Big news: Grammarly is acquiring Coda!

News from Coda
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Coda is a wonderful environment. Yes, I have a wish list, I have some complaints, but at the end of the day, I prefer Coda (for my work) over other solutions. I hope that we will have, some day, better data security, that we can (natively) accommodate tables with a million rows, that we can use CSS or markup, that we can turn of search (or limit search to what is visible for a user). These are just a few of my wishes.

But, I’ve said it before and I will say it again, there is not single software package that I know of that can be everything for everyone. If you need to do bookkeeping, get yourself an (inexpensive) bookkeeping package. If you are looking for ERP, get ERP software, etc. etc.

Coda can do a lot of things in amazing ways. I have build many documents for different uses, but the ONE document being used by our complete team (of about 20) runs most of our business (planning, data collection, automatic information replies…and much more).
Is it secure? Yes, if you don’t have to many secrets within your team. To the outside world it is.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but it works.
Is it stable? We are on a team plan (with, among other features, locking available to us) and yes, it is stable (with reasonable effort).

My point: writing documents as a (serious) app is a skill that not everyone has, but Coda allows you to use it’s advanced features and grow your skillset as you go. I have used traditional tools (RDBMS, Delphi, PHP+HTML+CSS and many more) that were far more capable of dealing with large datasets, produced more precise and good looking reports, allowed for very detailed authorization schemes and what not, but to build something that resembles what I have build with Coda would have taken so much more time, that it would have never happened.

My point: Coda is amazing and even though it can’t do everything we want it to do, it does a lot of things right at blazing speeds (for the user and for the makers). For me, there is just about zero chance that I will ever return to developing the old fashioned way.

About Grammarly: I had not expected this, I had not wished for this, but it doesn’t hurt my Coda experience either. I rather have Coda with Grammarly and AI than no Coda at all. My Coda Apps (Coda docs) work, the users I build for don’t have the slightest problem with 99% of what bothers a lot of makers (including me).

So my choice: I live with it. Coda is a work in progress. I am looking forwards, I accept the limitations (as I have had to do for the last 40 years) and honestly, almost every day I look at some of my docs and I am amazed what Coda does for me.

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The irony of getting all these great feature requests is that Codans will have to use AI to sift and organize them.

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The same thing happened several times at Airtable.

  • They had some bad update issues and it was about the time they announced a pivot to AI and enterprise along with a price hike.
  • Long-time lovers of the product went apeshit just like this thread; it lasted for a week and died down when it hit about 2500 posts.
  • They demanded the CEO (Howie) say something. He never said a peep.
  • The held a few focus group zooms which were not well attended.
  • There were a lot of haters in the threads but it was later determined many of them weren’t even Airtable customers. Paid haters from competitors apparently (speculation).
  • Some of the complaints were fair (as they are here).
  • Largely, it was panic over nothing of any substance.
  • Users paid the higher price, and enjoyed new features, and many have built profitable services with their AI features.
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This is a very important observation.

Dedicated, technically-inclined people typically represent less than 10% of the user base, but contribute 90% of the feedback (and complaining). This is both good and bad because (a) they do not represent the vast audience that pay the bills, but (b) they push the development team to fix and refine stuff. They/we often create anchoring biases that can be as equally ruinous as they can be helpful.

My team (on Enterprise) are highly skilled data scientists, AI developers, and real-time engineers. In rare cases do they hit walls with Coda and in almost every case, a little help with a Pack gets them over the wall.

In my view, this merger has mostly upside with non-zero risks. Distraction from core objectives, specifically feature development and improvement being one of them. However, we have to trust leadership and their knowledge of what’s best for their company. We’re passengers on a plane they worked very hard to create. No one has bigger stake in their future than they do.

Codans are like airline pilots. Their interests are perfectly aligned with their passengers because they arrive at the crash scene first. So too are Coda’s interests - perfect alignment with our interests, so it really troubles me to read posts that make it seem like everyone has forgotten this.

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Dear @shishir ,

You can earn back a lot of goodwill from the longtime Coda fans, some of whom have been here from day one, by dedicating a tiny fraction of the resources which have now become at your disposal to relatively simple quality of life improvements to the core Coda product.

We are dying by a thousand papercuts here. So I will focus my list on small fixes that shouldn’t require any fundamental engineering re-work. And yes, for the millionth time, we’re aware that they’re not security features but we want them anyway.

