Coda

Pros

Other than Slack and e-mail, Coda is the main infratstructure for our organization. The flexibility and being able to set everything up and automate exactly to our liking is fantastic

Cons

It's a fairly new product, which means that there's (almost) constantly UI changes going on. Performance could be better too, and interdoc connection is missing.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

The flexibility of both setting up and using Coda is by far the best of any similar service I have tried. Whatever your needs are for a database-type service Coda will tick most, if not all boxes. Build the database exactly to your liking and expand when needed. The team also constantly works on implementing improvements based on user feedback. They also keep developing new features.

Cons

They do not offer a lot of options when it comes to formatting and visual layouts. For example, you are bound to only two fonts: one serif and one sans-serif. Granted, you can play around with italics and bold types but you are pretty limited in your choices, at least for now.

Pros

Looks more corporate than notion, and this allows to sell the tool to managers that still believe have a share folder in Google Docs is where documentation should be. On the other hand, it is more focus to be a company wiki place than a personal place to save your notes, documents etc.

Cons

If you want to work big documents o sheets, CODA is not the place. I tried to use CODA as a place to save all the feedback from my users and the bigger the file, the slow the tool become, or you need a great computer to run the application correctly.

Pros

I like the easy of use of this tool. It’s like having the best of Google Docs, and Google Spreadsheets all in one place. You can customize almost everything! And it has great integrations with third party applications, plus you can connect through multiple API client libraries.

Cons

At the very beginning, our team experienced performance issues. The tool is so robust that needs memory and some browsers were not supported.

However, as Coda grew as a company, performance issues are not a thing anymore and their support team was super diligent at helping us optimize our docs.

Pros

I love that I can sign in with my gmail account, that along makes my life easy. I like that I can easily integrate other apps and build out projects based on my needs. The best part for me is to easily collaborate with others in real time, the feature is really smooth.

Cons

Honestly, there isn't much i don't like about it, so I don't have much to say here. Maybe more on the free plan for those just getting started?

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

- Features
- Support team (so responsive and helpful!)
- Mobile App

Cons

- No desktop app available + doesn't work well with Safari (a problem for Mac users)
- No dark mode availble
- Some basic features (like putting docs in the order of your choice) aren't available

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

East to document and collaborate in one single place. It combines the functions of google docs/sheets etc and keeps them in one centralized document/place.

Also only pay per doc maker, not per user.

Cons

Nothing I dislike about the product, just wish I knew some more coding to really take my docs to the next level

Pros

A one stop shop where we can build collaborative project hubs, coordinate tasks and deliverables, integrate with Jira and provide daily project statuses to clients and internal teams.

Cons

Formulas and connectors are not easy to navigate and training our internal teams has been a challenge

Pros

Coda is simple to use and easy to share pages with colleagues. As a knowledge management tool or collaboration tool it gets the job done without a steep learning curve.

Cons

Coda felt like it had limited capabilities to make deeply customizable content like tables or pages with diverse content.

Pros

Great little collaboration site with intuitive UX

Cons

But in all honesty, just not as powerful as Notion.

Pros

Clean UI/UX is a huge plus. Moreover, I personally feel Coda to be miles ahead that it's competitor Notion in all aspects.

Cons

Importing and exporting spreadsheets is a hassle

Pros

Flexibility is the number one reason we love coda on my team.

We use Coda for a number of purposes:

-bug tracking for our app
-organizing documents for projects
-indexing and searching our assets database
-contact lists
-backing up text strings for our website
-managing translation strings
-task tracking for consultants

With just a bit of training we have managed to onboard most of our team and to set up dashboards and workspaces suitable for so many different core functions.

It is amazing to be able to accomplish so much without needing to introduce a new tool to our workflow. It also integrates well with Google Docs and Dropbox, which we also use on our team.

The support team is very responsive and helpful. They really provide excellent tips and guidance, and often solve issues within minutes.

Cons

The limitation on document sizes for users with free accounts makes sense but at the time we needed to upgrade there was no way to transfer the old document to the upgraded account seamlessly. We ended up having to duplicate our document, which was really bad for continuity and very very confusing to team members less familiar with our file storage systems.

