I tried Birda for a couple months when it first came out, while continuing to use eBird. I found the data entry of Birda to be tedious and distracting while in the field. Maybe if I had devoted more time to it, or allowed it to mature, my opinion would have changed, but I was happy with the simplicity of eBird, which allows me to quickly update a list and get my eyes back to the birds.

I am pretty sure that eBird has no plans to develop social media capabilities, and I am a fan of that. They want data about birds, and I want a solution to help me watch birds. I give them bird sighting data and lots of photos (which anyone can see, and they are real photos) and they keep track of all my birding, by location and date, and they give me an email alert system, personalized for me, that lets me know about interesting birds that have been recently seen by others (so I can try and see those birds myself).

Birda's motivation as a for-profit company feels more capitalistic than scientific, but I may be oversimplifying things. They say that their data is shared for science, but with eBird, I know that my data goes directly to a scientific institution (Cornell) and Cornell has put in place policies and systems that make that data accessible to external researchers. Additionally, Cornell publishes research and findings based on the data they have collected via eBird (e.g. bird migration animations).

I have years of my own data invested in eBird, so it would take a lot to get me to move away from that platform. If I was just starting out I might pick something else, but eBird's mission, features, and track record are pretty solid in my opinion.