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Coda

Coda

Overview

What is Coda?

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)…

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Learn from top reviewers

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Pricing

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Free

$0.00

Cloud
per month

Pro

$10.00

Cloud
per month per doc maker; unlimited editors (paid annually)

Team

$30.00

Cloud
per month per doc maker; unlimited editors (paid annually)

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://coda.io/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Coda Beginners Guide: Creating Coda Docs [30-Minute Demo]

YouTube
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Product Details

What is Coda?

Coda is a doc that brings words, data, and teams together. It starts with a blinking cursor on a blank page and can grow as big as a team's ambition. Coda comes with a set of building blocksーlike pages for infinite depth, tables that talk to each other, and buttons that take action inside or outside the docーwhich users can combine to make a doc as powerful as an app. The vendor says people have made Coda docs that do everything from launch products, to scale small businesses, to help them study for tests.

Coda Features

  • Supported: Pages: Every Coda doc starts with a page. And can grow into as many pages as desired, so users cannot outgrow the doc, no matter how big a team or idea.
  • Supported: Tables & Views: A table in Coda can be as simple as a list or as deep as a database. And it can have customizable, connected views, so everyone can work off the same data, in their own preferred way.
  • Supported: Controls: Controls—like buttons, select lists, and sliders—to make a doc feel more like an app for teams.
  • Supported: Packs: Packs connect Coda doc to apps in use—communication tools, coding tools, and design tools.
  • Supported: Formulas: Formulas can live anywhere in Codaーon the page or in a control or table. These are like the connective tissue between building blocks in Coda.
  • Supported: Automations: Automation is the building block that puts repetitive yet important tasks on autopilot.
  • Supported: Templates: Popular compositions of building blocks are offered as templates and made them available inside the doc.
  • Supported: Forms: Collect inputs and data and synthesize using Coda's building blocks to view and filter data

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.

Coda Videos

Meet Coda
Learn how Figma's Yuhki Yamashita uses Coda to ship product
Watch Coda CEO & Co-Founder Shishir Mehrotra transform Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson's fabled offsite doc into an interactive Coda doc

Coda Competitors

Coda Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Notion, Quip, and Dropbox Paper are common alternatives for Coda.

The most common users of Coda are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

(1-3 of 3)

Great tool to use

Rating: 7 out of 10
March 03, 2021
Vetted Review
Verified User
Coda
1 year of experience
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
  • 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
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!
  • It allows us to reach many users across departments and countries efficiently

Driving cost-effective and meaningful impact in small-medium enterprise

Rating: 10 out of 10
February 25, 2021
PC
Vetted Review
Verified User
Coda
1 year of experience
Coda is still in a developmental stage in our organization. We are still learning and discovering where it can drive impact. Right now, we currently use it for:
Installation base management/reporting, Project management, Customer marketing emails, Point-of-care usage, Post-event analysis, Trackers, simple address book serving as a foundations to a simple CRM, Shielding calculation
  • Automation is fantastic. Automating row creations and actions has helped streamline a lot of our processes without sacrificing too much time and effort, making overall transition easier for most of the users.
  • Flexibility. We can virtually build almost anything and migrate things from our Excel.
  • Simplifies information access for the team, keeping information current and accessible.
  • App-like feel in mobile. This is one of the winning points when we took up Coda.
  • In the past 1 year of using Coda, I have observed large leaps of development and new feature release. This gives confidence to me as a new user that this product is here to stay and tries its best to stay relevant.
Cons
  • 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.
I think Coda is well suited for management of simple data in general. I'm a medical physicist, so some of our calculations are quite complex. This makes it such that I have to break down the formula into various columns and run a multiple calculations before it can output to a final result that I want. Hence, complex calculations, while workable, expect to spend more time in the building process. And if it's too large a data for calculations, you might run into a less than optimal situation with document loading.