Pros

For my needs, it's like the developers took the best features of Google Docs, Airtable, Notion and Confluence and wrapped them all up into uniquely powerful and easy-to-use product. I have to do a lot of off-the-cuff analysis and tracking, and the features they provide around tables exceed even Google Sheets for my uses. I often find myself building little apps that make a task so much easier to get done and with minimal effort compared to other apps (custom scripts in Google Sheets anyone?).

The formula and control options are also second-to-none both in just how much you can do with them and also how they can be brought together into a much more usable interface.

Cons

I don't understand why you have to go with a Team plan or above to access document locking functionality. I've got it now that I'm paying, but I've built a lot of tools in Coda in the past that I wanted to share but didn't because I also had to then give folks editing access. If I'm going to trust anyone with editing access, it's my team - I'm trying to lock things down for colleagues, clients and leadership.

Also, they have got to add in the option to import data from a file - this copy and paste from a spreadsheet is a pain and not always reliable.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

CODA is a Financial Business Tool. The support team is very energetic who offer quality training and expert support. The tool itself is very user friendly as it allows Organizations to build their own financial system platform. It provides a customized interface facilitating data entry, reporting, analysis etc.

Cons

The cost (especially for large Organizations) is enormous, considering that not all features/functionalities are required. The cost should be decided based on the customer requirements. There are other cheaper products in the market which might get the job done at a much lesser price.

Pros

Coda has more functionality than most of its competitors. There are many other products that do one small part of what Coda can do. For example, most of the functionality of Monday can be done by Coda, however, Coda can do much more beyond that.

Cons

There is a learning curve to using this product at its full potential. Creating pages, setting up tables and workflows all requires a lot of learning. So in order to have a very functional product, the user must be trained.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

Coda is a great software for businesses looking for more efficient ways to solve problems. It's easy to set up, easy to learn, easy to use. It's super simple to create professional-looking systems and dashboards. Coda also has integration with many other softwares, making it even more powerful!
The Coda team very supportive and the company is constantly releasing new features.

Cons

The only limitation of the software is that it's difficult to handle large number of records at the same time (millions of records).

Pros

The ease of use of Coda is a big draw, as is its flexibility. The ability to set things up and customise to make it work exactly as I need is great.

Cons

The learning curve is very steep. It's kind of to be expected with the amount of power and customisation on offer, but still, it takes a while to get used to and to truly harness its power. The support available is very useful in this regard.

Pros

The software is intuitive to use and brings together a combination of tables and word processing features. They have been very proactive in covering the gaps from their Beta setup which has meant we can now use it as our main system.

You don't need to know how to code (although a little knowledge can help you create some advanced features). They have also setup integrations with other platforms, when combined with their automation features, it is a powerful solution.

Cons

I think the integrations need to be boosted, particularly with G Drive and G Data Studio.

Some in built features for workflow mapping would be great but that isn't a core part of the software.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Functionality-wise coda has checked almost all of my needs. Filterable views, integrations with other apps and data-sources, formulas, automation, etc.

But what has set it apart so far is the customer support. Whenever I have questions or need help figuring out how to troubleshoot a doc the coda team has been extremely helpful. I've never experienced such a high level of customer support anywhere else. I've had members of the support team take the time to copy my docs and really look into my specific work to help troubleshoot instead of giving me generic answers. The help was always constructive and informative.

Cons

Could have more features, but great as is. I'm sure new features will be available down the line.

Pros

Particularly, I use Gmail integration a lot to send my job appointments. It's very pratical and useful. Also, for teams, I like the possibility to mark another person and send emails when needed.

Cons

Once I use Coda to manage the team's tasks. It was very productive. However, when the project was over, I accidentally deleted the doc and then I was unable to recover it. It was really frustrating.
I also dont't like the date formats, whenever I try to pass the data to some spreadsheet I can't because of the date formats.

Pros

We’re able to see the time spent on a task with tracking. Also we’re able to see the list of completed tasks easily all on the same page.

Cons

Wish it worked with office calendars and more free plug ins but all in all great free resource for our small business.

Pros

The number of templates that are pre-built and available means you can set up projects for your team in a matter of minutes, well maybe 30-60 minutes but still a lot quicker than starting it all from scratch.

Cons

Perhaps when you first start there's a bit of trial and error and a few rabbit holes that make slow progress but once you get into a rhythm you can scale projects and goals across the company.

