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.

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.

feature impact, ease of use and integration with existing business

Outstanding, see other reviews for further details.

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.

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.