I would very much like to get any feedback from others in the community intending to use Coda not as a way to create a one-off app or sorts, but as a full-on Project Management suite to handle all main operations - Issue Tracker (Jira replacement), CRM, Support (possible with Intercom Pack), Wiki/Documentation (not offered by Airtable for example), HR management, some finance such as tracking overdue invoices, light task management ala todoist. While putting together this entire set-up will require quite a bit of config, Coda seems powerful enough to handle all this. My main hang-up right now is the fact that unless I can get this all in one Doc, I will lose the ability to integrate amongst the tools because rows in tables, which will represent development tasks, bugs, etc, customer records, Work candidates, and so on, cannot relate to one another.
I would be very grateful to get any other feedback from the community on using Coda this way. Although the motto is āa doc thatās an app,ā I am seeing Coda as an āall-in-oneā business management solution given the flexibility, aside from the one hurdle I am having most difficulty overcoming which is the inability to link rows among docs.
A professional services resource manager and revenue forecaster (forecasted hours per week on projects by each engineer. Shows soft spots in utilisation and rolls up to a quarterly revenue forecast)
A resource forward planning tool (looking at sales opportunities coming down the pipe, scoring them by size, sales stage etc. and then provisionally assigning engineers. Helps justify to sales why key staff have been selected for project X, and not their project Y!)
A services partner selection tool (given minimum competency in a particular product, region and industry, who amongst our partners could deliver a particular job externally).
Theyāre all in separate docs but they use common information (e.g. engineers, products etc.) These all have to be specified in each document, which is a bit of a pain.
I have two main issues:
I canāt ālock downā the application structure whilst allowing access to its content, which means I canāt prevent people from accidentally breaking it. This is a huge problem AFAIC and Iām surprised that this vulnerability exists.
I canāt share certain key data structures amongst multiple docs. This is less of an issue for me.
But it goes without saying that Iām finding Coda to be enormously exciting, and a lot of fun to use.
I am hoping to do this as well but hit a few stumbling blocks when I tried this a few months ago. These were:
Performance on larger databases is terribly slow, to the point a CRM app was grinding to a halt
Search was also affected which reduced the effectiveness of the app ( I believe this has since been improved)
Permission settings are not granular enough, meaning that everyone sees everything or nothing. I need some granularity to allow users to focus on what they need.
Coda are aware of the above items, and so I am hoping there will be some news shortly as we need to decide on a solution going forwards.
As you say Coda is very exciting, I just hope we are in a position to use it as our mini-ERP
It seems to me that this thread will turn out to be very important one.
It is something else to build partial solutions which often looks very promising and itās quite easy to get over excited or even agitated because Coda is fun and innovative, but to be able to implement the solution fully so that it meets the critical business requirementsā¦ thatās the place when problems and doubts arise in my opinion.
Templates that showcase the potential possibilities often arenāt enough when it comes to build something designed for many real businesses, still those are great sources of inspiration, to extract some building blocks for example.
Small businesses, personal use - yes, it works for sure as partial solutions are often enough and people can accept some mess, workarounds, inconveniences etc. as it is managable.
But the question is, and this thread in my opinion points to that clearly, whether weāll be able to really go all in and what, letās say, should we consider as the upper limit of our expectations in the future.
Whatās more, all this issues look very interesting and important considering the new pilot program here: https://community.coda.io/t/we-need-your-input-for-an-upcoming-program
At the moment I think we are going to have to embark on doing something in GSheets and other pieces of software as Coda isnāt at the level required just yet - and it would be unreasonable to expect it can deliver it in the short term.
It has made massive strides already and some of the new functions look great - hopefully this time next year maybe.
Really glad this thread topic was a worthwhile one!
After writing this, I actually almost ditched my plans to go as āall inā as I described in my post above, due to the current limitations of Coda ultimately hindering the effectiveness of the set-up I was trying to accomplish. In the end though, after really deeply testing two other āfinalistsā ALM/Project Management suites, I realized that these out-of-the-box solutions were unable to handle a lot of the custom stuff Coda can do. So Iāve made the power call, and going to bring my small (12 people) team over to Coda and try to manage all we do here!