Pros

It's very useful making schedules and team activity

Cons

None so far, if there will be will keep you posted

Pros

I think the best usa for coda is using it for creating a knowledge base.
Amazing templates from their users

Cons

The "excels" are bad so I rarely create tables in coda. It takes long time to edit those

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

Simple to save and update. Simple to add emoticons and text arranging - which makes everything prettier. Astounding layouts and instruments are effectively added by a straightforward cut. I love it!

Cons

It was hard until I could get the associated tables - I had a few issues. Guide layouts likewise gave me a piece pressure, however it worth the effort.

Pros

coda have a lot of important integrations

Cons

in databases the relation between tasks is not working

Pros

Coda truly impressed me with its versatility and array of features. With the capacity to take on both simple and complicated tasks, such as compiling lists, coding, and more, it gave me the perfect platform for managing and executing all of my projects. Furthermore, its neat and organized approach made it especially convenient to switch between different tabs without any difficulty.

Cons

Coda can be unreliable and sluggish when constructing large projects, and still has areas of development concerning features and usability.

Pros

Why I *love* Coda
- First and foremost: tables and a writing surface in one doc. Never again do I have to link to a spreadsheet or paste long-form text into table so that all of my Google Suite info is cobbled into one doc.

- Spans personal and professional work. I have transferred most of my professional work into Coda docs and (even more excitingly) moved all of my "life admin" work (moving checklists, auto repair history, wedding planning, etc) into Coda docs. Coda's flexible platform allows you to build docs that suit whatever work you're trying to accomplish.

- Automations. In Coda you can set data and time-based triggers to alert you in email and Slack. These are game-changers when it comes to remembering an upcoming deadline, reminding a co-worker of an outstanding action item, or celebrating a data milestone.

- Doc Gallery. The gallery is a collection of published docs that can be copied for your own use or be used for inspiration for creating new docs. If I'm ever stuck on how to make a doc (like distributed onboarding), I browse docs that other Coda creators have published for ideas on layouts, formatting, and formulas.

Cons

Challenges in using Coda
- Onboarding. The power of Coda can be intimidating when onboarding – I would second-guess whether doc layouts were as good as they could possibly be, if my formulas were robust, if I should make a different sub-page or section for content, etc. Thankfully, Coda has a variety of resources like their Community of creators, the Help Center, a YouTube channel (shout out to [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN]!), and a fantastic support team. It took a couple weeks of watching videos and reading the Community page while transferring docs to Coda for me to feel like I really understood the platform, but now I feel like I really *get* all of the features and feel empowered when making docs.

- Onboarding your team. Getting a team to adopt a new tool, especially something as foundational as docs/collaboration/documentation is hard. We had the full spectrum of people who were elated about using Coda to... not elated. I wanted to give everyone the experience of using a fully built out doc, so we transferred our weekly team meeting gdoc into Coda. In doing this everyone had a direct comparison between old (gdocs) and new (Coda docs), and we won over most people just with that doc. To keep up the momentum, I worked with teams and individuals to transfer over their docs to Coda, and I send out an email every week sharing a Coda feature (like emailing pages, automations, conditional formatting). Coda is the new default for our team after ~1-2 months of transition.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Coda

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

Coda is, first and foremost, very impressive. It does a lot, especially through their Packs, that can make Coda docs meaningful hubs for projects whether personal or professional. If you can get the buy in from your team or company to make the swap, giving people the tools to create useful tools for themselves is fantastic. The pace of development compared to others in the space (looking at you, Notion) is also very impressive and it feels like almost every other week there's some new feature that I can actually make use of with Coda.

Cons

The main drawbacks for me are the pricing model, especially for individual use, and the maths functions.

Pricing: It's very tough to use as e.g. a personal planner with the free product, and it isn't dramatically better at those functions with the paid product than something like Notion. Particularly after Notion made the majority of personal plan free it's just very hard to recommend Coda for individuals unless you have a very specific need for some of their features, as the document size limits can feel very arbitrary, blocking out usage for a lot of hobby users.

Maths/Spreadsheet style functions: While a lot exists, and the idea of focusing on column references rather than cell references initially feels nice, in reality it only makes explaining what a formula is doing once it works easier - getting that formula to work is very tough. Documentation is pretty patchwork around maths functions and sometimes you just want to be able to jot some quick table calculations down that might not suit "Rows as distinct entries" style tables, but everything in Coda is set up to deal with continuous and repeated equations within an entry, which is very tough to deal with.