I’ll save the grandiose feature requests for the many visionary big brains around here. I just need stocking fillers:

1- Add these to Doc Locking options:

  • Toggle the search function off.
  • Toggle the annoying “fill with AI button” off.
  • Toggle the “formula fields cannot be edited” message and the associated grey highlight off.

2- Add this toggle to the edit Layout menu: Hide "row from.." link

3- Fix this formula OpenRow(row, viewOrLayout, viewMode):

  • the viewOrLayout parameter is broken and only takes views. if it also took layous as well it will save us the creation of hundreds of unnecessary views
  • make it allow us to open the row in pinned mode

4- Make conditional formatting work in Layout views

5- Make “Disable If” available to all columns, not just buttons

6- Formally support the button() formula so that it works for any actions and without helper columns

7- Give us access the browser-side event that fires when a row is created or modified , so that we can leverage it to do validations and offload expensive calculations via action formulas. The current API-driven automation speeds are just not fit-for-purpose.

This list may look arbitrary to you, but it is not. Passionate Coda makers know exactly the power that each of them unlocks and the pains that it solves. Have any of your people reach out, and we will happily explain (once again) why we need them.

You’ll notice I didn’t mention Grammarly, because I don’t care. The onus is on you and your team to convince me that I do, when you roll out whatever mind-blowing features you have in mind. But if the thousandth papercut kills me before that happens, I won’t be here to see it.

Happy Holidays and congrats again on the big new job,
Nad

PS: to all the geniuses that are now tempted to reply with “oh but there is a workaround for this or that”. Please don’t. I know all the workarounds and they’re rubbish. We need fixes not bandaids

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Indeed, Maker billing is a key ingredient for a lot of us.
My teams’ opinion regarding pricing is that we’d welcome a price hike (or extra tiers) should new core Doc (non-AI related) features be added (extended access/permission control among others for instance). However, any per-user type of pricing would be an immediate deal breaker.

Since the community (and thus Coda’s users) seems divided on AI, maybe looking to AI as an Add-on/independent upgrade rather than integrated into the pricing could help as well. Let’s say if you force me to pay more because you’ve integrated AI everywhere but me and my team are not using it, I’m wasting my hard earn money. Much further down the road, when your AI solutions are close to perfect for all users and the great majority of user are actually purchasing the add-on, then it’d make sense to factor it in the base prices.

Personally, I’m paying for out-of-Coda AIs because it adds a lot of value to my work and productivity. But the state of AI inside Coda is useless to me and frustrating to the point that I actually feel I’m losing my time and thus money, each single time I’ve tried to use it. And the way it’s been integrated (each editable cells in a table) is very painful for the user right now in terms of UX. To reconcile both world (those that may find value in that and those who don’t), maybe having some kind of AI toggle at the top of the page (somewhere near the settings icon) could make the AI integration disappear entirely/appear as is now, at will.

Finally, your greatest Christmas gift to the community should be sharing the Roadmap (or at least concrete details about the vision) that’s currently in your head rather than mentioning it exists.

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This is a great list.

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Okay, if you yourself admit the imperfection of the current implementation of AI in Coda, then on what basis do you believe that after the merger of Grammarly and Coda, something radically advanced will emerge this time, judging by your expectations? Don’t you find contradictions in your own chain of narratives between what exists now and the likelihood of what you imagine coming to fruition? Coda is not merging with Monday.com, SmartSuite, or ClickUp—platforms that are closest to the sphere in which Coda operates.
It is merging with Grammarly, a platform from a completely different universe that merely processes text and performs grammar analysis. Grammarly holds its niche through integration with business applications and specialization in grammar—nothing more. It’s a platform that itself could become a colossus with feet of clay due to the development of neural networks like ChatGPT or Claude. The latter, by the way, demonstrates outstanding results and in many ways surpasses Grammarly in text processing. Don’t just take my word for it—pit them against each other, and you’ll see for yourself. Any copywriter familiar with these tools will confirm this.

And let me remind you, we are discussing this under the conditions where the following scenario is happening right now:
A user has set up their workspace in Coda and decides to use what is supposedly the greatest scientific achievement of humanity and the platform itself—Coda AI.
They eagerly click on the tool’s bubble and enter what seem like obvious work-related queries:

  • “Please write me a formula to calculate overdue days for project deadlines, but taking working days into account.”
    What does the user get in return? JACK SHIT!
  • “Please remind me how many of my projects currently have the status ‘PRE-PRODUCTION’?”
    What does the user get in return? JACK SHIT!
  • “Please add a task to my dashboard with a deadline on the 27th of this month titled ‘Conduct Audit.’”
    What does the user get in return? JACK SHIT!
  • “Create a report on tasks with upcoming deadlines assigned to senior managers and show me all expenses.”
    What does the user get in return? JACK SHIT!

