so ive been using DroneDeploy for about 8 months now for weekly progress documentation on a few construction sites and honestly its been fine, the automated flight plans are easy and the clients can log into the dashboard which they love. but a coworker keeps telling me pix4d is way more accurate for the actual point cloud stuff and i should switch.

thing is, most of what we deliver is orthomosaics and the occasional 3D model for the PM to look at, nothing super technical. we're not doing volume calcs for earthworks or anything like that right now but that might change. is the accuracy difference actually noticeable for typical construction documentation or is my coworker just being a pix4d fanboy. also the price difference is pretty significant if i remember right

honestly for straight up progress photos and orthomosaics dronedeploy is totally fine, ive used both and the outputs are comparable enough that clients never notice. where pix4d pulls ahead is when you start doing actual survey-grade stuff, like if you need your GCPs to actually matter and you want to tweak processing parameters yourself. dronedeploy kind of holds your hand and hides a lot of that. not always a bad thing but if the project scope stays the same as what youre describing id probably just stick with what works.

the price thing is real btw, pix4d licenses arent cheap especially if you want the full mapper version and not just the cloud stuff

I switched from DroneDeploy to Pix4D about a year ago for earthworks volumetrics and yeah the control over processing is way better but the learning curve is real. took me a while to stop getting weird artifacts in my point clouds because i was using the wrong point density settings. for what youre doing though i dunno if its worth the headache, dronedeploy just works and if the clients are happy with the dashboard access thats honestly half the battle with construction clients anyway