eino is the best alternative to iBwave for most design teams. One AI-native, multiplayer platform in the browser covers every wireless technology: DAS, private 5G, public safety and Wi-Fi, indoors and outdoors. Teams and organizations can collaborate in the same design, and every subscription includes unlimited global clutter and terrain data at standard resolution. Prediction accuracy is best in class, with GPU-accelerated full ray tracing technology. More than 50 global systems integrators, DAS and private cellular OEMs and industrial enterprises run their design workflows in eino. The right pick still depends on what you design. The shortlist is eino, Forsk Atoll, Ranplan Professional, Ekahau and Hamina.
Teams that run iBwave are often looking for an AI and cloud-native platform to make their day-to-day design workflows more efficient. The usual triggers are the same: each iBwave license allows one concurrent user, the software runs on a Windows workstation, outdoor design is sold as a separate product and geodata is quoted per project.
eino publishes this page, and eino is first on the list. To keep the list fair, every entry uses the vendor's own published facts and the month they were checked, and every entry states its limits, ours included. The five tools here all design in-building and campus wireless networks, and further down they are grouped by the kind of network you design.
What separates these tools is AI-native workflows, cloud-based versus desktop hosting, ease of collaboration, and pricing for support, maintenance and certification.
| Tool | Best fit | Technologies | Runs on | Survey | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| eino | Teams designing every network type in one model | Wi-Fi, private and public cellular, DAS, public safety, fixed wireless, IoT | Browser, multi-user | eino Site Survey, in the same model | Subscription; maintenance and support included |
| Forsk Atoll | Operators planning macro and in-building cellular | Cellular RAN, DAS, private LTE and 5G; Wi-Fi in Atoll One | Windows desktop | None of its own | Perpetual license plus maintenance |
| Ranplan Professional | Indoor and outdoor cellular on desktop | Small cells, DAS, Wi-Fi | Desktop | Ranplan Tablet, sold separately | Lease or perpetual; not public |
| Ekahau | Wi-Fi design and survey | Wi-Fi; private 4G and 5G online | Desktop and browser | Sidekick 2 hardware | From $1,495 a year |
| Hamina | Wi-Fi teams that want a browser tool | Wi-Fi; private 4G and 5G access point placement | Browser | Hamina Onsite and Clip | From $980 a year |
Details for other tools were checked between September and November 2026, from each vendor's public pages linked in the table. Check with each vendor for current details. Test eino on a building you choose.
eino is wireless network design software that runs in the browser. One 3D digital twin of your site carries Wi-Fi, private and public cellular, DAS and public safety, indoor and outdoor. Public release notes start in July 2024, and releases have shipped twice a month since January 2026.
Accuracy is at parity with iBwave, and we prove that side by side on the same building. The difference is speed, team access and scope.
Design Agent is a purpose-built agentic workflow. It parses walls, doors and stairwells from an uploaded floor plan and turns it into a 3D model the engineer reviews before running predictions.
From there, eino's agents carry out planning tasks from a chat instruction, with an approval step before anything changes: place APs with AI across floors, generate a layout for a coverage objective, produce a ROM estimate and run a design validation. The engineer still sets the coverage targets, technology choices and constraints.
eino designs DAS from the first budgetary design or ROM to the design package in one model: antennas, cables and signal sources, with a riser diagram generated from the same model. DAS planning has been in the product since May 2025 and the riser diagram since November 2025. Since October 2026, neutral-host DAS is modeled the way the real system is built.
The ROM Estimator, released in November 2025, gives a rough-order-of-magnitude cost and equipment estimate for a DAS or Wi-Fi project from building parameters in a guided chat, and its output carries into a new project. The method is in our guide to building a wireless ROM estimate.
eino exports DWG for handoff into other design tools, and the DWG to iBwave handoff checklist shows what carries across.
eino plans private 5G and LTE, indoor and outdoor, in one project. PCI planning arrived in June 2026, and capacity planning and NR carrier aggregation throughput maps in September 2026. The detail is on our private 5G and LTE planning page.
Route QoS, released in July 2026, checks coverage along AGV and robot paths, which is the job that often starts a private cellular project in a warehouse or plant. The work stays in eino from design through validation.
eino designs Wi-Fi, including Wi-Fi HaLow since July 2026, in the same model as the cellular and DAS layers. Optimize Network with AI, released in September 2026, searches transmit power, downtilt, mast height and antenna choices for the placed radios against goals the engineer sets, and keeps the results in a scenario library.
