Big news: Grammarly is acquiring Coda!

[shishir]

Today, I’m excited to announce Coda’s next chapter…

Coda is merging with Grammarly, the trusted AI assistant for communication and productivity.

Together, we will build the AI-native suite of the future. And I’m honored to lead the combined companies as CEO.

I share much more details on how this came about in my blog post, but as I chatted with the leaders at Grammarly, I realized that both companies have arrived at similar views of the future. One where AI will redefine every business application and workflow, reinventing productivity as we know it today into a place where humans and AI work together everywhere you get work done. Together, we want to rethink a suite of tools and provide users with their own AI productivity platform for apps and agents.

And this group—the Coda community—is as important as ever. You’ve consistently inspired us while also pushing us to make Coda great. I want to emphasize that we’re still committed to improving Coda Docs for the thousands of teams that rely on docs every day. In fact, you should expect a big acceleration in Coda Docs!

I encourage you to read the full story on the blog, where I share context and detail what you can expect in the short term, and give you a glimpse into what’s in store longer-term.

Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.

Edit to add more context:

Thanks for all the feedback — very much appreciate it! I hear your concerns about the future, and honestly, I’m energized by how passionately you care about Coda.

To that extent let me emphasize a few things:

1. The Coda product is the center of this partnership: It’s not going away, it’s the main part of this deal. We will accelerate (not decelerate) our pace. Coda has an amazing community (50k+ teams, millions of users), and I have some very exciting plans for the core docs-as-powerful-as-apps surface that you know and love. That includes finishing some things you’re already excited about (did anyone ask for sub-doc sharing?) as well as some new things that you may not have thought of yet that I’m really excited about.
2. Re AI — Everything is not AI, and we know it: I’m an AI optimist, and generally believe that it can have a huge impact on work when seamlessly blended into our workflows. But don’t worry that we would “just focus on AI,” I have a super interesting roadmap in mind on core Coda (and Grammarly!) features as well. We know very well that much of the Coda secret sauce lives in our flexible surface, tables, formulas, automations, Packs, and all the features that connect them. I see AI as an addition, not a replacement, for those core competencies.
3. Re Pricing — No changes planned: Reading some of the stories here on how Coda’s unique Maker Billing approach has impacted your ability to scale your Coda usage is heartwarming. Pricing is a hard topic — and not one I take lightly. I can assure you that there’s no changes planned here now.

It’s the holiday season and a good time to ask for gifts. So perhaps I could ask for your holiday wishes of the new combined Coda+Grammarly? For the AI optimists, what are your dream scenarios? For the less-enthused-about-AI crowd, what’s on your wish list for the joint companies to focus on instead?

Feel free to keep posting here, I’m listening.

[Daragh_O_Shea1]

This is big news.

Very interested to see where it goes from here. Particularly with the hinting at building a platform for agents and how you see Coda fitting into that workflow/agentic future.

[Piet_Strydom]

Interesting…

Grammarly on the one side, Snowflake on the other!

[Paul_Danyliuk]

Ахах, вітаю наших нових українських оверлордів

[Drew_Raminez]

This actually surprised me Since Coda was acquired by Grammarly, I’m worried about the future of Coda, especially its pricing. I’m afraid the pricing may increase or change.

[Micah_Lucero]

Interesting, didn’t expect this

[Coda_Solutions]

I was just about to comment this too. One of the biggest concern when “changing of hands” occur is the pricing structure and the dismantling of Coda as we know it.

Not sure what that pricing structure will look like going forward but current users should be grandfathered in at least.

Feeling…

[Pamela_Howell]

I’m not happy yet. The first time I tested grammarly it showed me 5 mistakes, then I tried to paid version and it showed me 12 mistakes. In other words grammarly was allowing me to look like crap unless I paid them. I knew there were 12 mistakes before it told me so.

[anon42122166]

why do documents and spreadsheets still run the world?

and you’ll see fast innovation as we supercharge them with our joint AI roadmap.

I’ll tell you one thing: the answer is not AI. I really, really hope this merger accelerates the building of functionality that isn’t AI related as well. I really miss the bi-weekly releases of quality of life improvements, and big dumps of the attention-to-detail fixes.

