so ive been doing monthly progress mapping for a mid-size construction company for about 8 months now, mostly using DroneDeploy because thats what the client was already paying for when i came on. works fine for the orthomosaic deliverables they want but ive been feeling like the point cloud quality is just... not great? like the mesh outputs look a bit mushy compared to what i see people posting from Pix4D jobs.

the thing is Pix4Dmapper is not cheap and i already have a Mavic 3 Enterprise so its not like im running some ancient sensor. i do mostly flat or low-relief sites so maybe the difference wouldnt even matter for what we're doing. but theres a couple projects coming up that involve stockpile volume calculations and i keep reading that Pix4D handles that better.

has anyone actually run the same dataset through both and compared? or am i just falling for the grass is greener thing because i spend too much time reading specs online

ran the same flight data through both on a quarry job last year, same GCPs and everything. honestly for flat terrain and basic orthos DroneDeploy is fine and the turnaround is way faster since its cloud processed. but yeah for stockpiles Pix4D gave me tighter volume numbers ? i spot checked against a survey crew and DD was off by like 3-4% on one of the bigger piles, Pix4D was within 1%. could be my GCP placement was just better that day, hard to say definitively.

if your client is doing anything where volume accuracy has real dollar value attached to it i'd at least trial Pix4D on one project and see if it justifies the cost. they do a 15 day trial which is enough to process a real job.

not sure this helps but i switched from DD to Pix4D about a year ago and kind of miss the DD interface tbh, the web dashboard is just cleaner for sharing with clients. Pix4D desktop feels like it was designed by engineers for engineers which i guess it was. the outputs are better but the workflow is slower and if you mess up your processing options you can burn an hour waiting on a reprocess. just something to factor in depending on how much time you have per project