Pros

I love the overall flexibility of Coda. The customization is the main selling point for me. I typically use Coda for project management. Workflows are easy to setup. Live Document editing with the templates offered look sharp, and Coda has the ability to turn those pages straight into web pages. It great for collecting all of the team data and creating a quick proof for our client.

Cons

The free version really isn’t worth using. However, it’s a good way to see the capabilities of the program. Once we tried the free, I quickly purchased the team plan. It was well worth the money.

You’ll need some tech know-how and team training to get it up and running. However, once everyone is on board, it’s a massive time saver, flow optimizer and even creativity booster.

Pros

Coda is a fantastic application which has incredibly transformative potential for those who are interested in exploring it. It is feature rich, with a constantly expanding portfolio of API options, built in capabilities and all important 3rd party integrations, this enables easy integration into existing business infrastructure and quickly demonstrates return on investment once things start to get set up. The way I see coda is like word/docs with the functionality of excel/sheets/airtable and the look of notion - take all that and put it on steroids by adding near limitless customisability and a fantastic customer support team who will help you to achieve things that you didn't even know possible - what you end up with is just a doc, the way docs should be

Cons

As coda is much younger than its competitors some of its features are still in development, for example the API only recently came out of beta (as of 17/07/20). There are some downsides to this which I'd like to imagine you can assume, however the diligent team release updates extremely regularly and listen intently to their customers, building a fantastic user-centric workspace experience with ever increasing features. The main thing which I didn't like about the software is that the tools in upper pricing tiers are too attractive, making me want to spend more than my budget on this kind of software - which I suppose is a good and bad thing.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Coda

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

It's easy to integrate with team processes and also to enable the creation of new processes. Has a lot of integrations, has powerful table functionality, is has some very nice original features like creating a webpage out of documents.
The documents are very complete and have the necessary flexibility to adapt to every teams' needs and specificities. The documents also naturally look good, no need to "beautify".
The collaborative side of the documents is a great feature and works well in small teams.

Cons

Most of the integrations with outside software are poor and have very little to no customization/parameterization. For example including google drive documents is very very basic.

The pricing is not very competitive, specially for small teams, considering other softwares out there. The worst part is that they limit the size of the documents in the free tier, and if you go beyond the size limit they lock your documents and you won't be able to work on them any longer. They could use a better model that is not this aggressive.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

If you are technical but can't code, this is your super power. It will allow you to build your own applications and customise enterprise systems that work for your organisation. It integrates with a tone of other applications like Google Calendar and zoom.

Cons

It was extremely obivious where the getting started tutorials were. It took quite a while to learn but is actually worth taking the time. I think if someone is looking for an out of the box solution this is not it. However it's worth it to educate yourself on how to use it as the automations and template will claw back that time for you when you get to grips with it.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

Before Coda, we used to have several different programs and databases to keep track of our day to day work. Coda has become the one-stop-shop for most things we do that don't require higher processing capabilities (statistics, image analysis, etc.). I really like how several of us can be on a certain document at one time (similar to the Google docs functionality) and all of us can collaborate in real time without having to jump from one application to another.

Cons

We have a lot of data in Coda and I really wished there was a statistical analysis option for our tables and charts. When I say stats, I don't mean high order stats (such as Chi-square tests, T-tests, etc.) but averages and counts based on specific criteria and so forth. Also, though once you know the program it's a breeze to work with, a Doc Maker needs to spend a lot of time familiarizing him/her/themself with the abundance of features Coda has to offer and its language.

Pros

How easy it is to customise Coda docs based on the needs of the People & Culture Team! Super love it!

Cons

Formats need to be easily customisable as well, if possible. Like we're currently using Coda to automate our People & Culture ops, and if it is possible to customise formats in the forms as well. Thank you Coda!

Pros

It is the easiest way to create or update a process workflow and keep track of tasks, also has very a smooth clear view of the tasks dashboard with due dates and who requested the tasks with the task status and the due date.Managing the daily tasks of the team is a great feature as well.

Cons

Sometimes, especially when using low internet speed connections the pages take so much time to load and this might some issues for the users, I recommend creating a special view "lowered web version" for such internet speed.

Pros

I like how versatile the software is. Besides this the huge gallery of templates full of good ideas always make me think about the way I'm doing my job. Primarily we use here in my company as a team wiki with steroids.

