so ive been using Litchi for probably 3 years now and its fine, does what i need, but ive been hearing more people talk about Dronelink lately and im curious if its actually better or just newer-shiny syndrome. my main use case is doing long linear survey passes over farmland, usually setting up like 40-60 waypoints with specific gimbal angles at certain points along the route.

the thing that bugs me about Litchi is the mission hub interface feels kind of dated and syncing between my phone and the hub sometimes just doesnt work and i end up standing in a field wondering why my drone is going somewhere completely different than planned. happened twice last month and once i got lucky and it was just flying to an old cached mission but the second time i had to abort manually.

has anyone done a real side by side with these two on a mini 3 pro or similar? not looking for a youtube video answer, just curious what people who actually fly missions regularly think

been using dronelink for about 8 months now and honestly the mission planning interface is way cleaner, especially if you're doing stuff that needs conditional actions or altitude adjustments mid-route. the map layers are also better for agricultural stuff, you can pull in better terrain data which matters when your field isnt totally flat.

that said the free tier is pretty limited and the subscription is kind of annoying if you fly casually. for serious survey work though i think its worth it. the sync issue you described with litchi i never really had but i also stopped trusting cached missions a long time ago, i always do a hard refresh before i arm anything.

not exactly answering your question but have you tried DJI's own waypoint stuff in the RC controller? i know it sounds basic but for simple linear passes it actually works pretty reliably and you cut out the whole third party sync problem entirely. probably not enough control for what you're doing with gimbal angles but just throwing it out there