We are still discovering more areas to work on and where it can add value/impact to our internal processes. I believe there's still room for growth in our usage for our organization.
  • In general, in terms of positive impact, we are able to run more meaningful actions without additional investment in time from the team (except for the person managing /creating the documents).
  • We operate in a world full of information that can be overwhelming. Data is collected all the time, but we don't have meaningful or easy ways to analyze the information. With Coda, we can customize our formulas flexibly to our needs, and thus we are able to have more understanding of the vast information to drive the correct future actions.
We were looking for many different things to improve our internal processes before we came across Coda. A large part of my work involves marketing, project management, service management and data analytics.
For a company like ours, we find Coda the most cost-effective and flexible solution to what we needed. While there are other products made for specific needs, we find Coda [is] a good place to start - for us to evaluate what we really needed - before pursuing a dedicated solution which may cost us more if not evaluated properly, and may very well end up a white elephant in our organization.
25
While mainly 2 of us are the primary caretakers of Coda where we build docs and implement, the rest are mainly general users. We comprise of a variety of functions ranging from sales, customer support, engineering, and project management.
2
Anyone familiar with Excel would be excellent.
  • Downtime reporting.
  • Consumable usage.
  • Customer Tracker/Address book.
  • Project Management.
  • Downtime reporting. We use this for live updates when a system goes down - our engineers can easily mark the system as down and log the time up when system is operational again. This provided us with useful stats over time.
  • Shielding Calculations. Still a work in progress, but I see a lot of potential for this. If able to output reports in customizable format/pdf, this would make our work a lot more efficient.
  • Daily consumption of consumable or logging of error rates. Our point-of-care team have been using this to track customer usage. What used to be at least an hour of data entry and processing has now been cut down to minutes.
  • There are many ways to move this forward and I think we are still investigating the areas we can implement. One is to have a status update check on our regulatory affairs with time-based email reports.
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.
No
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
We tested the free version and subsequently the pro version to understand the differences. But the journey was definitely independent. The single most important factor for us was the app-like interface in mobile version. This was important to our service division. That level of user-friendliness enabled us to have more confidence to operate with Coda as the heart for some of our key activities.
Yes. I would reach out to the manufacturer directly to get an overview so that I can save time in evaluation and decision making.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes
We tested first on the items that we definitely knew what we wanted in terms of definitions. This was our downtime logging and uptime calculation document.
This helped us become very confident in what Coda was possible for. From there, we learned key points like understanding overall processes before building the doc since that will drive the overall objective of the doc's purpose.
Coda's implementation is still relatively an ongoing thing since our adoption is quite niche to a few subdivisions in our organization.
Change management was minimal
In terms of manpower, we didn't really have to do a lot of change of management, but it modified the way we interacted with one another. We were more collaborative at a higher level, since the Coda management in our organization is run by the people of the physics division. So we learned to work with various departments to look into ways that Coda might be able to resolve some unique bottlenecks.
  • Buy-in or support from colleagues. Not everyone likes change. Even if we rolled out the docs first, encouraging usage was tough.
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.
  • no training
I won't recommend it unless you really want to go through that journey on your own and you have the time to. If you don't have the time, it would be better to learn it from somebody who has the experience.
I think it's just right. Since it's user-based rather than feature, it makes it more scalable and flexible.
Identify your core users who would be building docs and maintaining them. Identify their skill level, too. It wouldn't [hurt] to start with the free version to test the look and feel of the overall product before jumping into a purchase that you might regret later.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
No. We use it as it is out of the box.
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.
We purchased the Team pricing and we qualify for basic training as well as priority support. That being said, Coda was not visible to us on this somehow and we didn't really think of reaching out for request of training. It would be helpful that Coda contacted directly when we upgraded our plan.
Yes
Quite quickly I would say. One fine day I discovered the problem was fixed but we weren't notified of the fix so I don't know how soon the fix was implemented after the initial report.
When I was new to Coda, I couldn't understand the formulas well. Coda has a nice feature where we can share our docs directly with Support. Support helped to modify my formulas so that it was working how I wanted it to. Saved me a lot of time. But also gave me a nice lesson indirectly on how to work my formulas properly.
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.
  • Creating chart views out of existing tables. Much easier than Excel.
  • Buttons are elegant ways to add information into a table. Especially if we want to control/avoid messes made by colleagues who are sharing the documents.
  • Some formulas are easier to run in Excel due to the nature of how we build formulas. In Coda, it feels limited and a frequent need to keep breaking down formulas into sections.
  • Gantt Charts are not what we are used to so it feels limited in terms of features.
Yes
Fairly well. Works best in simplified views. Took a bit of effort to understand how the interface works for tables. Sometimes it feels like an app. More often than not it's a long scrollable (left-right) table.
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.
So far in the past year, we haven't had situations that Coda has gone down for us which is great.
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.
  • Zoom
  • Google Forms through Zapier
  • Gmail
Zoom: Specific for Meetings, I don't find it extremely useful at the moment since it can't pull out attendance information (except in Webinar mode)
Google forms: We used this via Zapier but since Coda launched forms, we no longer have to use Google forms. We only use Google forms for more complex forms. Coda forms is still mainly a basic survey form.
Gmail: This is probably the best thing that Coda can do. Having email connected has been extremely useful and we use this feature a lot for email updates and marketing.
  • Outlook/Exchange
  • Synology Cloud
  • SAP Hana
It would be good to integrate some of our existing solutions to simplify the flow of data. To my knowledge, there's no support or plan to support this integration.
  • File import/export
I don't have much experience in general in this regard.
Get someone who understand[s] integration to work with you.
We didn't have a relationship or discussion during the sales process. We independently evaluated and decided on our own.
Good response post-sale in customer support, but limited by timezone differences.
Not applicable
Not applicable
Yes
We went from Pro to Team. No downtime. We just needed to migrate our docs.
  • Better management of users and access.
  • Unlimited docs and lines.
  • Improved Cross-Doc limits.
  • Haven't thought about it.
Yes
We needed to improve user access and some extra features. Mainly because we wanted to use our work email for login instead of Gmail (personal emails) as well. Change went well, but it was a hassle to remind colleagues to use their work email instead of Google account, since Coda's signup page defaults to registering with Google. People tend to miss the sign below to register with non-google accounts.

Automatization is your best friend

Rating: 10 out of 10
February 24, 2021
Coda helped us managed our projects in a way no other platform has done it. Eternal spreadsheets are now in the past. Our efficiency has improved as well.

We are currently managing clients, sale orders and monitoring progress in experimental projects. We are intending to use Coda across our company, in other departments due to its automation-user friendly options. We believe this is the opera prima of Coda, users will find more time to dedicate in other tasks, with more complexity and more ad-on value.
  • Automatization
  • Formulas
  • Table management
  • Pages and sections with its links
Cons
  • Stability
  • App
  • Formulas Q&A
Managing projects, teams and sales. Managing large scale projects, by time or complexity, is not recommended. Coda is best when you have identified the process you think are messy or can be automatized, or both. Recommended for users who must track progress and Excel is too complicated to understand for others. Not recommended for those who have specific task, or one-day rush duties.
  • More time to dedicate to other tasks with more value
  • More digital-only tasks
  • Better sales tracking
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