The way tables are handled in Coda is fantastic! It allows you to truly create relational tables with very little effort.
My only complaint is the top tier pricing is too high for my budget. For a business that level makes sense. For an individual it does not. Other than that, it's FANTASTIC.
I started with Coda for personal use (see below), but now I'm rebuilding my freelance consulting business using Coda. It is so quick and easy to build solutions and so versatile, that I can solve many problems for many clients with less cost to them. My personal use that got me started and falling in love with Coda. ⬇️ I am a busy, widowed, homeschooling mother of a large family. I organized our entire household on Coda with everything from legal information, medical information to tracking extended warranties, creating my to do list, running my blog posts, and everything you can imagine in between. I've created a library of our books, movies, and even track our 5 rescue cats and all their information. In addition to that I've built a very extensive to do list complete with automated features such as notifying me when extended warranties, credit cards or other things with expiration dates are going to expire. I track insurance and vehicle information including gas mileage and maintenance costs! I'm working currently on tracking our budget and expenses in Coda to see if I can get rid of using Quicken for these functions. The benefit is rather than having a dozen or more different apps that I have to check I just use Coda for EVERYTHING. And I mean everything! Whether it is tracking my sleep or my Bible reading or keeping a list of links of articles I want to read, I pretty much manage everything in my life with one app now. Because it does offer truly relational databases, I can link things together easily. I'm also having my children who are still in school begin learning how Coda can help them to get organized, make plans, etc.
It's really easy to use and I love their pricing model, which I prefer over their main competitor, Notion. Pricing is based on doc makers and not on viewers, which I think is the appropriate way to go.
I can't think of anything at this time that I dislike about Coda.
Many of my clients are SMBs that don't have massive budgets to invest in work and operations-related technology. They also have a significant percentage of their workforce that work virtually, which often creates challenges with communication and engagement. Coda is cost-effective and highly efficient at enabling my clients to share information, engage with their employees and allow collaboration to happen in real-time.
The customer support for the paid version has been amazing! It's also relatively easy to learn the basics and they have a great tutorial/help section to help get you up and running. I use it for personal stuff, and for business with my team to track jobs statuses and other details. I also like that you don't have to pay for every user, only users who need higher permsissions. Most apps charge you per user, even if they are only using a very basic part of the application. So Coda's pricing was great for us.
I wish it had an offline mode, since I am unable to pull up the app and view information if we are in an area with little or no mobile data service. Some of the terms used within the app take a little getting used to, so I get a little confused when trying to complete certain actions, but I guess that's probably pretty common when using a new application.
In the office, we use it mostly to track the status of our jobs. We are using a table view with filters and sorting showing just the information we need in the order we prefer. In the field, our crew can just see current jobs, and they are able to leave notes, photos, update statuses, about the job as we go to keep everybody including the office on the same page. I love the option to use checkbox lists, bullet points, mentions (where other users will get a notification when we post something), and text formatting. This makes the information easy to view and follow the coversations.
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.
What's better than having a tool for tracking each and every deed of your day to day life and keep a track of it than Coda. Coda has tons of features that has helped me in being a better version of myself. It features like To-do lists helps me in performing effectively and doing my pending tasks, its expense tracker tool has helped me in significantly decreasing unrequired expenses and save more, its focus timer has helped me in increasing my focus and sit to work for more duration. Its benefits are numerous and can't be described in a single-go. It has truly benefitted me personally.
At times when I am busy and forget to organize the documents, Coda does not automatically organize the documents as well as the content stored in the documents. Doing this would have helped me really. To improve my professional field, I decided to integrate it with other platforms like Zapier and more but the integration flexibility of the platform as for me was not up to the mark.
Coda is truly an exceptional and useful platform not only for enterprises but also for individuals out there, who are looking to optimize their day-to-day tasks and work. Coda has tons of features and functions like to-do lists and more that helps me in keeping a track of the tasks I need to perform as well as notify my team about the pending and upcoming tasks. The expense tracker feature not only helps me in keeping a track of my personal expenses but also my operating expenses as well. I used this to calculate the expenses incurred while organizing an event, and keep it within my budget. The final outcome of the expense tracker and its analysis, and the original expenses are same and truly efficient. So overall, Coda has been a game changer for me professionally and personally.
Coda is an amazing product. I have been using Coda since they launched their first public beta and it's since been one of the top apps that I use. The best thing about Coda is that it's so versatile, intuitive, and powerful. I ended up using Coda for basic needs like managing my house expenses to extremely complex tasks such as running agile tracking, shipping & inventory tracking, and CRM. The interface is extremely easy to use and their team has been doing such a great task of engaging with the community and putting community feedback above everything else. From running forums to sending out quality feature release newsletters which I look forward to reading. It's truly a great product built by a passionate team.
I honestly don't have anything I dislike about Coda atm. One problem I usually face is that when there are too many columns, sometimes the app becomes slow. Otherwise, the team is doing a great job by releasing quality features and updates and I can't wait to see how this app evolves over time.
I have been using Coda for various use cases. From house expenses tracking to CRM, progress tracking, Shipping, and Inventory Tracking, etc. If I have any task which involves using tables and data, I first think, can it be done on Coda. The biggest benefit is how versatile the product is while maintaining the ease of use.
The fact that it allows us to use the core of all the necessary software in one place makes it absolutely groundbreaking. Packs are the second best thing making it a one-stop solution for all needs. Finally, the unique pricing structure is boon for small teams.
Grammarly doesn't work with Coda. furthermore, they seem to have some kind of issue with the auto correct on windows. If you enter the word suggested by the windows interface it doesn't change the word but adds the whole word in addition to whatever you have written.
As a product manager, it is a very time-consuming to maintain 20 different files for the same feature Coda helps very much to clean the clutter and be more productive. The pricing structure of coda allows our small team to be more efficient at a very good cost.
At the expense of a couple of coffee each month, Coda has enabled us to draw some operations details (inventories, clients, events) to a large online system. For several different purposes, it's amazing. The team was able to support me easily if I had a concern. Personally and technically, I use it.
Because Coda is different from the programs I used, you must learn how to find a solution to problems. This is another way of thinking. The main challenge facing us with Coda are the incomplete functions. There is no way to print pdf, for example (invoices). It will be a significant move forward for the system to automate this feature.
We have a certain number of time limits in my business for customers to return details to us. In order to encourage them to remain organized on the right foot, I should build a template that I can share with them. My objective is to get Coda to semi-automatically do all organizational work on its own and analyze the collected data. All without the costly company-level devices which are costly to buy, build and manage.