so ive been doing crop health surveys for a few months now mostly using DroneDeploy and its fine but a colleague keeps telling me to switch to Pix4D and honestly i dont fully understand what id be gaining. like DD does the NDVI overlays, the automated flight planning works reasonably well with my M3M, outputs are decent enough that the agronomists im working with dont complain.

but theres this nagging feeling im leaving quality on the table. pix4d feels more... serious? like the control you have over the point cloud processing and the tie point settings and stuff seems way more granular. but i also dont have time to spend 3 hours tweaking every single project. most of my jobs are just get in, fly the grid, deliver a report same day or next morning.

anyone whos actually switched between the two for ag work specifically have thoughts? not looking for the marketing comparison stuff, i can google that, more curious what the day to day actually feels like

honestly for same-day turnaround ag surveys DD is just better, the cloud processing means you hand off the data and go home. pix4d local processing on a decent machine is still going to take you a couple hours for anything over like 200 acres at high res, and unless you have a specific reason to need the extra accuracy on your GCPs or the point cloud density its probably not worth the headache. ive used both extensively and the ndvi outputs from both are close enough that no agronomist is going to tell the difference on a standard survey.

where pix4d starts to matter is if youre doing anything that needs to hold up to like engineering tolerances, corridor mapping with precise volume calcs, that kind of thing. for crop scouting its overkill imo

i switched from DD to pix4d about a year ago and tbh the learning curve was steeper than i expected but im doing construction progress mapping not ag so maybe different. the raycloud editor is really useful once you get used to it, being able to manually add tie points and see exactly where your reconstruction is struggling is something i genuinely missed when i was on DD. but yeah for quick turnaround stuff the cloud processing on DD is hard to beat