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How to use UniFi Design Center, step by step
A walkthrough of UniFi Design Center: floor plans, scale, wall materials, AP and camera placement, coverage views, exports, and where it misleads you.
UniFi Design Center is Ubiquiti's free planning tool. You feed it a floor plan, place access points, cameras and switches on it, and it simulates what the result would look like before anyone buys hardware or drills a hole. It lives at design.ui.com and runs in a browser.
Ubiquiti rebuilt it recently, and the current version was announced on 24 September 2026. If you have watched a tutorial video from a year ago, the layout you see now will not match it. Worth knowing before you conclude you are doing something wrong.
I use it on most planning jobs, and I trust roughly two thirds of what it tells me. Here is the workflow, and then the parts I ignore.
Gather four things first
Fifteen minutes of preparation saves an hour of fiddling.
You need a floor plan, ideally a PDF from the architect, but a phone photo of a printed plan works. You need one real measurement on that plan, a wall or a room you can state in feet or metres, because that is how you set the scale. You need to know your wall construction, at least roughly: drywall and studs, plaster and lath, concrete, brick, or the metal mesh that sits behind old plaster and stops Wi-Fi cold. And you need to know where the internet enters the building and where the equipment will live.
If you do not have a plan at all, you can draw one in the tool. Slower, but fine for a single floor.
Step 1: create the project
Sign in with a Ubiquiti account and start a new project. There are no recurring software fees, which Ubiquiti states plainly in its own announcement, so if something asks you for money you are in the wrong place.
Name the project after the address, not after the client. In two years you will be searching by address.
You can invite other people into a project, which is the feature I would not have expected to use and now use constantly. It means the person planning and the person installing are looking at the same drawing rather than two versions of a PDF.
Step 2: import the plan and fix the scale
Upload the image or the PDF. The current version attempts automatic wall detection, so a clean architectural drawing will often come in with most of its walls already traced. A photo of a crumpled plan will not, and you will be drawing over it manually.
Then set the scale. Pick the dimension you measured, draw the reference line along it, and type the real number.
Do this before anything else and check it twice. Everything downstream, coverage, camera field of view, cable lengths, is arithmetic performed on that one number. A plan scaled twenty per cent small produces a design that looks perfect and needs an extra access point in real life. I have seen this exact mistake in quotes people have sent me for a second opinion, and it is invisible unless you go back and check the dimensions.
Add your other floors as separate plans. The tool will stack them into a single 3D model of the building, which matters because Wi-Fi travels up and down through floors as well as sideways.
Step 3: tell it what the walls are made of
This is the step people skip, and skipping it is why the coverage picture comes out optimistic.
Go through the traced walls and set the material. Interior drywall, exterior brick, concrete, glass. If you are not sure what is behind the plaster in an older house, assume the worse option and be pleasantly surprised later.
Pay attention to the things that are not walls: kitchen appliances, a mirrored wall, a fish tank, a foil-backed insulation panel, a metal staircase. Water and metal are what actually ruin Wi-Fi, and none of them appear on an architect's drawing. Add them as obstructions where you can.
Step 4: place access points and read the coverage view honestly
You can place APs by hand, or define zones and let the tool propose placement and quantity for you. The automated placement is a reasonable starting point. It is not a decision.
Adjust for reality. Ceiling APs want to be in the middle of the space they serve, not tucked against an exterior wall where half the signal goes into the garden. Stairwells and open landings are where a single AP covers two floors. Garages, porches and back decks are where people expect coverage and quotes never include it.
Now the important part: what the coverage view is telling you. It is a prediction of signal strength based on your walls, your materials and its model of each AP's radio. It is not a measurement, and signal strength is not the same as good Wi-Fi. A room can sit in the green and still feel slow because thirty devices are sharing one radio, because the channel is crowded by your neighbours, or because the AP has a good downlink and the laptop has a weak uplink.
The newer version does zone-based capacity planning and channel recommendations, which helps with the device-count problem. Treat all of it as a starting hypothesis to be verified with a real survey after installation.
Step 5: cameras and sightlines
Cameras are where the tool earns its keep, because field of view is geometry and geometry it does well.
Drop a camera, point it, and it draws the cone it can actually see. It also models detection performance, low-light behaviour and audio coverage, so you get blind spots shown to you rather than discovered later.
Two things to check on every camera. First, what is in the near field: a downpipe, a porch column or a soffit edge two feet from the lens will eat a third of the frame and the drawing shows you that immediately. Second, whether the camera is aimed at a plate, a face or a general scene, because those are three different distances. A camera that covers the whole driveway will not identify anybody in it.
Also mark where each camera's cable has to go. Which brings us to the next step.
Step 6: switches, ports and cable runs
Assign every device to a switch port. The tool shows the relationship between ports and devices, at both the floor plan level and a rack view, and it will tell you when you have run out of PoE budget or ports.
Order one size up on ports. Every project grows by two devices between the design and the final walkthrough.
What the tool will not do is route your cable through the actual building. It gives you a straight line and a length. Real cable goes up a wall, along a joist bay, around a duct and down into the rack, and it is routinely half again as long as the drawing suggests. If you are planning a build or a renovation, read wiring for Wi-Fi and the conduit rule alongside this, because the drawing cannot tell you what is reachable once the drywall is up.
Step 7: export it and hand it over
When the design is done, export it. You get installer documentation and a PDF of the plans, and the project can be handed to UniFi Site Manager so the gear can be pre-provisioned before it arrives on site.
One caution from experience and from Ubiquiti's own community forum: the PDF export has been the flakiest part of this tool across several versions, with recurring complaints about missing data and poor image quality. Open the export and check it against the design before you send it to anybody. If it comes out wrong, screenshots of each floor are an ugly but reliable fallback.
Keep the project file. When someone adds a garage in three years, editing the old design beats redrawing it.
What it does not do
It does not know that the installer cannot get above the vaulted ceiling. It does not know the tenant will put a filing cabinet in front of the AP. It does not price labour, and it has no opinion on whether you needed eight cameras or four.
It is a drawing that tests your assumptions cheaply. That is genuinely useful, and it is not the same thing as a design that survives contact with a building.
If you are new to this hardware generally, my first take on whole-home UniFi Wi-Fi covers the decisions that come before you open a planning tool at all.
If you would rather not do it yourself
Happy to have you use the tool: it is free, and a client who has drawn their own rough plan is a client who asks better questions.
If you want the design checked before you spend money, I do that as a planning engagement or a second opinion on a quote you already have, billed as a fixed fee, hourly or on retainer. I am vendor-neutral and I do not resell hardware. For the hands-on side, cabling, mounting and commissioning in Southern Ontario, that is my company RelayPoint Technologies. Either way, get in touch and tell me what the building is.
Sources
- Meet the New UniFi Design Center (Ubiquiti, 24 September 2026)
- All-New UniFi Design Center (Ubiquiti, 2 April 2026)
- UniFi Design Center
- Community thread on PDF export quality