As a follow-on to my original post and the great replies from the community, I wanted to share what Iām finding right now the three top items on my wishlist, which if released, would really provide a lot of benefit to me:
Aforementioned inability to link across Docs. As I am moving away from Jira after many years (my team used to be larger), I do miss the fact that an issue can be viewed across the entire app, if permissions allowā¦and about permissions:
Some basic permissions. I plan to set up several docs, and attempt a one-way API or Integromat sync to a master āRoadmapā Doc I will use to track the entire activity of my team at a management level. I have read a good deal about this in the community and hoping it will worked as planned! But a big help here would be the ability for me to have individual permissions inside a doc. That would ease some of the need to set up multiple docs, which canāt be connected, as I could limit visibility to part of a doc, and thereby build it out more. For example, I have freelance offshore web developers who I donāt want to see my financial (tasks about chasing late invoices, etc.) or HR info.
Ability to lock down a doc. As I move forward, I have fears about docs getting ābrokenā by mistake. There is a will publicized article that talks about Coda in the context of some other new-age apps, and the author cites this issue:
I would think this is a relatively simple addition to the platform so hoping to see it soon!
and a PS on this article, the author ranked Notion ahead of Coda, but I dissent. Notion has a lot going for it, in particular the amazing design. But actually I find Coda easier to work with. As I tried to set up Notion, which I almost converted my team to instead of Coda, I found it was like a āwarā - as the author describes working with Coda interestingly - to configure to get function I was looking for. Also IMHO, I have actually over time found that you guys have a superior wiki to Notion! Every piece of text in Notion is a block, and that becomes difficult when trying to write paragraphs, instructions, Product Requirements, all kinds of documentation. While I think the Coda document capability is limited right now, the fact that you can truly write free-form, embed formulas, etc. makes you guys actually better for documentation at the moment, at least thatās my take!
Really excited to be going full speed ahead now with Coda, and anxious to continue to engage here with this great community!
Hey, so sadly, I have not been able to execute on this, largely due to the reasons I cited in the end proving too hard to overcome. There were also a lot of challenges to get Coda set up so my team felt comfortable with it, as they were used to tools with more typical UI set ups, think Jira, Asana, Wrike, even Trello.
I still think Coda is the most flexible tool out there and continue my efforts to adapt it, but for now, Iām still in a multitude of other tools, including the new wave of āProduct Managementā apps such as Productboard, Aha, Prodpad, etc. that Coda also can easily match with its flexibility.
As I got a few responses to this post, I thought Iād provide an update. I am currently in yet another iteration of trying to adopt Coda to my team! 2.0 solved a lot of the issues I cited above, so thatās great. I am still struggling with some of the UI stuff, as my team is not used to seeing our work items in a raw table, but Codaās UI has really stepped it up this year and this is not something that is preventing our adoption.
My current list of items that are probably the biggest roadblocks are:
Inability to link easily to multiple tables. Tools such as Jira and Aha let you link issues to each other across the whole app. With Coda, as powerful as lookups are, you are only able to use this to link two tables, so that limits flexibility. Also, the need to manually set up a reciprocal relationship has been a burden, as we are setting up a ton of stuff in just one doc. As a side, Notion automatically links tables once one lookup column is established - would love to see that with Coda.
More āuser friendlyā views - some examples of what I mean here:
I think the expanded card view could have some options like āfull screen,ā or āreducedā where it would shrink to part size and pin to the right side of the screen - a frequent behavior in apps like the aforementioned Jira, Asana, etc.
Also, I think there could be a bunch more customizations in the card view, which is still pretty raw IMHO. It would only be a question of a basic redesign to bring it into shape to look like all the best ones out there.
User story board/swimlanes in card view: I posted about that here: New Features for cards. You guys already have the ability to group by the top or left, so this seems like an easy addition to allow grouping by some other column in the table.
Hierarchical view in table view. A lot of talk about this on the community, it would really help us out to be able to see subtasks, or any sub items, when the basic table view is presented. Hereās some of the talk about this:
I think the Coda team has this last one on its radar, really hope so and eager to see it in production!
