TrustRadius Insights for Coda by Grammarly are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Automation Features: Reviewers have praised the automation features of Coda, with multiple users stating that it has helped streamline their processes. The ability to automate row creations and actions has been particularly appreciated, making tasks more efficient and saving valuable time.
Flexibility and Customization: Many reviewers have highlighted the flexibility of Coda, noting that it allows them to build virtually anything and migrate data from Excel. This feature has been extremely useful in simplifying information access for teams, keeping information current and easily accessible.
User-Friendly Interface: Users have consistently praised the user-friendly interface of Coda, finding it powerful and flexible for document building. The intuitive nature of the interface, along with the use of Coda formulas and Packs, has made it easy for users to create complex documents with ease.
We use Coda to project plan and documentation. It is an easy way to organize information and collaborate. We utilize it for new products we are releasing, and key tasks each individual needs to take care of in order to get the product off the ground.
It is also used as a knowledge base and training documentation resource
Pros
Tables
Documentation organization
Collaboration
Cons
Better training
Steep learning curve
Different layout designs
Likelihood to Recommend
Coda is an amazing project tracker and tool to help you be organized and collaborate easier with your team. There is a decent sized learning curve to utilize Coda entirely, but out of the box it’s intuitive and easy to use. It is a powerful tool, that when leveraged correctly can significantly improve project management.
We use it for keeping track of a lot of internal documents. For example we use it for feature set lists for different products, as well as with creating territory plans. On top of that, I personally use it to create target account attack plans for my top accounts to go after.
Pros
Easily shareable docs
You can put spreadsheets and lists and notes sections within the same document
You can create action items and assign them to other users.
Cons
The user interface isn't super user friendly. It takes some time to figure out how to use it properly.
In one of my documents, it's tied to another, and I can't figure out how to edit one section without it updating the other.
Likelihood to Recommend
Initially I didn't love it, but it's growing on me as I get more familiar with how to use it, and how to share the documents like I want to.
We were using Coda in my previous workplace to collaborate within immediate as well as cross-functional teams and use one platform for managing all information instead of spreading work across word documents, presentations, excel sheets, and over areas. Coda provides a very intuitive and flexible platform to organise all information irrespective of the formats.
Pros
Very intuitive to use
Highly flexible- you dont need to think of formats
Very agile and collaborative
Cons
Integrations with internal tools are not great. You cannot read/write info to other tools of your choice easily.
Managing scale can get clumsy.
Onboarding/ initial learning curve is cumbersome for many users.
Likelihood to Recommend
Coda is extremely agile and works really well for highly collaborative organisations that do not want to get into the hassles of managing different formats and storage of different information. It makes organising information very structured and easy and also keeps it highly collaborative for internal as well as external teams.
Coda is allowing our quickly growing company to consolidate and track OKRs across many different departments and functions. We often have multiple programs, spreadsheets and communication streams floating around about the same topic with unique access to each. Coda has allowed us to bring all of this information together in a consolidated and clean format.
Pros
Collaboration
File sharing
Knowledge consolidation
Cons
Automated integration with other programs
Likelihood to Recommend
Coda has served us well as we establish and measure OKRs on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. The multitude of owners that play a role in these results creates challenges as it pertains to information gathering, sharing and reporting. Coda is helping us solve all of these challenges. Coda is working well for our smaller organization but could present challenges at a larger enterprise.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Finance and Accounting (501-1000 employees)
We use Coda to create documents of all sorts -- text, sheets, anything -- and store them. First off, you can easily create any document type: report, to-do list, poll, spreadsheet, etc. You can add tables, images, voting, ranking... whatever comes to your mind. Then you can organize these documents with ease, creating directories with pages and subpages (also, you can add one of many interesting icons to make it all neat and funky). Finally, you can integrate it all with tools such as Gmail or Slack, which saves a ton of time!
Pros
Document creation.
Storing documents in a neat and organized manner.
Integration with Gmail and Slack.
Cons
Design can be improved. Sometimes it looks so 80s (font especially).
It's not very intuitive.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well-suited scenario: A team works on a report. An outline is very clear since we use pages and subpages. It contains images and tables and that is well combined. Everyone can add their part, and also everyone can leave comments. Less-appropriate scenario: A new person needs to get onboarded and learn to use Coda. Past familiarity with text editors is of no use and it will take significant time.
Currently at my company we use Coda for all of our shared documents. It's essentially the "office" part of us while we're all working remote. It's a source where we keep company information and track and manage our internal processes, from onboarding to company information to track and manage budgets.