Cons

The software is not so easy to digest in a world where everybody uses excel as the way to go.I had some bas times trying to explain to my team that coda database is not organised as a spreadsheet.

Pros

It makes it easy for the eng team to house coding and write more technical specs out.

Cons

Not great for prioritization, tasks that move around, owners

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

I like the clean look and the general ease of use with Coda. The ability to collaborate with others is great.

Cons

I would say that Coda is a collaboration tool built for programmers. Although it is easy to use once you know how to use it, it is the sort of software that lends itself more to people already in tech versus other fields.

Pros

Coda is super easy to organize information, share it in an app like environment and build a documentation website/app. With the help of tables, action buttons and 'smart' views you can do things that would take much more time to setup with other tools. A lot of functionality can be implemented without ever reading any documentation.

Cons

There is a limit to the amount of information (or data) that can (practically) be stored in a (multi-page) doc. The limit is high, but you need to be aware of certain limits.

Pros

The idea of building up an ‘app’ to be exactly what I need functionality-wise, and based off of an all-encompassing spread sheet was very appealing. I would have access to all the info I needed on desktop and mobile.

Cons

Building it out to be what I needed required an ability to code the document in every way, and that’s just not something I’m knowledgeable enough for. Nor do I have the time to figure it out. Even once I did finally build out features, I would easily delete them accidentally.
That said, I got some help early on to get everything set up correctly, but again, without knowing how to do it myself, I couldn’t maintain or expand on what I was provided.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

The flexibility to set things up how you want is great but that also comes with down sides after a while. The data table functionality works ok.

Cons

Speed and performance really suffers with time, to the point where it takes 10 seconds plus to open our main doc. Support tried to help but couldn't really do anything to improve it.
It's also very easy to accidentally share your entire doc and make it public without realising. I wouldn't keep confidential information in there anymore because of that.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Coda

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

Since I started using coda I was able to organize my tasks and content in a better way, it replaced old document tools and now I have much more flexibility to work with data at work and also for personal stuff.

Cons

Some of the features could be simpler to use, sometimes is a bit complicated to use more advanced features with custom integrations and more complex widgets.

Pros

If you like playing around with software or do you need to customize functionality to various projects Coda is a serious contender. There are so many uses and possibilities that it replaces a lot of other software.

Cons

It is not always easy to translate your idea into a functional Doc, so be prepared for a step learning curve.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Coda

Switched From

Pros

I love Coda's flexibility. With my team we use it to define roadmaps and scope projects. Personally, I use it to take daily notes and I also run my own public blog with Coda.

Cons

It's important to be careful with large documents.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Coda

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

Coda is a robust software that has helped our company centralize all our internal documents. The platform is quite user friendly, allowing us to really expand the product features to meet our needs as an organization. The support and help documents are quite impressive, we used it to train our entire staff on how to efficiently use the product.
They have been responsive to feature requests, and the product has definitely improved in our time using it.

Cons

I still find random bugs quite often that aren't debilitating in completing my work, usually just a nuisance that will slow productivity.

Pros

I love how it is easy to manage data thanks to view.
Very easy to link with external data source.
Our entire team processes are now managed with Coda.

Cons

It lacks of export features for graphs.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Coda

Pros

Vast flexibility and fast performance. Exceptional feature rollout speed.

Cons

Many of the things that have been pain points in the past have since been resolved, with continous new features and a very communicative team. There are still some key missing features such as code syntax highlighting and true markdown support.

The pricing can also be either very good value, or rather expensive, depending on how you intend to use it.

Pros

The platform has a good document editing and templating functions. This includes an intuitive table designer which allows placeholder text to be re-used throughout templating and allows spreadsheet type calculations.

Cons

The organisation of folders / sub folders isn't deep enough to nest different sub-categories and we found that after several months of use, there were performance issues and slow loading times.

Pros

Unbelievably powerful, you can build all the most advanced CRM / ERP / project management tools and features you can imagine in a few hours, integrate with the whole universe, and make your ops people (sales,...) save time and be happy.

Plus it comes with a Google doc killer that will reshape how efficiently your team works in asynchronous docs, it's game changer.

Cons

People who are not really at ease with Google sheets / zapier can't build as advanced workflows, but it's okay.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Coda

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Coda