So ive been doing progress mapping for a mid-size construction company for about 8 months now, flying a Mavic 3 Enterprise mostly, and the company wants to lock in on one software subscription instead of me bouncing between trials. Right now im leaning toward DroneDeploy just because the browser-based workflow is easier to hand off to the site managers who are not drone people at all ? they just want to click around the orthomosaic and measure stuff without installing anything.

But ive heard Pix4D gives you more control over the processing parameters and the point clouds are supposedly better quality? I dont do a ton of BIM integration or anything super advanced, mostly just orthomosaics, volume calculations for stockpiles, and the occasional elevation model. Would love to know what people who are actually billing clients for this stuff are using day to day, not just what the comparison blog posts say.

been on DroneDeploy for about two years doing similar work, earthworks and grading mostly. honestly for what you're describing it's probably fine. the stockpile volumes are close enough that my clients don't question them and the shareable link thing is genuinely useful ? i just send the project manager a URL and they can annotate and pull measurements without me being on the phone walking them through software. that alone is worth a lot when you're dealing with people who are barely comfortable with google maps.

the processing is a black box which bugs me sometimes, like when something looks off in the ortho you cant really dig in and figure out why. pix4d you have way more knobs to turn. if you're doing deliverables that need to hold up to any kind of engineering scrutiny id go pix4d, but for routine progress documentation dd is genuinely hard to beat for the workflow simplicity.

random thing but have you looked at Metashape at all? way cheaper than either of those and i feel like the point cloud quality is honestly better than pix4d for most things i throw at it. takes a bit more to set up but once you get a workflow dialed in its pretty fast. just something to consider before you commit to a subscription thats like 3-4x the cost