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
PandaDoc
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
PandaDoc headquartered in San Francisco offers their eponymous electronic signature platform for sales teams, containing sales proposal automation and CPQ (configure, price, quote) features, and integration with CRMs.
$19
per user/per month
Pricing
Coda
PandaDoc
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
Essentials
$19
per user/per month
Business
$49
per user/per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Coda
PandaDoc
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
With 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
PandaDoc offers a free eSign plan and 3 paid packages for eSigning and document automation starting at $19 per month per user. All plans include unlimited documents and eSignatures. Evaluations start with a free 14-day trial.
We previously used DocuSign - while the eSignature features were good, we found it difficult to easily create and edit templates. It could be this has improved since then. I do think DocuSign contracts look more official. I took a demo with HelloSign - I liked it, but the …
My organization considers Coda for a variety of business and organizational projects. Using Coda, my organization keeps a lot of data and different types of data in one place. The user interface of Coda is very fluid and easy to use. My organization has benefitted from using the efficient and effective operational functionality of Coda.
If you run a business, then you must use PandaDoc. You can use it for HR, IT, Finance, Sales, Operations, Customer Success, etc. Excellent for complex proposals with a beautiful design. Document analytics helped me track the status (sent, viewed, and completed). If a document wasn't viewed, I'd follow up to help close the deal quicker. The integrations allowed for a seamless experience. I can create and send a document from the CRM and when it's signed, it saves the opportunity. There are triggers to change the status to complete and automation to save the document to a folder for accounting to process and operations to proceed with deliverables. It helped with cross-departmental communication and allowed for more team productivity.
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.
The visibility of who has completed but not fully signed. I love the dashboard but have to consistently scroll to get back to where I was looking and find interesting agreements to surface where we have not counter signed yet.
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.
The reason I gave it a rating of 7 is because it's probable, but not for sure. This is because there are a few little things we don't love about pandadoc. Mostly that there is not conditional logic such as: they must either fill this field out OR this one. Also it's a little pricey. But we'll probably stay because it's good enough and a pain to switch to something new
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.
Once you get the hang of it, it's very easy to use. There can be a slightly steep learning curve to get fully in on the system. The new editor v2 has really improved usability and allows us to collaborate on documents simultaneously. Once the templates and library items are set up, a new document, whether it be a sales or HR document, takes very little time to complete.
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.
The documents load quickly for the most part but sometimes if there are larger documents with a high number of variables it could take a bit longer to get the document to show up. Most of the time the document comes on the screen relatively quickly allowing for quick access to documents to be edited and sent out.
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.
Recently I could not upload a pdf to a contract - support was very responsive and easy to work with. They got back to me the next day with an apparent fix - however when I opened the document nothing had changed. I then could not respond to the rep who was helping me because it was a "no-reply address", the problem still has not been solved and we had to make alternate arrangements to get this to the client. Never had it happen before and was only with this one contract.
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.
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.
We also evaluated a product called "Better Proposals" that's not in the TrustRadius list. Pandadoc won our business by virtue of having generally more flexible design and layout abilities. There are a lot of new contenders in the space of proposal/contract creation and management, but Pandadoc feels a) more mature and robust, and b) like much more than just proposal management software. We also use it for contracts with contractors, addendums, branded legal documents, and an increasing number of additional documents as we become more accustomed to it. It's definitely more than just a sales and marketing tool, it's also amazing for a host of HR applications.
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.
