Coda vs. HCL Connections

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Coda
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Coda, from Coda Project headquartered in San Francisco, is a template-based document generation solution, supporting a variety of use cases presented by the vendor as ideal for smaller companies that might otherwise be relying on spreadsheets to maintain (for instance) product development, or inventory tracking. It is available free, with paid editions to support teams, automations, or for more advanced collaboration and workspace features, as well as more advanced security features.
$0
per month
HCL Connections
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Connections from HCL Technologies (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in 2018) is a collaboration tool and employee digital workspace with key features like social analytics, blogs, document management, and a social network.N/A
Pricing
CodaHCL Connections
Editions & Modules
Free
$0.00
per month
Pro
$10.00
per month per doc maker; unlimited editors (paid annually)
Team
$30.00
per month per doc maker; unlimited editors (paid annually)
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CodaHCL Connections
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsWith Coda, you only pay for Doc Makers. Often one person creates a doc, others edit it, and some simply observe from afar. Instead of charging for everyone, we only charge for the people who create docs. Interested in enterprise pricing? Visit coda.io/enterprise
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CodaHCL Connections
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
CodaHCL Connections
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Square 9 Softworks
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Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
MSB Docs
MSB Docs
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Conga Composer
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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Score 9.3 out of 10
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User Ratings
CodaHCL Connections
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(24 ratings)
9.0
(20 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
7.7
(7 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(1 ratings)
9.0
(4 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.8
(2 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(1 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Configurability
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
4.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(1 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CodaHCL Connections
Likelihood to Recommend
Coda
Coda is great to build a place for your users to go to and see information. It is easy to navigate through and the variety of content creation is great. However, it is not always easy to create what you want and there is a lot of playing around and learning. Coda also sometimes misses some functionality which is expected. For example, downloading a list of users that have access to the platform. Being able to send push notifications when a new page has been created etc. Overall it is a good tool to use just be prepared to invest time!
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HCL Technologies
IBM Connections is well suited for larger organizations that need an internal social networking tool and are willing to deal with IBM and the complexity of the software. It is less appropriate for smaller organizations and those who don't want to deal with the complexity, or IBM's awful customer service and prices.
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Pros
Coda
  • Flexibility. It's easy to get started on a small scale, but add more complex organization strategies as needed.
  • Integrations. It's simple to ingest data from sources like Zapier for time-saving automations.
  • Useful components. View table data across different formats like cards or custom detail views.
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HCL Technologies
  • The plugin for MS Office/Explorer has made saving and sharing working documents extremely convenient for me and my close colleagues
  • The newsfeed feature conveniently aggregates updates from the communities/people you follow. It's nice not to have to jump from community to community to see what's going on in the organization
  • The various apps can be used for several purposes. A little creativity goes a long way when establishing what type of information the apps can be useful for communicating
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Cons
Coda
  • It takes getting used to in terms of how the formulas per column is implemented, in contrast to how we build tables in Excel. For organization/team purchase, it would be worth considering having a training for the core team of users. Right now, we do a lot of self-learning.
  • Inability to email charts or image without these objects being hosted on a third party. The community has been great in providing workarounds but it would be much more convenient to be able to have such ability natively.
  • APAC Support. I'm based in Malaysia, due to timezone differences, even with a livechat implemented, the support for each step and conversation takes up to 24 hours per response. Having some hours covered in our timezone would greatly improve customer support experience.
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HCL Technologies
  • The lack of a note-taking tool became a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. Our pilot users felt Connections was a natural place to take and share meeting notes – including photos, drawings, recorded audio, etc. – and were always frustrated that there was no easy, organized way to do that. We tried using a Blog, Wiki, etc. but nothing really resonated as a good solution for this.
  • The Wiki tool is weak, providing rigid structure but with few options. A Community can only have a single Wiki, for instance. Wikis are weak in the mobile app as well; they’re not even easy to navigate. Users ended up ignoring Wikis completely despite our efforts to get them to convert documents like guidelines, policies, procedures, handbooks, etc. into Wiki form.
