Coda Reviews & Product Details

I love the overall product concept and how it provides a beautiful UI for gathering and visualizing structured data. I love how you can link all sorts of objects together and reference controls and data types in all sorts of ways. It solves a ton of problems I've had trying to work between Google Sheets and Google Docs, and it's by far the best solution to a project I'm working on to collect data on internal processes and present it in informative, strategic ways.

There are numerous small product gaps that make Coda extremely frustrating to use at times. 1) It should be easier to view and restore a previous version of the document without contacting Coda support. 2) Merging separate documents and copying tables from one place to another is nearly impossible to do, as all the formula links break, and you have to redo all your work. They should make it possible to copy a chart or filtered table to another document with some way to change all the references in the chart to a different source. 3) They should also make it possible to copy styling and conditional formatting from one table or chart to another. It's SO frustrating to have to repeat these things over and over when all you want is consistent styling across the document. 4) They should make an option for non-global table filters so users can filter data for their own purposes without it affecting every single version of the document. I know there's a hack to get around this, but it shouldn't be that hard. I've spent dozens of hours building an extremely complex project in Coda, and it would save me so much time if you could implement these features. Thanks!!

I'm building a tool to gather data from internal Post Mortems and present it in informative ways that help us build reports and track our progress reducing incident impact. I've been able to visualize and filter the data in ways that are far superior to the Google Sheet we were using for the same purpose. I plan to set up automated emails to internal teams to give everyone a better view into the data.

East to create interactive documents that act like apps without any programming knowledge

Wish there was a way to integrate JSON with outside websites. Wish you could drag rows between tables to move them.

Able to keep a nicely formatted drive inventory sheet

The database functions mostly work well, I like that it looks nice and you can add different colours etc.

My biggest problem with coda is that to integrate it with other apps you have to use Zappier which is incredibly expensive. It would be much better if I could use a cheaper alternative such as automate.io or IFTTT

We use it to organize ideas for a series of books - and that's what I wish coda would focus on. There isn't a good ideas management app, coda is the best I've found but it doesn't focus on ideas

I like that it is like a more powerful spreadsheet and that a document created in Coda becomes a mobile app automatically. We used it to create a simple CRM that allowed us to create our own workflows and customer views and searches. Creating relationships between contacts, companies, and events on a calendar were super easy. We also liked that is naturally collaborative. You can work in a document at the same time and see what other people are contributing.

The formula syntax took some getting used. Pulling data from multiple tables into a single view is challenging. It has gotten better for creating improved layouts, but the earlier version was very limited in how you could arrange elements within a document.

I've been able to create templates that can be shared and used in various use cases.

Ability to make complex workflows and custom 'apps' or workflows

Some bugs and automations are very immature and need some work

Organization and planning. Great for project management

It is very easy to start using! You can start collecting info on the go and CODA will allow you to build countless ways to interact with that info as you need. In my opinion, it is quite like Filemaker pretends to be, only that you don't have to invest tons of effort planning prior creating your first record. In this case to me it is like the defunct Apple's Hypercard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard, only supercharged with plenty of integrations for 3rd parties.

To me it is quite pricey. This is one of the services you want to have permanently. However USD 10/month for a usable version is quite expensive in the long term. And if you happen to share your work (as it is almost something that naturally happens) others are quite reluctant to create an account to prevent being charged for a service they don't expect to use as I do. It takes a while to convince others about the usefulness of this and they almost think it is quite complicated. Most of the times I just end copying and pasting info to share in other free services like Google Docs.

I have collections for both personal and work. The most important for me is the way CODA solves the "relational" link of different tables. Forget about the IDs and relations. The powerful formulas help you to build "queries" quite easy. You only need a browser and plenty of memory for it ;)

Ability to customize documents with tables and charts, as well as link outside documents and embed videos.

Using the desired features sometimes requires a lot of googling or contacting support.

Easy sharing of complex formatted documents

It's easy to start working in Coda. Ease of use in general is very high with Coda. You can easily create or remove pages & subpages, change text formatting, add tables, and import many of the most common types of documents. The ability to set an icon for the page and a cover image allows each page to stand out and makes it easier to know at a glance what kind of page you're on. It's also incredibly easy to collaborate within Coda, with multiple people able to seamlessly interact with and change items together.

The tables are probably my least favorite part of Coda. If you're using a template table, sometimes you can mess up your view by adding a new row and that formatting is just annoying. I also do not like how the calendar integrations & notifications work. It's really confusing to try to figure out how to do it in the first place and then just having it send out notifications at a certain time is also annoying to set up.

Probably the largest issue that Coda is solving is creating a one-stop-shop for our whole team to document, collaborate, and discuss, across all departments. Our developers are using Coda to track their technical initiatives, domain knowledge, and other important technical information. Design and Product are using Coda to document research, Discovery, and other artifacts as part of development. The ability to link to many kinds of documents means that we can have a single page on say a specific feature and FAQs, Murals, Google Meet recordings about that feature, etc. can all live on one page.

Very easy to build almost any kind of business application

Lack of ability to change page styles - could be more visually distinct

Coda is allowing me to efficiently manage data internally - all kinds of business data

Easy to use and find documents. Collaboration with multiple people is easy. Ability to have multiple editors even if they aren't doc makers. enjoy the ease of use more than notion

Change Tracking Ability to hide sections from publicly shared links Easier to move pages between documents or break documents into multiple documents Icons are hard to navigate for documents, would also be nice to add your own.