A site with Wi-Fi and cellular gets one model and one set of drawings. A Wi-Fi-only tool needs a second tool for the cellular side.
eino designs public safety coverage in the same model as Wi-Fi and DAS. It has supported ERRCS, the emergency responder radio coverage systems that fire codes require, as its own design technology since July 2026. In August 2026 coverage extended to P25 narrowband and FirstNet LTE, with DAQ and signal level as the P25 measures. The same release added radiating cable (leaky feeder) planning and PCTEL SeeHawk and IBflex survey import, which bring tunnel work and measured results into the design.
eino designs outdoor and campus networks with unlimited geodata, including global clutter and terrain at standard resolution, already in the subscription. Buildings, trees and terrain come from map and satellite data. High-resolution clutter is a paid option.
Indoor-outdoor projects, available since December 2025, put a campus, its buildings and their DAS or Wi-Fi in one model, and fixed wireless point-to-multipoint is planned outdoors in the same tool. Outdoor results export as GeoTIFF, Shapefile and KMZ for GIS teams.
eino Site Survey puts the walk test in the model that predicted it. It has been generally available since September 2026 as an add-on to a design subscription. It measures Wi-Fi 6 on 2.4 and 5 GHz plus cellular, and it is certified by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon (C-Band) and FirstNet.
Prediction and measurement sit on the same floor, so the design is checked against the survey without moving files between tools. The same method we use to compare predicted and measured coverage is how a side-by-side test against an iBwave design is judged.
Several people have been able to edit the same model at once since January 2026, so a seller, an estimator and an RF engineer can work on one bid together. Imports cover DWG, IFC, Revit, Navisworks, PDF floor plans and CSV antenna data.
New radios and antennas are added to the library within 24 to 72 hours at no charge. Nothing installs on a workstation, and there is no certification to earn before a new team member starts.
Ceragon Networks compared five or six design tools before choosing eino, then launched its private networks business unit with eino as its design platform from day one. In under a year the team ran 191 design projects on it, almost five a week, and secured $10 million in new contracts, as the Ceragon case study reports. That work spans utilities, oil and gas, smart cities, mining and defense.
I don't want to use a different tool between pre-sales and post-sales. My goal is to have a high-level design, do a site survey, and fine-tune the same design.
Private networks team, global systems integrator
Atoll is RAN planning software for mobile operators and private networks. Atoll In-Building adds integrated indoor and outdoor planning, multi-wall ray tracing and active, passive and hybrid DAS. Atoll One, released in June 2025, is sized for small and medium private networks and plans private LTE, 5G and Wi-Fi.
As of November 2026, Forsk's homepage reports over 500 customers in 140 countries. Its releases name Airbus on Atoll One (August 2026) and the utilities Ameren and Oncor on private LTE and 5G (May 2026). An Atoll AI Agent was announced in July 2026 for customers in autumn 2026, and Forsk's homepage now says Atoll and Naos include AI agents.
Compared with iBwave, both are desktop tools. Atoll's in-building module is the closer match for teams whose home is the operator's macro network.
Ranplan Professional plans indoor and outdoor networks, covering small cells, DAS and Wi-Fi, in one desktop tool. Ranplan also lists public safety networks among the networks it plans.
Ranplan's Migrate service converts legacy design files to IFC, and the Sidekick beta can convert supported iBwave exports into IFC building models.
Compared with iBwave, both are desktop tools that cover indoor and outdoor cellular. Ranplan leans harder on open building formats.
Ekahau, part of Ookla, an Accenture company, is Wi-Fi design and survey software. AI Pro runs on desktop, AI Pro Online runs in the browser and the Sidekick 2 is the survey device. Since December 2025 the online version also designs private 4G and 5G, BLE, Zigbee and UWB.
Compared with iBwave, Ekahau is the Wi-Fi specialist. iBwave covers DAS and carrier cellular that Ekahau does not.
Hamina runs in the browser: Planner for design, Onsite for survey, Live for network analysis, and the Clip survey device. It offers AI-assisted wall definition on the floor plan for Wi-Fi design.
Hamina says it holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certification and hosts separate EU and US cloud instances.
Compared with iBwave, Hamina is browser-based where iBwave is desktop, and it stays with Wi-Fi and indoor private cellular.
Private networks are a growing body of design work. GSA counted 2,003 organizations in 88 countries deploying LTE or 5G private mobile networks worth more than €100,000 each by the end of Q1 2026, with customer references growing 37% a year since 2019.
