What are Coda users saying about the software?

Coda is the best!

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.

Coda is amazing for many things, specially organizing content and making your tasks organized.

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.

I love Coda

I have been using Coda since quite early days in their beta. While it was already showing a lot of promise in the early days, it has completely blossomed and matured since and I now use it daily and have had it implemented for different purposes in two organisations. Highly recommend.

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.

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.

The documenting master tool

We started using Coda as our source of truth for the company, specially for documentation. But as the product has evolved, we have used the product as our task management system too.

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.

Powerful, flexible and rewarding to use

I see its relevance In all my future work in some way or another.

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.

My New Favorite Tool

Having everything about a project live all in one place had saved me a lot of head aches. I'm building out a course and this has become the hub of the entire thing. The face that I could build out all the tabs and pages I needed has kept me organized and on track, not something i could have done on google sheets or any other pm tool for this particular need.

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?

Unlimited power and agility for 0 to 12$/m/team

Amazing, game changer for the business efficiency, speed, agility.

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.

A couple of weeks and you'll be in love with Coda

2 weeks are all it takes for you to fall in love with Coda. Starting is not the smoothest process, but the power and flexibility it gives us make it totally worth it. The free tier is more than enough for most solo users. Managers will simply want to get the team plan because it is the one app you'll need to put it all together.

Pros

Coda is extremely powerfull. I love the hability to centralize in one document all the data my team uses.

Cons

The one feature that needs urgently to be deployed/improved is the 2-way sync of lookups, but for same table and different tables lookups.

Love it!

Before I shifted my businesses to Coda, everything was SO unorganized to the point where I hated coming into work. Hiring employees was such a task because I had to keep track of sending onboarding forms and Google Drive links over email. Ever since Coda, EVERYTHING IS IN ONE PLACE! It's such a great feeling to be so organized. I'm obsessed with organizing everything in Coda now. It has just overall made my life easier and I feel like there are no longer a 100 tabs open in my mind all the time.

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

Simple to save and update!

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.

The idea of Coda is better than google docs, but the software is not the most user friendly

I love the idea of Coda, but I find it hard to use. Because of this, I don't use it mainly for my document management.

Pros

I really like all the features of Coda. I like that you can add so many things to documents (like to-do lists, spreadsheets, headings). I also feel like it is a great tool to track team meetings.

Cons

It is not very easy to learn how to use Coda. I have been on teams that have used Coda for document management but then have switched back to Google Docs for ease of use.

Good and flexible

Our experience has been very positive so far. We managed to create some internal processes to develop projects around some templates we created in coda and that helped us significantly. At the time we started using coda very few other tools had the customization abiities of coda and that was a winning point for us. Hope they fix their pricing model soon, because having documents locked down is not reasonable at our stage of business.

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.

Very cool features, but some bumps along the way

I use Coda for individual notes on smaller projects (block limits prevent me using it for longer ones), giving me a single spot to find my notes from meetings, workshops and creative outputs and organise my thinking far better than I could in our G Suite setup. I also love Coda for user interviews and research, helping my to create views of an interview script for each session, but then to be able to review all the sessions side by side, have the videos embedded etc. Most limitations come from an inability to fully adopt it in my own work enough to justify paying for an account - a lot of my personal use moved to Notion when the introduced pricing strategy killed half of my live documents, and it's just not powerful or reliable enough for me to be able to make a push for it as a team-wide tool yet. This isn't a concern for future users, but the "This doc is too big and will become read only in 14 days" approach to implementing their initially very convoluted pricing strategy was a real pain point and burned a lot of my goodwill. I don't expect them to pivot that dramatically again (from "A doc as powerful as an app" to "A doc for teams"), but that pivot has made me very wary about recommending it to friends and colleagues in case it happens again and half their work gets frozen in a format that's very tough to extract efficiently.

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.

Low-code at its best!

Pros

There's a lot that you can do using just the free version. Paid plans provide useful additions. After spending a little time with the documentation, you can build amazing things.

Cons

The learning curve is a little steep. I have experience with database software and I feel it put me at a disadvantage as I had to let go of some old habits. Some parts of Coda are reminiscent of a classic database while others force you to think a little bit differently.

There really isn't a competitive alternative

As I said, it's a surprising powerful app that's still very easy to use and the user/dev community is actually very active and helpful. I discovered and started using Coda in their early days and I have tried every single app listed above and then some since (and still use many for various things). For its unique combination of features, though, I still always find myself coming back to Coda. So much so that, while their free plan is surprisingly feature rich with high limits, I finally decided to pull the trigger and commit by purchasing a plan.

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.

An extremely flexible and powerful project and data management tool

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.

Easier collaboration vs. Notion

Coda is a quick start for anyone familiar with google docs or other collaborative platforms. I use Coda for managing a team of 20 volunteers on web content publishing projects.

Pros

I like the templates library and integrations.

Cons

I am waiting for a rollup function to include all team comments across documents. This feature is currently missing and makes the software difficult to use for managing a large team with multiple documents.

Using coda to organize

I have been able to set up an online interactive system to organize our activities in a way that would have required much more effort with any other tool. And really nice is that you can modifying/add features with incredible ease.

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.

Great Low Code Platform for SME Businesses

Extremely positive. Support have been fantastic and the software have yielded plenty of benefits for us which we couldn't get elsewhere (and we spent a lot of time trying)

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.

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.