Radaria vs Ekahau: an honest comparison

Let's start with what most “Ekahau alternative” pages won't tell you: Ekahau is the gold standard for Wi-Fi RF design, and if you need predictive AP placement on a floor plan, you should probably buy Ekahau. Radaria doesn't do heatmaps yet — it's on our roadmap, and we say so on our homepage.

So why does this page exist? Because a growing share of “we need a Wi-Fi survey” problems aren't RF design problems at all. They're “the signal is fine but the app is slow” problems — and that's a category Ekahau wasn't built for. This page explains where each tool wins, with numbers, so you can decide in five minutes.

What each tool is actually for

Ekahau (Ekahau AI Pro + Sidekick 2) is a professional RF design and validation suite. You load a floor plan, design AP placement predictively, then walk the site with the Sidekick — a dedicated measurement device with multiple tri-band radios — to validate coverage, channel overlap and interference. Its deliverable is the industry-standard RF report.

Radaria is a walking synthetic monitoring tool. While you walk, it fires a complete HTTP probe at every sample — measuring DNS resolve, TCP connect, TLS handshake and TTFB separately — records synchronized video of what the technician sees, and produces a deterministic A–F verdict explained by AI in five languages. Its deliverable answers a different question: not “is the RF good?” but “does the network actually work for the applications people use?”

One designs and validates radio coverage. The other diagnoses and documents application experience. They overlap less than you'd think.

The differences that matter

1. RF layer vs application layer

Ekahau measures the radio: RSSI, SNR, channel utilization, interference — with hardware precision no smartphone can match. What it doesn't see is everything above the radio: a misconfigured DNS resolver, a proxy with an expired certificate adding 1.2 seconds of TLS handshake, a saturated WAN link inflating TTFB. All of those produce the classic ticket — “the Wi-Fi is slow” — with a perfectly green heatmap.

Radaria measures both at once: -65 dBm and TLS at 1.2 s, on the same sample, at the same timestamp. When the problem is above layer 2, an RF-only survey simply cannot find it.

2. Video evidence

Radaria records continuous video synchronized timestamp-by-timestamp with every scan and probe. In the cloud replay you scrub to 00:04:32 and see the Wi-Fi data, the video frame and the position together. For consultants this is proof-of-work; for acceptance testing and legal disputes it's evidence; for training juniors it's a teaching tool. No RF suite on the market — Ekahau included — does this.

3. Hardware: dedicated device vs any Android

Ekahau's accuracy comes from the Sidekick 2, a dedicated device listed at $4,995. Add Ekahau AI Pro software at $5,995 and the mandatory first-year Connect subscription at $1,995, and the realistic entry cost is around $13,000 per kit (reseller pricing, June 2026 — see Acuity RF). For an MSP equipping three field engineers, that's a serious capital decision.

Radaria runs on any Android 11+ device — including the smartphone already in the technician's pocket, or a $150 second-hand unit mounted as a permanent sentinel. During early access, the software is free.

This is not “we're cheaper for the same thing” — the Sidekick measures RF in ways a phone radio cannot. It's a different trade-off: RF-lab precision on dedicated hardware, versus application-truth measurement on hardware you already own.

4. One-shot survey vs continuous monitoring

An Ekahau survey is an event: an engineer, a day on site, a report. Radaria's sentinel mode turns a cheap Android into a fixed probe that monitors application-layer health shift after shift — closer to Aruba UXI sensors than to a survey tool, but without per-sensor hardware costs and vendor lock-in.

5. Explanation, not just data

Ekahau's reports are made for Wi-Fi engineers — by far the most complete RF documentation in the industry, and they assume you can read them. Radaria's verdict is a deterministic A–F grade with per-metric recommendations, narrated by an AI explainer in five languages, streaming like a chat assistant. Your customer's IT manager understands the deliverable without a CWNA certification.

Comparison table

When to choose Ekahau

Choose Ekahau if you design networks for a living: greenfield deployments, predictive placement on floor plans, RF validation against design specs, spectrum analysis. If your deliverable is “where do the APs go and prove the coverage matches the design”, Ekahau is the right tool and worth its price.

When to choose Radaria

Choose Radaria if your problem sounds like “users complain but the survey says everything is fine” — when you need to know whether DNS, TLS or the backend is eating the time, document it with video evidence a non-engineer can understand, monitor sites continuously without sensor hardware, or equip a whole team without a five-figure budget. And if you run a warehouse with Zebra terminals, Radaria diagnoses scanner throttling and packet drops correlated with real application latency.

Can they coexist?

Yes — and in mature MSP practices they probably should. Ekahau for design and RF validation on projects that pay for it; Radaria for diagnostics, evidence-grade troubleshooting and continuous monitoring in between. They answer different questions about the same network.

Radaria measures what your users actually feel — DNS, TCP, TLS and TTFB for every step you walk, with synchronized video evidence. Get the Android app or open a free cloud account.