Most states have adopted the model code that sets in-building radio coverage rules for first responders. The International Code Council shows the International Fire Code in use or adopted in 42 states, the District of Columbia, New York City, Guam and Puerto Rico, and its Section 510 covers emergency responder communication coverage. Jurisdictions amend the code and adopt different editions, so the local fire code official sets the final requirement.
Choose by what you design, who needs the model and what you hand over. eino leads on all three for teams that take DAS, private cellular, Wi-Fi, public safety and outdoor jobs.
One cost is easy to miss. The ROM, the 3D model and the BOM get built before anyone wins anything, so on every bid that does not close, those engineering hours are pure cost. The tool that enables teams to build ROMs fastest pays for itself first.
Teams look for an iBwave alternative when they need more efficiency from the same headcount. They want in-building and outdoor design in the same platform with unlimited geodata including global clutter and terrain at standard resolution, a leaner cost structure without a workstation per seat or a data purchase per project, and GPU acceleration in the cloud for faster renders. iBwave allows one concurrent user per license, runs on a Windows workstation and sells outdoor design and geodata separately.
iBwave is the long-standing tool for in-building wireless design, used most for DAS. The in-building workload keeps growing. By WIA's count, 830,350 indoor small cell nodes, including DAS, small cells and private CBRS networks, were in use in the US at the end of 2025. In the same research on in-building gaps, 34% of enterprise IT managers report critical coverage gaps in their own facilities, and 41% want better DAS and small cell coverage for cellular.
iBwave Design Enterprise runs on Windows 11 Pro and recommends an NVIDIA RTX 4090 desktop card (as of September 2026), and every license allows one concurrent user, whatever the tier. Our post on why prediction stayed on the desktop covers what the browser changes. Outdoor campus design is a separate product, iBwave Reach, and geodata is a quoted service.
The iBwave Certified Professional program is a respected credential. Each of its three levels is a three-day course listed at $2,475 for the virtual classroom, and certification must be renewed every three years with a recertification exam (as of November 2026). Teams that move design work to eino do it for a different set of reasons: the browser, the whole team in one model, DAS, private cellular, Wi-Fi and public safety in one project, and unlimited geodata including global clutter and terrain at standard resolution.
eino is the alternative that covers DAS, private cellular, Wi-Fi, public safety and outdoor work in one browser model the whole team works in, with prediction at parity and Ceragon's 191 design projects in under a year as the proof. Every tool on this list is good at something. The thread that runs through the best of them is one model for more of the job and more of the team.
An evaluation starts with a 25-minute demo on a building you have already designed in iBwave. The side-by-side test then runs eino's prediction against your iBwave design on the same building, so you judge parity on a project you know.
Book a 25-minute demo and bring a floor plan of a building you already designed in iBwave.
The best alternative to iBwave is eino, because one browser model covers DAS, private cellular, Wi-Fi, public safety and outdoor, the whole team edits it at once, and parity with iBwave on prediction is proven side by side on your own building. Forsk Atoll and Ranplan Professional fit desktop cellular planning, and Ekahau and Hamina fit Wi-Fi.
The best iBwave alternative for in-building DAS design is eino: antennas, cables, signal sources, riser diagrams and neutral-host DAS in the browser, with the budgetary and BOM from the same model and DWG export. Ranplan Professional and Forsk Atoll In-Building are desktop options. Ekahau and Hamina do not support DAS design.
eino is AI-native and browser-based, where iBwave Design Enterprise is Windows desktop software with one concurrent user per license. Agents build the 3D model from a floor plan and place APs, and several people edit the same model at once. eino also puts DAS, private cellular, Wi-Fi, public safety and outdoor in one model.
DAS teams look for an iBwave alternative such as eino to get more people quoting at once, the whole team in one model and outdoor work with unlimited geodata including global clutter and terrain at standard resolution. iBwave Design Enterprise needs a Windows workstation, each license allows one concurrent user, and geodata is a quoted service.
iBwave software is mostly priced by quote. iBwave Design Enterprise is quote-only, and iBwave's store sells Private Networks and Public Safety as one-user 30-day subscriptions, with 12-month and multi-year terms quoted by sales, as of November 2026. eino, the alternative this page recommends, is a subscription quoted through its sales team, with maintenance, support and unlimited geodata, including global clutter and terrain at standard resolution, in the price.
Yes, the legacy iBwave Viewer is free, and an eino design needs no viewer at all because it opens by link in the browser. The free Viewer is a download for viewing .ibw design files, and Viewer+ is a paid product with a free trial, as of November 2026.
