so ive been using litchi for like 3 years now and overall its fine but the lack of updates is starting to bother me. feels like they just kind of abandoned it. the hub still works, waypoint missions still work, but some of the newer drones arent supported properly and i had an issue last week where the virtual stick mode just dropped out mid-mission and i had to take manual control fast.

been hearing good things about dronelink but honestly the interface looks intimidating from the youtube videos ive seen. is the learning curve actually that bad or does it click after a few hours? mainly fly a mini 3 pro and an older mavic 2 pro, doing mostly survey-adjacent stuff for a nonprofit i volunteer with ? nothing super precise but we need reliable repeated flight paths.

also wondering if anyone uses the cloud sync features or if thats mostly for people with bigger operations

switched from litchi to dronelink about 8 months ago and yeah the first week is rough, not gonna lie. the mission structure is just fundamentally different ? litchi is very linear and simple, dronelink is more like building a behavior tree almost. but once it clicked for me i honestly cant go back. the component system where you stack actions together is super powerful once you get it.

for your use case with repeatable survey paths it should be solid. the altitude modes are way more configurable than litchi ever was and the terrain following (even the basic version without lidar) works better than i expected. cloud sync i do use but mostly just for backing up missions, not the collaborative stuff.

one heads up ? dronelink's mini 3 pro support is good but double check which functions are available via DJI's SDK because some things are just locked by DJI not dronelink. not the devs fault but still annoying

i tried dronelink for a month and went back to litchi tbh. maybe im just set in my ways but i found myself spending more time planning than flying and for the simple stuff i do it felt like overkill. litchi just works and i know where everything is. different strokes i guess