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
Square 9 Softworks
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
For document-intensive companies looking to improve business efficiency, Square 9 Softworks develops solutions for process automation that aim to drive increased productivity across all business applications.
$45
per month per seat
Pricing
Coda
Square 9 Softworks
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
Square 9 Process Automation Essentials
$45
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Square 9 Digital Transformation Essentials
$68
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Square 9 Enterprise Essentials
$75
per month per user (10 User Minimum)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Coda
Square 9 Softworks
Free Trial
Yes
No
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
Offered via a three-tier pricing model that allows customers to scale their solution up or down based on the changing needs of their organization.
Pricing excludes professional services and implementation fees
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!
Square 9 Softworks is great in data management and flow. For us, they've done an excellent job with the Health Screening Tools, Cloud Storage/Management and Online Applications. It seems to be a very diverse product. I think because of that, you can talk with Square 9 Softworks about what you are envisioning to see if they are capable of it. I would not do that with many other products - they just don't have that flex.
Fast Manual indexing with what we consider the best in point-n-click OCR indexing.
Webserver that incorporates Full-Text Content Searching, Workflow Queues, Full Document Management and Live document Signing on any mobile device or location.
Fast workflow designers for rapid implementation
Broad range of capture and information processing tools, easy to configure
Loaded with essential security options
Low price, and about 10X more powerful than MS SharePoint right out of the box.
Multi-database support for a very low price with disaster recovery licensing, this is very rare in the industry.
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.
Some of the administrative/security configuration with Windows Active Directory can be tricky when managed by separate corporate IT personnel (alignment in strategy)
User adoption with any new process can be challenging, but overall user friendly menus
As Database sizes grow (200,000+ records) paging through records can be cumbersome, probably need to migrate to an archive process to offload some of the data.
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.
We absolutely can't imagine not continuing software maintenance as there are always new additions that improve the system not to mention the excellent tech support when issues are encountered. Response times for troubleshooting are very quick and usually, my issue is resolved in less than an hour after connecting with support.
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.
Super simple software to operate and configure. Very granular permissions and controls. Browser based setup with everything and very intuitive visual workflow building makes it easy to set things up. Troubleshooting document workflow issues is also made easy via the batch manager when you can track each document as it moves through the workflow.
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.
With the PDF projected viewer, the document retrieval-to-display can drag for a second more than some systems, and the capture workflow if you overload a server array can also drag, but those are the only two issues we've ever seen with this product, and they are not serious issues at all.
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.
The support we received from Square 9 Softworks was exceptional. From deployment to implementation, we always felt supported. The team we worked with had patience and exceptional response time. They were amazing to work with, I always felt supported. No matter how simple or complex my question was they always delivered.
It would have been higher, but the training is a bit muted for the lesser qualified office equipment vendors who signed up as partners to sell and support it. The more experienced ECM vendors and customer end-users will find the training very good, but a bit slow.
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.
I think the implementation could have gone a little smoother than it did. Now that I know how to use the software, I could do it myself. I feel that as an organization, we could have been a little better prepared. If the consultant was more aware of what we were looking for, they could have assisted in setting up some workflows for us as per the contract. But because we were not prepared, the initial implementation process was a little painful. That said, adding a document management system to ANY business kinda means everyone has to re-think the way they do their work which can be difficult for some staff.
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.
A similar product I have used was Time Matters. For a Law Firm, I think Time Matters is more useful as it keeps track of everything for a client, including billing. However, since I now work for a legal department of a corporation, SmartSearch is definitley more useful. It is not possible to seperate the documents we have internally in neat client files. We have various miscellaneous documents for many different services and customers or vendors. SmartSearch allows us to organize in broad categories that make sense to internal employees using it and to make sure security is set on specific documents. Time Matters would not have been sufficient for our managers to have access to, since it uploads all documents to the file - some of which are confidential.
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.
The scale-ability is quite good actually, but you need competent sales/support folks providing it to you, so the scale is set right for the demands of your system use. Some resellers are not good at doing this, some are fantastic. If you are scaled correctly at first implementation, you'll be very happy with this system.
