Thanks for the mention, Ed!
A super concise but also super eye-opening answer is this:
Coda is a doc.
If you decide to use Coda for your project management, that’s exactly what you’re agreeing to — managing your project in a doc, with all the drawbacks:
- It’s all nothing but one file (two actually, but whatever).
- It doesn’t scale like a regular database would. 125 megabytes is your hard limit at which APIs such as Cross-doc cannot read from this doc anymore. The doc is not sharded, you’re always loading the whole of it. Your browser recalculates the whole of it.
- There’s no real permission system on doc content level. Everyone who has permission to view the file can see all the file. I don’t think this one is easy to overcome, so I wouldn’t expect Coda to change this in any near future.
On the other hand, Coda has a build-it-yourself approach that lets you make virtually any custom workflows, unlike ready solutions like Jira or Asana that are flexible only to some extent, often at a premium (plugins etc).
If you’re considering between Trello and Coda, Asana and Coda, or Sheets and Coda, then going forward with Coda is practically a no-brainer. Just always keep in mind that you’re tracking all your stuff in a doc. But if you’re looking for something scalable, then choosing a dedicated SaaS for that could be a better investment.