so ive been using Litchi for probably two years now and its been fine, no real complaints, but a friend keeps telling me to switch to Dronelink and honestly i cant figure out from their website what the actual difference is in day to day use. the marketing stuff on both sites is useless.

main thing i do is automated waypoints for mapping, sometimes photogrammetry stuff for small construction sites, nothing crazy. i fly a Mini 3 Pro mostly and occasionally borrow a Mavic 3 Classic. Litchi works fine but the UI feels pretty dated at this point and the waypoint interpolation sometimes does weird things on tighter turns.

has anyone actually used both and made a switch either direction? curious if Dronelink handles curved segments better or if its just a lateral move with a different UI coat of paint

switched from Litchi to Dronelink about 8 months ago and honestly dont regret it. the mission planning interface took maybe a week to feel natural but the control you get over camera actions at each waypoint is way more granular. like you can set specific gimbal angles per waypoint independently of the flight path which litchi always felt clunky about.

that said if youre doing proper photogrammetry you might want to look at DroneDeploy or even just WebODM on the backend regardless of what planning app you use up front. Dronelink is great for the flight side but its not really a full mapping workflow tool. depends how deep into the data processing side you go i guess.

i tried dronelink for like a month and went back to litchi tbh. maybe im just used to it but the learning curve on dronelink felt steeper than it needed to be for what i was doing. also had one mission where it just... paused mid flight for no reason i could figure out, might have been a connection thing but it spooked me enough to go back to what i knew