Good now, only getting better

I've been using Coda since the closed beta, and I've been blown away by their vision for the future and the speed with which they're implementing new functions.

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.

The future of docs and collaboration

My experience with Coda has been exceptional. I feel empowered by their resources to create exciting docs that have transformed our workflows, and if I ever have questions I know that Coda Support or the Coda Community will be able to help.

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.

Could be a great product, but Not the best for me

Beyond utilizing the initial document/app I was provided, I found my experience frustrating at best. It’s not Coda’s fault, this product could be perfectly ideal for someone with the right skills, that’s just simply not me.

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.

Slows down over time

Ok... but then it just slowed down and became unusable. We need to get critical company info out of heads and recorded fast. Loading up Coda was slow and they messed with the structure of docs too much to the point where we lost track of what went were. It was simple at first then it became docs, folders, sections, child sections. It feels like they're just bloating it with features now.

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.

Best app to create mini apps for remote teams

As a remote-first company, we at Getro.com, have been using Coda for over 3 and it's been an instrumental tool to help us scale and stay flexible operating our company.

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.