Documentation of SasS product, delivery practices, coding practices and meeting noticed Centralized document management very beneficial without needing software installed on people's machines

How easy it is to use, but the simplicity does not halter the number of features it offers. All the built-in templates also make it extremely easy to get started

The mobile app is unbearable and makes it hard to consume notes on the go. Using it in larger company organizations also makes it hard when using a lot of different tables

For me its having everything in one place, and how I can customize coda so it benefits my needs. This range everything from larger strategic documents to smaller team voting docs

Love that everything is built inside of a Notion-esque text editor. Packs were easy to install and use, and the software was pretty straightforward.

Docs inside Coda are siloed and segmented and difficult to provide guest access or client access to. It's difficult to understand access control inside Coda and to freely share data between Docs for proper access control.

Coda seems to be a good solution for organizations that are looking for a combination of app-like functionality and documentation.

The power they give us to use the data to code in many different ways

It's hard to centralize data and there's many segments or docs I think we don't need to split having notion as a model

I'm inviting people to have some tables to control assignments for our religious community

Different thinking to find out solutions to the challanges by building pages and its releationships. In addition, the productivity gets better with using AI

The setting for eg. Headlins is ony to set by clicking on the mous, I miss something more efficient

Virtual co-working

Coda has nice UX and visually it looks good

I want to be able to send emails of am certain pages on a regular cadence

Being able to create metrics was very useful for me to be able do my everyday job. I appreciate that I am able to be more productive and give management visibility

It's a big improvement over Google Docs, which is what we were using previously. The tools to format and organize docs are nicer, especially the ability to sort and organize subpages within a doc. The tools around tables and data-driven workflows are powerful, and were a big selling point for us when we chose Coda over Notion. We also found the way text documents are edited to be a bit more natural in Coda than in Notion. I also feel like the product team seems to be moving at a good pace, and they're frequently sharing updates about new improvements.

Coda is not yet a great tool for sharing and maintaining written documentation. Things like guides, policies, and other prose-centric docs can be maintained in Coda, but we've found that as we built out these kinds of docs, there were missing features that made finding, using, and maintaining written docs kind of frustrating. Some examples: 1. A huge selling point of Coda or Notion over Google Docs is the ability to break a long doc into easily navigable and linkable titled pages. However, Coda's search function doesn't surface pages as results. So you end up in a circumstance where you have a doc like "Employee Handbook" with an important page titled "Reimbursements" but if you type reimbursements into search, it only returns the top-level handbook. This has led to a sense on the team that they can't find things in Coda, and useful and important pages don't get referenced as much as they should. This is on a 14-person team, and I suspect it would be worse on a larger team. 2. A minimal version history feature exists, but is not sufficiently featureful to answer questions like "When was the last time this page changed substantially?" or "I know Sarah made some updates on this page. What changed?" This has been frustrating and made collaborating on a doc harder since you can't easily say "Hey I made some improvements, can you review them" without re-reading the whole doc. 3. Something neither Coda nor Notion seems to have is any indication of the vitality of a document. How old is most of this doc? How often is it referenced? Who wrote most of it? Notion does have the ability to surface backlinks to a doc which is a bit of a hint about a doc's relevance, but overall this feels like an area of opportunity across all tools. 4. Often we end up wanting to embed a bit of a spreadsheet to do some noodling in an otherwise written doc, for example a little scratchpad for helping calculate some things or make a 2-column comparison. Coda really wants to treat tables not like chunks of spreadsheet, but more like views onto a database. This is interesting and potentially really powerful for building workflows, but on a 14 person team we're less often building data-heavy workflows and more often just making a quick little sheet to try and house some ad-hoc calculations. Some of us are getting a handle of how to make good use of Coda tables, but a lot of team members have moreso learned "Coda tables are weird, it's easier to just link a Google sheet" which has been disappointing. So a year in to using Coda, it's been an improvement over Google Docs, but I'm increasingly confident that for our writing-centric needs, Notion would have been a better move. We're holding out a bit longer to see how Coda's feature set evolves – they seem to have a smart and high-velocity product team, and the idea of migrating again a year later is not appealing – but we may end up moving to Notion at some point.

We store our team guidelines, policies, handbook, meeting notes, proposals, brainstorm results, and other written docs in Coda. This has been a lot better for us than Google Docs, since it's easier to organize a group of related pages into a single-destination doc (although the inability to search for pages somewhat mitigates this benefit). Overall we have a nicer and better maintained docs experience than we did with Google Docs. We've had some success with some of Coda's dynamic features, such as scripting docs and using templates to do things like collect feedback on a doc from readers.

- the database flexibility - the views - conditional formatting - doc maker subscription plan - the community

- customer service - 10 weeks for a 48 hrs issue and some other weeks for other issues that could be solved very easy - very buggy and unclear - some formulas work from the custom formula field, but don't from button settings. and vice versa - the import is hard and buggy, but the export is horrific - response time issues

For a small database with 100-200 rows works fine, then it's starting to glitch

* Flexibility * Relational Data Stores * Automations * Integrations

* Lack of ability to structure docs * Inability to search through all pages of all docs in a central area (think: Notion view of all docs)

It is solving making use case specific tools. We are able to self define how we do OKRs, Product Management, etc. It integrates with other tools, so we don't have to only use a specific tool (like Asana or Monday.com)

Perfect combination of spreadsheets, text and graphics. Easy to use and navigate.

Nothing. Coda is great and I don't see any downsides.

Team collaboration. Ability to share complex processes and data in an easy way.

One suite for most of the company's operations. CRM, operations, strat sessions, even communication among the team members. Also very affordable in comparison to its competitors. CODA has also made a lot of micro and macro level improvements over the last year.

It is hard to use the word "dislike" about Coda because it delivers on many fronts. So all shortcomings fall in the category of "requested features" like default support of UTF-8 characters.

I use Coda as a one-stop place for running my company's operations, sales, marketing efforts. Same for the strategic brainstorming sessions, and more and more - internal and external communication.