I think Coda has strategically more powerful features, but I think Notion has a better metaphor for their structure. The idea that everything is a block, they can be rearranged by dragging and dropping, and blocks can go inside other blocks—it’s very intuitive for the modularity of elements that Coda is also founded on. Dynalist is actually the best implementation of this structure because you can view any block in isolation, but also “zoom out” and see it as part of a larger thing.
I get it—I’m a product designer—I’m not always keen on the “so, I saw that this other app does it this way” remark, but I really like the proposition that Coda has of building powerful applications—I just think it’s built on a shaky foundation that can be fortified with a more modular structure.
I think it would be useful to see some kind of similar handling of “blocks” of text in Coda, it’s been discussed here a bit:
and elsewhere.
One idea (sorry I can’t find it now) was to allow converting of bullets or sentences into blocks, but not have them automatically be “blocks” upon creation, as Notion does. I think that would be ideal. I for one like the fact that you can write free-form in Coda, like in Word and other “traditional” word processing-type apps. I find it actually annoying that in Notion everthing is forced into a block.
Very eager to hear what the Product Team plans with all this. The comparisons with Notion, for a good reason, are starting to come fast and hard as both apps gain visibility!