with Ekahau.

Initial setup was straightforward.

The ROI is great.

Switch to Ekahau.

Before choosing, we also evaluated MetaGeek.

MetaGeek also has exceptional products.

Recent upgrades allows opacity view on the heat maps, allowing the floor plan to have better visibility. What I like is that Ekahau regularly takes the advice of real users and categorizes these point and adds them in product version releases. In other words, Ekahau really listens to their customers!

One area would be to allow several files to be opened and the ability to close only one of the files.

At present, if you have several files open, you must close the entire program to close the one file. A workaround is to open a new instance of ESS, but would be nice if you do not need to do this.

When a user has two surveys done at different times (Survey1 and Survey2), and at a later time, wants to open both of them at the same time, ESS allows a user to do that. However, the software does not allow you to close one of the surveys unless you completely close out ESS.

This is not a big issue, as I mention the workaround is to open up each survey in a new instance of ESS. IOW, to ESS and open it, then select open Survey1. Then open another instance of ESS and select Survey2.

It is more of a convenience feature. For example, if you have two MS Word docs open, you can to File/Close and close one of the docs. In ESS, you cannot do that yet.

3+ years

Deployment does take about 20-30 seconds, as it is a large program, so that's acceptable.

No.

From small to large surveys, Ekahau seems to function well. I have heard that very large surveys (e.g. 20-floor building) can cause issues, but I have not personally experienced that.

9 out of 10. They listen and respond to you, sometimes in a couple of hours. Excellent customer service.

9 out of 10. Customer service seems to link straight to technical support and issue resolution is fast and sometimes in less than a day.

Yes, easy setup with the wizard.

I have done both. Vendor team sent registration code, copy and paste and setup was fast.

Site survey software is not inexpensive. But it is vital for the WLAN professional. Call Ekahau and get a trial version and if pricing is an issue, ask them what they can do.

I have used trial versions of all leading site survey software. All have a bit of a learning curve. (AirMagnet, Tamosoft, iBwave).

Just a customer service story: I needed an AP listed for a predictive model that was not listed in ESS. I sent a request to have this one added to ESS and within three hours, the response came back with the file I needed to copy and paste into ESS to use this AP model! Three hours! Unbelievably responsive and outstanding customer service. Ekahau listens and responds to their customers!