So ive been using DroneDeploy for about a year now mostly for field mapping on the farm I work with, we do maybe 2-3 missions a week covering anywhere from 50 to 400 acres depending on the season. Its been fine honestly but the subscription just went up again and now im looking at whether Pix4D fields or just the regular Pix4Dmapper is actually worth making the jump.

The main thing i care about is accuracy on the orthomosaics and the NDVI outputs ? we're not doing anything super exotic, mostly scouting and some basic elevation models for drainage planning. DroneDeploy does this fine but the processing times on the larger flights are getting annoying and a couple times the stitching near field edges has been kinda rough. Also their customer support has been pretty useless the last two times i contacted them.

Anyone actually running both or switched from one to the other recently? Curious if the local processing in Pix4D actually makes a big difference vs cloud processing or if im just going to be paying more for roughly the same outputs.

Switched from DroneDeploy to Pix4Dmapper about 18 months ago and havent looked back honestly. The local processing was the main reason ? once you have a decent workstation you're not waiting on their servers and you have way more control over the point cloud densification settings and tie point parameters. For NDVI specifically the calibration workflow in Pix4D is more transparent, you can actually see what its doing rather than just trusting a black box.

That said the learning curve is real. DroneDeploy is just easier for someone who wants to click go and get a map. Pix4D has a ton of settings that you can mess up if you dont know what you're doing and the documentation is decent but not great. If you're doing drainage planning and need solid DSM accuracy i'd say its worth it but if NDVI scouting is the main use case i'm not sure you'd notice enough difference to justify the cost jump depending on what tier you're on.

have you looked at WebODM at all? its open source and you can run it on your own hardware, not as polished as either of those but the outputs are genuinely good and a few guys in our ag co-op use it for exactly the kind of work you're describing. obviously theres some setup involved but after that the per-flight cost is basically zero which adds up fast at 2-3 missions a week