[Drew_Raminez]

Yes, especially Grammarly, which has horrendous prices. Since it recently bought, I might decide not to fully migrate and see how it progresses under Grammarly

[Anonymous]

I’m fed up of AI tools taking over everything - they often make software more clunky and distracting.

It also feels like AI is a marketing buzzword that companies throw around nowadays to sound “forward-thinking” and expensive .

Time will tell if the Grammarly AI helps or hinders Coda users, and whether the platform will keep the fast, clean interface that many of us love.

As a side note, when I’m writing I actually avoid Grammarly now - it’s slow and works like bloatware. I hope the same doesn’t happen with Coda.

[Jordan_Axani]

This feels really… odd.

I don’t doubt a great product can come, but I am worried about what this means for small-medium companies like ours (we’ve spent about $50K just on Coda experts in the past years to build out our internal tools, so we’re really locked into the Coda ecosystem).

A big draw for us was to only pay for doc makers, not all users. We have hundreds of people that simply access information on Coda, not edit or contribute to it. I can totally see now how that could change, especially given Grammarly’s aggressive pricing…

[Janice_Cat]

Not excited about this. I moved to Coda from Airtable as an app dev platform and have zero use for AI. Tried Grammerly once, it was very annoying, removed it immediately.

[Anonymous]

On another note, Grammarly integration may bring privacy concerns for Coda users. According to the longer blog article by Coda:

“Imagine if the [Grammarly] Assistant not only gave amazing suggestions and refinements based on the writing it sees today but also had permission-aware connections into all of your other systems (from your email to docs to CRM to project trackers and more).”

“The Coda Docs you know and love will continue to work as they do now but will get supercharged with the Grammarly Assistant seamlessly blended through the experience.”

I’m personally not a fan of Grammarly (or any tool) having line-level permissions to read and suggest edits for emails and personal projects. If this integration is compulsory and not optional on Coda, I will definitely be leaving.

Isn’t Grammarly just another data mining tool at this point, veiled as a “helpful” Assistant?

[Marc_Fitt]

Not sure I like this move at all. We will see how Coda will turn out…

Can someone point out the connection between Grammarly and Coda because I don’t see it.
A flexible, easy-to-use relational database app VS a simple text corrector app you can just have an extension for?

I think you undersold your vision, Shishir. Coda had much more potential than Grammarly.

Coda is not powerful because of its canvas editor; it’s powerful because of its tables, action buttons, automation, and being a truly easy-to-manage relational table that you can customize to your needs.

How will the app be called now? Grammarly lol?

I uninstalled Grammarly 3 years ago because it was just bad, clunky, and not privacy-friendly at all.

I personally don’t like having AI scan all my docs. I hope we can still just use Coda apart without “Grammarly AI” or under the name Grammarly, which just doesn’t make sense at all.

Can’t wait to see how this will end.

[Phil_Purdy1]

Not a fan of this. Not a fan on Ai centric business models, or grammarlys pricing or business model. It doesn’t feel like any of these relationship have panned out. Snowflake got hacked right after partnering with coda. And who knows what coda will look like in the hands of grammarly.

If there was any question on the direction coda was going there are now 10x more. This level of uncertainty makes it hard for any decision maker to recommend coda or to continue it’s development with their systems. If there isn’t a solid road map that people have been pounding the table for the last year about in the next month I’m done. Too much techno babble bullshit.

[Brian_Klein]

Definitely understand those concerns, Phil. We encourage you to tune into the fireside chat with Shishir next month—when we get a registration link, I’ll share it here.

[Brian_Klein]

In the short term, we don’t anticipate any changes in pricing.

But this moment is a great time to evaluate how Coda prices its product to meet customer needs. And if there are any changes, we’ll of course notify you in advance.

[Phil_Purdy1]

I just want a road map. What features are planned, what features are getting fixed, what is happening with single page sharing what is something tangible! Those fireside chats feel like they are written by ai, about feelings and experiences. I don’t want a story I want a plan!

Where is Coda going, and what should I expect to be able to do with it in the next year.

[Stefan_Stoyanov]

I really don’t get it, either from this message or the blog post. Coda is going to be new Google Doc?