  • The Windows Explorer plug-in was useful but required a lot of manual intervention to setup. For instance, once a user joins a Community in Connections, the Community also has to be manually added to the Explorer plug-in so the user can find, open and edit files with it. We felt this process should be much more automated.
  • Tagging is only relevant in the web UI and, to a lesser extent, in the mobile app. However, in the Windows Explorer plug-in, Tags are not usable at all making it difficult to find things that were easy to find in the web UI.
  • IBM Docs was not included in the on-premises deployment; it was an additional license so we did not test it. Documents, mainly Microsoft Office files, are still the single most common way our user community creates, shares, edits and presents information. That proved to be a major gap for our users, and slowed user adoption considerably. We considered testing it, but IBM Docs would only work for about half of our users so we found ourselves wondering if we really wanted to support two document editing platforms. IBM Docs also offers no way to work offline as far as we could tell. This also meant we would need to keep licensing Microsoft Office which is not cheap.
  • Consulting costs are high because the back-end environment is complex. Installing, administrating and even patching Connections is a fairly complex process. We needed to hire consultants to install our test environment and any major upgrades would’ve required additional consulting fees. Any 3rd party add-ons we looked at were highly technical in nature meaning…you guessed it, more consulting costs.
  • Administrating IBM Connections requires editing XML files in a specific, secure way that is typically done in a console. I love consoles as much as the next admin, but when you only use a console once every 2 months it means looking up all the documentation and re-educating yourself. A single change could take me 2 hours to implement. 3rd party admin dashboards do exist, at an additional cost, but IBM really should provide a much easier way to manage the environment.
  • The lack of in-person or online training courses, materials, videos, etc. really discouraged a lot of users. The only decent training we could find (marketing videos aside) was a single video series on Lynda.com which, of course, was an additional cost. In the end that video didn’t really help our users much beyond introductory concepts.
  • IBM includes reporting, but it’s a massive Cognos system requiring some serious hardware and Cognos expertise. We had neither, and would have ultimately opted for a 3rd party add-on for reporting and statistics.
  • An often overlooked concern is eDiscovery. Our contracted eDiscovery service extensively works with various ECMs, but had no idea how they would handle Connections data. The cloud version of Connections offers an add-on for eDiscovery, but as far as we could tell IBM offered nothing for on-premises deployments.
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Likelihood to Renew
Coda
Coda is definitely something that has been proven to drive positive impact in our organization. We have many divisions that can benefit from this that we have yet to explore. It would definitely be worth renewing.
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HCL Technologies
Connections has continued to more than meet our needs from a collaboration point of view and we are currently working on integration with our IBM Websphere portal platform to provide an integrated collaboration solution. This scenario will provide our users the best both products have to offer in a single interface.
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Usability
Coda
Coda can seem either really useful or really useless. The extremes of both ends is driven by what our own understanding of what we want to implement. If we lack this understanding, it will be easy to misunderstand Coda's usability especially in the wrong context.
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HCL Technologies
Connections combines all the most useful abilities from various social networks. This makes it useful of course, but it also reduces user adoption time initially by allowing users to get comfortable with basic features. Once they are comfortable, it's easy for users to start exploring. They find new people in the organization to contact, new sources of information, etc. Before you know it, about half of the users are contributing back in some form -- and all with little or no training needed by IT.
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Reliability and Availability
Coda
So far in the past year, we haven't had situations that Coda has gone down for us which is great.
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HCL Technologies
Once Connections was installed, patched, etc. it was ALWAYS up. We only had to bring it down for OS updates to the servers. That seems to be typical of anything that runs on WebSphere; it's bulletproof and could probably run for months and years if the underlying OS didn't require constant patching.
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Performance
Coda
We haven't done any integrations - the initial part of our experience we found that for docs with complex formulas, the page tends to load slowly but in recent months, Coda has improved and optimized the loading times in general and we generally don't find any problems in terms of speed anymore.
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HCL Technologies
IBM Connections web UI, mobile app (data sync to / from the device), and file transfer speeds were almost always very fast. It was rare for a slow-down of any kind, even when doing searches.