Some kind of search results. My team is really used to looking for items with search, as we frequently canāt remember exactly what something was named, etc. Stuff like showing recent searches when clicking in the search box, and other basic functionality would be great to see soon.
I hope this update is useful. I know Codaās stated mission is to be a Doc thatās an App, and to provide the best possible canvas for Makers to build creatively. But I for one believe that Coda is in the lead in the market to solve a huge problem - a Single Source of Truth app for company management, in particular start-ups and Tech-focused. So I am holding out for features that will continue to get you guys to this second goal. No reason you canāt be both of these things!
+100 on the "
the need to manually set up a reciprocal relationship has been a burden ". Most other databases do this (such as Airtable). Coda should too, reduces effort & errors enormously.
@Matthew_Oates, thanks for supporting this idea. I just posted a related idea about having this available in a column, too.
Would be interested to see if you are on board on this one as well. Agreed itās a great feature of AirTable, which I spent a lot of time with but ultimately gave up in favor of Coda. But really missing this feature and similar ones!
Iām mostly āall-inā. There are some tools you are just not going to replicate better with Coda.
But for the most part, the ability to quickly build the business logic to suit your business > the product flow of whatever off the shelf product.
While getting more performant, āone doc to rule them allā approaches are not advised now; better to break up your workflow into a few docs.
I use one SSOT (single source of truth doc) to hold my main data, and then CrossDoc that data in to the other docs. Be aware that this is an advisable approach, but there will be times that it makes sense to keep a data local to that doc due to the limitations of Cross Doc. This is mainly when you need a lot of writes to the table. Good luck!
Mainly performance and integration. I have some data on the separate software which I am now integrating with Airtable via custom API by syncing. I am looking forward when we can connect to various data sources through packs.
Welcome to Coda - you have found the motherlodeā¦
Next week Coda is having a āBlock Partyā where they will be making some long anticipated announcements.
This thread is VERY old, so most if not all of the topics mentioned in 2019 has been addressed. We will always want more performance, of course, but it is quite fast at the moment.
I am fairly āall inā, having moved here from Notion, which I have stopped using. I have also stopped using Roam Research. My two big documents are one for work, which incorporates a task list grouped into āgapsā that need to be developed for a software project. The task list, using indicators, also doubles as an issue list. The āgapsā are stored in a table, with their metadata, and links to a page per gap, Notion style, where meeting, design and other notes are made. I also have a ādictionary tableā where I define terms used in the company. Using @, anywhere I used that word or term in the doc, I create a hotlink to the definition of the term.
For my personal use, I have something very similar, but the āgapsā are interesting info to be further researched, or mini-projects that I am working on.
I have also stopped using my QuickBooks, and built something to analyse my bank accounts in Coda. (I am NOT building an accounting package, just a tool to analyse my monthly income and expenses.)
So task management, yes; project management, yes; Wikipedia like functionality, yes. But remember, you start with a blank canvas, or hopefully with a template you found in the gallery. But what you do with it is up to your imagination.
my small company is systematically replacing hundreds of quite complex spreadsheets for several clients in the financial services sector and in clinical research.
those spreadsheets have been around for many years, slowly evolving and mutating under the hands of spreadsheet whizz-kids and numbskulls. they now contain errors, false assumptions, inaccurate formulas. and yet remain key to important workflows.
we are finding that coda documents provide a clean, structured and very flexable migration path. allowing analysts to review and improve the logic, while improving the reliability of the models. users are allowed to use the dicuments but not modify logic or formulas at will. much safer.
we are also migrating a smaller set of project, team and sales management tools we originally made with notion.
coda has excellent formulas, button functionality and automations. integration with zapier is very powerful.
our only problem is that the mobile phone interface is totally unusable, nothing looks the same as the pc views and only a very few items can be displayed at once. we have developed a webview app to put desktop views on android tablets, but its far from ideal.
the more senior execs among our clients almost never open a laptop, doing almost everything via tablet and smartphone - so this has become a major concern for us.
but the rate at which improvements are being made to coda is amazing. and the ingenuity and in-depth knowledge to be found in this community is impressive.
so we are convinced we have chosen the right tool and we love building solutions for our clients so rapidly.
just make the mobile displays about five times more compactā¦ and we will be very happy.
