so ive been doing some basic field mapping for a few local farms and up until now ive just been using dronedeploy on the standard plan which honestly works fine for what i need. but one of the farms wants more detailed soil analysis overlays and a guy in another group told me pix4d handles multispectral processing way better especially with the parrot sequoia

the thing is pix4d mapper is like significantly more expensive per month and i dont do this full time, its more of a side thing i do for a few clients in the area. so im trying to figure out if the output quality is actually meaningfully different for agricultural use cases or if im just going to end up with the same orthomosaics and NDVI maps and just a lighter wallet

anyone switched between the two or used both? specifically curious about how the point cloud density compares on flat terrain, fields arent exactly challenging geometry

ran both for about a year doing similar work, mostly vineyards and grain fields. honest answer is it depends a lot on what your clients actually need from the deliverables. dronedeploy is just way more turnkey ? you fly, it processes, you hand someone a link. pix4d gives you way more control over the processing parameters but that also means you need to actually know what youre doing with GCPs and the calibration workflow or you'll get worse results than dronedeploy not better

for flat ag fields the point cloud difference is kind of negligible in my experience. where pix4d shines is if you need to export into something like Civil 3D or do your own custom index calculations beyond the standard NDVI. if your clients just want to look at a map on their phone and see where the stressed areas are, dronedeploy is genuinely fine and the support is less of a headache

have you looked at opendronemap at all? not trying to dodge your question but if budget is the issue there's the cloud version and also you can just run it locally if you have a decent machine. outputs are surprisingly solid for ag work. i switched off dronedeploy for most of my personal projects and the results are comparable honestly, just slower processing locally