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Support Rating
Coda
Mainly due to timezone differences. I think Coda's support in general is well implemented and executed. They know their stuff and are helpful. But since I'm not in the same timezone, solution rates are slower for me, and that's not something I prefer. I work in customer service, too, and more often than not, time is important. Shortening the solution time would be a much greater experience.
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HCL Technologies
IBM Support has ALWAYS been quick to respond, regardless of the product. Even first level techs seldom provide "canned" responses and they really try to help. If they can't help, they don't wallow around but engage the right person immediately. It's very rare that the first level tech needs to escalate, and even more rare when they do escalate and the next person engaged cannot solve it. We have been more than satisfied with IBM support's quick and professional responses to our issues.
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Implementation Rating
Coda
I'm relatively inexperienced but this experience is meaningful. It would have been nice to have some guidance from Coda so that we understood more on Coda's purpose and potential.
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HCL Technologies
Try to understand you will never find a product which suites all your end user for 100%. IBM Connections is the best of all breeds but if you go look on each functionality on its own there are better example out there. But as IBM COnnections delivers it all in just one platform makes it the best example about integration of different functionality into one platform.
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Alternatives Considered
Coda
While all of the products listed have great features and platforms, there was always one thing missing from them that I would need to get from another application. Coda was the first one we used that really combined some of the best parts of those products and allowed us to use it in one place. I also appreciate the flexibility of creating your own framework and workflow, unlike in other tools where you have to follow how they capture data and organize projects.
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HCL Technologies
From the few times that I have used MS SharePoint, I can say that it doesn't seem to hold a candle to the robust features of IBM Connections. The out-of-the-box capabilities of IBM Connections are amazing and are more easy to access and use than what I've seen with MS SharePoint.
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Scalability
Coda
I think scalability is definitely good here since it's based on number of doc makers. Implementation into each dept becomes simpler. That being said, due to the nature of our work, we find it easier that we have a "super user" and then a team of other doc makers. This would make the doc creation and management more efficient.
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HCL Technologies
Scaling UP is never an issue with IBM's core technologies like WebSphere, DB2, etc. as long as you have or can find the technical resources to implement it. Where IBM seems to fail is scaling DOWN for smaller organizations. Connections 5.0 on-premises would have required us to create 7 servers -- yes, they would be virtualized, but still that's 7 OS licenses, 40 virtual CPU cores, 80GB RAM, and a few TB of hard disk space. All to replace Quick which runs on 1 server with 1 OS license, 4 cores, 8GB RAM and 600GB of disk. Granted, there are major differences in capabilities between the two, but how do you get a CFO understand why features like a mobile app, file sync, and social sharing require 10x the back-end resources?
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Return on Investment
Coda
  • Increased insight for all stakeholders involved--both in terms of overview and details
  • Better grip on issues and escalations--reduced friction, confusion, and higher clarity on status, next actions, and ownership.
  • Reduced time required by those who need to maintain all information. Record (a detail) once and use multiple times.
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HCL Technologies
  • Positive - Using IBM Connections has reduced the number of directories and file share repositories previously used for collaboration.
  • Positive - The direction is to stop relying on email for the only method of communicating and sharing knowledge. IBM Connections is in the right step.
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ScreenShots

Coda Screenshots

Screenshot of One unified surface means ideas aren’t limited to a file type. A project doesn’t have to be split across tabs of documents, spreadsheets, and apps.Screenshot of Packs are a version of integrations or plug-ins. They connect the  doc to the apps in use every day, so as to pull live data in or push updates out automatically.Screenshot of Drag-and-drop templates provide a quick-start shortcut to commonly used templates like Upvote/Downvote, To-Do List, and Team Sentiment Tracker.Screenshot of Slice, dice, and chop data using Views. A View is a mirror of data that can be tailored to unique needs, all while staying connected to the source.Screenshot of When accessing the doc from a mobile device, it should feel like an app. Doc pages become tabs, buttons become swipe actions and doc notifications become push notifications.Screenshot of The Doc Gallery contains docs self-published by the Coda community. These published docs have a webpage-like interface and have varying levels of interactivity like view, play or edit. Find and share tools, templates, tiny apps, interactive handbooks, and anything else that can be built in Coda.