What is Coda?
What do you like best about Coda?
Coda is an incredibly powerful tool for building an internal wiki for our company. We use it to document and store everything from customer documents to our culture and code of conduct. As a very early-stage startup, one of the things we like the most about Coda is how flexible the pricing and usage is. You only need to pay for only the people who have to create new docs. Once a document has been created other users can keep adding pages to the doc without having a full-fledged Coda license. This is a major advantage of using Coda over its competitors. Coda also has very robust community where multiple templates are available in the way of doc packs and this has been very helpful.
The most helpful thing about coda is the flexibility of the software.
It’s easy to test an idea, build a wiki, or share detailed reports with a simple user experience. We’ve used it for everything from onboarding documents to our project management system while looking for a more robust solution for our (extremely complex) project system. We’ve also let new users try it out for notetaking and resources (internal wikis and knowledge bases). It is easy to hand off because it behaves similarly to a Google Doc or Google Sheets. The interface is user-friendly, and the editor options are where you expect them to be. Navigation is easy as well, coda allows for multiple levels of hierarchy in folders and can create a “chapter” heading-like feel for the document.
In addition, it can help us prototype applications. We’ve also used it to build a proof of concept for a Customer Resource Manager (CRM) and WordPress website content storage. For project management solutions, we’ve tied in multiple resources and used them to create various views of our data. Our project system in Coda was viewable by project managers or the staffer working on it. We’ve also been able to share our Coda docs with our clients and limit their access.
What do you dislike about Coda?
Some issues arise with Coda when you try to do exactly what you can in Google Sheets; the formulas and the syntax for formulas are slightly different (I mean, it’s not a Google product, so…). However, the formula lookup is easy, and the devs crew at Coda are very responsive. Some integrations do not pull in all of the data that you want.
Some integrations don’t work exactly the way you want them to, but most of the issues I’ve had when first using Coda (as an early adopter) have been solved over time with new additions, new releases, packs, and through requesting updates through their portal.
Some things I wish for from Coda: More header options – specifically h4 and h5. More font choices outside of serif and sans serif. And a less expensive option for their top tier if you only want document access privacy instead of the additional integrations.
Native Mac and Windows apps would have been a great addition to Coda. Often, while traveling or otherwise disconnected, the lack of a native app is an inconvenience.
What problems is Coda solving and how is that benefiting you?
Creating a repository of information for everything in our company. We are an all-remote startup and having a tool like Coda makes things much easier for us. We are also planning to use Coda APIs along with Zapier like tools to build lightweight internal tools like leave management and tracking.
What problems is Coda solving and how is that benefiting you?
We had previously relied on Google Sites for a lot of our internal documentation, intranet sites, and resource wikis (knowledge bases), but then in 2020, Google retired Google sites in the previous iteration. The new Google Sites do not have a strong hierarchy, their forms are not as integrated as before, the sheets are not as integrated as before, and it is more difficult for many of our technology-avoidant staff. Coda has been a good stepping stone to figuring out what these intranet sites need before we build a new platform for their committee or sub-group. Coda docs have also provided a more efficient way for users to manage their own content, add attachments and images, and communicate asynchronously without email.
As a small team that manages many websites, it’s also helped us wrangle our loose ends. With our Coda wiki, we can quickly update our information, link to our resources, add troubleshooting docs and links and keep it up-to-date. (Which is a critical aspect of team information that seems to get overlooked). We also have version history in our Coda, so if something gets updated or edited, it’s easy to restore and see what it was previously without needing more information.
Spreadsheets are too stiff and stale. But apps are too opinionated, unintentionally forcing a certain methodology by their very structure (eg, there are projects and tasks and that’s it). But Coda allows you to make your own structure (eg, projects, tasks, questions, issues, anything you want). Other apps have a due date field. But you can make any number of date fields if you want (eg, due, start after, started on, try to get done before, hard due date, actually completed on, review again at). It’s things like that that make Coda stand out. Infinite personalization is what I’ve needed, and Coda is the first to provide it for me.
Coda Features
Pros
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“I’ve used Coda for some months in my team and it’s similar to an evolved excel with a lot of great functionalities. I loved it cause it has a lot on template made by great companies, and it was free.”
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“Such a beautiful piece of software. I really like the way they think of what is going to be the way to see documents.”
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“The support is responsive. Coda has an excellent YouTube channel in which they offer many fun and easy-to-understand tutorial videos.”
Cons
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“This feature is currently missing and makes the software difficult to use for managing a large team with multiple documents.”
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“Overall I have created a system with this tool that would´ve taken a lot longer and be more difficult if I had used a different device.”
Coda Pricing
$0
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Yes, has free trial
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Yes, has free version