Pros
Organization
collaboration
dark mode
Cons
It's hard to know all the features or where to start on building a page
It doesn't seem very intuitive
Likelihood to Recommend
Coda is great if you know how to code documents and it's good for storing information in an organized manner. However if you're looking for a simple solution I don't think this is it, to get good one would need training.
<ol><li>keep track of all of our upstream and downstream customer projects</li><li>maintain a detailed view of application and OS configurations,</li><li>manage software version compatibility overviews. </li></ol>We manage our projects in Coda full-fledged, (e.g., with trackers for milestones, deliverables, actions, issues, decisions and more). Soon after establishing that framework, we started to use Coda to publish information relevant for a much wider group in the organization by means of "booklets" comprising a set of views that are filtered, grouped, and formatted as relevant for the audience. It's amazing to see how we've expanded the use of Coda on a week-by-week basis, now including trackers for daily standups, OKRs, and other purposes.
Pros
Overviews of any kind--think of lists you want to keep in Excel, but then easier and better.
Links between tables (references, look-ups).
Extensive filtering capabilities.
Conditional formatting.
Publishing/sharing information with a wider user group.
Creating multiple different views based on the same primary table.
Cons
It would be great if the row height of text fields could be capped to an x-number of lines. Now, you can select to use wrap/unwrap; however, headings and hard returns can still make the rows too high.
The formulas in Coda are very powerful yet can turn somewhat confusing, too. The good thing is that there are many YouTube videos available with instructions. Still, it may take certain users quite some time to get a good grasp on the formulas.
The speed of loading the pages has improved and should be improved further.
Likelihood to Recommend
This is the best tool I ever used that delivers what it promises: it removes the need of using Excel for maintaining lists, filters, lookups, and what have you. Coda combines the power of Excel with a real database, conditional formatting in the tables, and rich text formatting in the text parts. Altogether, it is suitable for use as a company-wide information sharing tool.
We started using Coda to solve the problem of teams using a variety of trackers and there not being a single source of truth. This has proved to be a powerful tool to help many cross-functional teams align on key information that is needed at every level but allowing departments, teams, and individuals to tailor their views to their specific needs.
Pros
Aesthetics - We have used many other programs, but Coda by far looks the best.
Ease of use - it is fun to build Coda documents!
Support - the customer support has been phenomenal.
Cons
Gantt - working on making improvements, but still need more.
Freezing Columns - would like to freeze so can see the far left column while side scrolling.
Infrastructure training.
Likelihood to Recommend
Very helpful for project management and creating a source of truth. Hasn't been as helpful for resourcing and gantt visuals.
We use Coda as a tool to update our internal users on an ongoing project. The project affects many people across different departments and we wanted to give them a space to read about what's going on at product and tech level. There are only two of us creating the content and we communicate it via email/workplace to our target audience
Pros
You have a variety of contect you can create
There are predefined templates that you can use
You can invite people via email domain
Cons
The features sometimes are not as intuitive and it can take hours to do something as you envision it
Often what looks great on a laptop looks bad on a mobile
Feature updates or improvements deployed by coda can change how your content looks and you may not be aware for a while until you stumble across it
Likelihood to Recommend
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!
We're using Coda across our entire organization to sidestep the mess caused by dozens (and hundreds) of disconnected Google docs.
On my team, it helps us keep all our plans for upcoming product, design, and marketing work in one place. It's brilliant as a source of truth because we can create a table with key project information once and re-use across multiple filtered views depending on our needs.
Pros
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.
Cons
Doesn't map 1:1 to spreadsheets. You can't use Coda to replace Google Sheets / Excel 100% of the time. Its database-like structure is an advantage for some use cases, but a limiting factor for others.
Formulas aren't intuitive. You can unlock seriously powerful workflows with the formulas provided, but they're far less intuitive than something like Google Sheets / Excel. This often leads to buggy or incorrectly set up documents too.
Difficult to manage complexity. You can put lots of data in one tool. But this can easily become cluttered, confusing, and sometimes redundant if a clear organization strategy isn't applied for larger documents.
Likelihood to Recommend
<b>When Coda Works Well</b>
<ul><li>Using Airtable, but struggling to add the right context + automation? Coda's document/database hybrid with smart automation could save you tons of time.</li><li>Hitting the limits of your latest Google Sheet? Coda brings a fuller set of features that unlock collaboration and can help you filter down the complexity in some cases.</li><li>Setting up a no-code internal tool for your team? Coda excels at most use cases like this. Automate idea collection, voting, etc.</li></ul>
<b>When Coda Doesn't Work Great</b>
<ul><li>Collaborating with users outside your team? You probably want Google Docs instead.</li><li>Want a simple, no-fuss spreadsheet or doc? Coda's extra features might just get in the way.</li></ul>
