so ive been doing some contract work for a few farms in my area and the clients are starting to ask for more than just photos, they want actual orthomosaics and elevation models they can use with their agronomist software. ive been playing around with both pix4d and dronedeploy for a few months now and honestly im kind of torn.

pix4d feels way more powerful like you can really dig into the processing parameters and tweak stuff but the learning curve is steep and the price is not fun. dronedeploy is way easier to just get up and running and the flight planning side is really smooth but sometimes i feel like im hitting a wall with what i can actually do with the outputs.

anyone here doing regular ag work or land survey type stuff have a preference? also curious if the GCP workflow in dronedeploy has gotten any better because last time i tried it it felt kind of clunky compared to pix4d where it at least makes sense visually

been using pix4dfields specifically for ag stuff for about a year and a half, its a separate product from the main pix4d mapper and its actually way more approachable for that use case. if your clients are mostly interested in NDVI and plant health outputs rather than like survey-grade elevation data it might be worth looking at. the processing is faster too because its optimized for that workflow rather than trying to do everything.

that said if they ever need anything that a licensed surveyor is going to sign off on youre going to want proper GCPs and pix4d mapper with the full point cloud outputs. dronedeploy has gotten better over the years but i still dont fully trust its absolute accuracy without a lot of ground truthing first.

honestly the GCP thing in dronedeploy is still a bit annoying imo, you have to mark each point across like 8 images and the interface for doing it isnt great on a laptop screen. pix4d at least lets you kind of fly through the process a bit more intuitively. for what its worth i just started using emlid for my GCPs and that whole pipeline is smoother now but that doesnt really answer your software question lol