so ive been doing monthly progress shots for a mid-size commercial build and im kind of at a crossroads with software. been using DroneDeploy for about a year and honestly its fine, the live map thing during flight is genuinely useful, but the accuracy on my GCPs has felt inconsistent and i cant tell if thats a me problem or a software problem.

been considering switching to Pix4D mostly because a few guys on the survey side swear by it, and the pointcloud output does seem noticeably denser when i compare outputs side by side. but the workflow is so much clunkier and doing everything locally instead of cloud-based is kind of a pain when the PM wants to share links with the owner group.

anyone actually running both on the same project or at least have done a proper head to head? not looking for spec sheet stuff just real world impressions from people doing this regularly

ran both for about 8 months on a highway widening project, using M300 with P1 so accuracy was always going to be decent regardless. honestly pix4d wins on outputs every time if you care about the actual numbers ? the ortho resolution and the way it handles the calibration report is just more rigorous. but your point about sharing is real, the cloud stuff in dronedeploy is so much more client-friendly. i ended up using dd for client-facing deliverables and running pix4d on the back end for anything that needed to go to the survey team. annoying but it worked.

the GCP inconsistency you mentioned ? are you using checkpoints or just control? if youre not splitting those out properly the accuracy stats are basically meaningless anyway

tbh i just use dd for everything because my clients dont know the difference and the turnaround is faster. probably not helpful for your use case if youre delivering to actual surveyors lol