so ive been doing crop health surveys for a couple local farms for about 8 months now using DroneDeploy and overall its been fine but a agronomist i work with keeps pushing me toward Pix4D saying the outputs are more accurate and the processing is better. problem is the price jump is pretty significant and im running this as a side thing not a full business yet so every dollar matters.

my current setup is a Mavic 3 Multispectral and i mostly generate NDVI maps and orthomosaics, occasionally a DSM when they want elevation data for drainage planning. DroneDeploy handles this fine as far as i can tell but ive never really had anything to directly compare it against so maybe im missing something. has anyone actually run the same dataset through both and compared outputs? or switched from one to the other and had a strong feeling either way

ran both for about a year doing construction site progress mapping and honestly for most use cases DD is totally fine. the web based processing is convenient and clients can just click a link to see the output which they love. Pix4D is definitely more configurable if you need to tweak point cloud density or mess with the camera calibration manually but if you're doing NDVI work for farmers who just want to know which parts of the field are stressed I really doubt they'd notice any difference in the final map.

the one thing i will say is Pix4Dfields specifically for ag stuff is actually cheaper than the main Pix4Dmapper subscription and might be worth looking at separately. different product but built for exactly what you're describing.

this is kind of what i want to know too bc im in a similar spot. also does anyone know if you can process multispectral data from the M3M in DroneDeploy properly or do you have to do the band alignment stuff yourself, mine always seems slightly off and im not sure if its a flight planning issue or a processing issue or what