So ive been doing mapping work for a couple local farms and a small construction company on the side for about a year now, mostly using DroneDeploy because it was easy to get into and the automatic processing is honestly pretty solid for what they need. But one of the construction guys is starting to ask for more detailed deliverables, like actual volume calculations for stockpiles and he wants the point clouds to look cleaner.

A buddy of mine keeps telling me Pix4D is the way to go for serious work but the subscription cost is not a joke. I'm on the basic DroneDeploy plan right now and already feel like im paying a lot for what I use. Does Pix4D actually produce noticeably better outputs or is it more of a workflow and control thing? Like can you actually see the difference in the orthos or is it more about the processing options under the hood.

Flying a Mavic 3 Enterprise by the way if that matters. Mostly flat terrain but the construction site has some elevation change and a couple stockpiles which is where i notice the most weirdness in my current outputs.

The short answer is yeah you can see a difference but it depends a lot on your GCP setup and overlap settings more than the software itself. I switched to Pix4D about two years ago after doing a bunch of side by side tests and for stockpile volumes specifically the Pix4D numbers came out closer to the ground truth surveys we were comparing against. DroneDeploy's volume tool is fine for rough estimates but if a contractor is going to use those numbers for anything financial you want something you can actually defend.

That said Pix4D has a learning curve that people dont really warn you about. The interface is not intuitive and there are like fifteen ways to process the same dataset and half of them will give you garbage if you dont know what youre doing. I spent a solid month just figuring out the point cloud densification settings. If you do go that route look into the processing templates first and dont just hit automatic on everything.

have you looked at Metashape? its what i ended up on after trying both of those and honestly for the price its kind of ridiculous how good it is. one time license too which matters when youre not doing this full time. just throwing it out there because everyone always frames it as a pix4d vs dronedeploy thing and theres actually a third option that a lot of people sleep on