(And there are dozens of similar queries related to everyday and critical tasks.)

The user is perplexed. Where are the innovations? What can this AI actually do? It turns out that it can only work with text that it can somehow access—and that’s it!
But my workspace isn’t just text, the user rightly notes. It’s tables, buttons, interactivity, and a specific logic embedded in the architecture I so carefully developed, hoping that AI would become an excellent assistant in my daily tasks, as reflected in the queries I submitted.

Here lies the essence of your so-called innovations, easily exposed when you look at the core of things, real tasks, and needs.

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Oh, how innovative! This immediately reveals all the incredible prospects that might await us in Coda with Grammarly. In a world where users work with data, visualization, and process automation, here comes a platform that can’t step beyond text but has allowed you to transcribe text, and you even managed to DUMP it into Coda.

Will we now be able to use this groundbreaking feature in Coda’s mobile app right after Grammarly rolls out its integration?

Oh, wait, hold on a second—it turns out Coda’s mobile app is an absolute piece of crap that’s impossible to use.

Alright then, what about GrammarlyGO itself? Well, ChatGPT effortlessly wipes the floor with it in terms of text processing and solving complex tasks. How delightfully ambiguous everything turns out to be!

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Hey @Tamerlan_PRO ,

It is so easy to complain—I can think of another zillion AI questions that don’t yield the desired results.

It’s not only about what is not working, it is also about what is working. If you know of software that does all these things so much better than Coda, what are you doing here? Make my day and tell me about any package that can, at a somewhat comparable price, do what Coda does. Or do what Coda does with the same ease. I am not saying advanced Coda use is easy (although many things are pretty easy to accomplish), but even with limited knowledge you can do interesting things - and with more skills you can do amazing things in very little time.

I follow the community almost daily, but the endless complaints of some of us are increasingly annoying. So yes, I can move on, but the community has been an inspiration for me when I got started and even these days I learn from some posts (the questions that make me think and dig deeper, as well as the showcases and shared knowledge). I also like to help where I can, therefore I won’t quit.

I try to use my clients’ feedback. But sometimes I can’t, and I can’t always give a full explanation or justification for the things we don’t change. Most clients stay anyway - and some move on. It’s always been like that, and it probably always will be like that. I think the same applies to Coda.

Looking forward to 2025,
Greetings, Joost

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I am also deeply frustrated by the developers ignoring the requests of a group of users I stand in solidarity with. I am equally annoyed by the blind loyalty of certain users to the platform during times when others are seeking help in the face of prolonged uncertainty. Not because I harbor hatred toward Coda—on the contrary, I am just as dedicated a user of Coda as you are. I know the platform’s strengths and weaknesses inside out, have been working in this field for years, brought dozens of clients to the platform, and have simply chosen a particular way to voice my concerns.

This is my right as a user, just as it is your right to defend Coda. But I want to emphasize—I am not positioning myself as an antagonist to Coda but rather as someone who is trying to draw attention to existing issues. Maybe it comes across as too harsh and not very polite. But I don’t mind being the villain of this story if it means standing up for what I believe in.

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Yes! I second that!!!

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Appreciate you getting involved in the communication, @shishir

You’re a founder and CEO. I’m a founder and CEO. Many in this community are. We all face the same challenges, on different scales.

The lack of clarity around Coda’s roadmap and development priorities is deeply concerning. Imagine if a critical cloud infrastructure provider for Coda was acquired, and the new owner gave no clear plan for maintaining or improving services. Would that inspire confidence or trust?

Concrete details about Coda’s future would go a long way in restoring trust. Not everyone will agree with the direction, but those who stay will believe in you and the vision. That’s the long game of being a CEO.

Happy Holidays!

PS: My companies have worked on Grammarly products and campaigns in the past. It once led the pack, but in 2025, an LLM in one language isn’t enough. Instead, I hope you’ll make “a doc as powerful as an app” the core of a great future for both products.

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@shishir

Your announcement post just started appearing for Coda users who are logged-in.

The announcement is clear and to the point.

BUT…

The MOST IMPORTANT message that my clients need to see is MISSING!

They need to see that their current Coda documents will KEEP RUNNING for the foreseeable future. That is their #1 concern and reaction to this news.

I fear that some users may CANCEL their subscriptions BEFORE you have a chance to wow them with your future plans.

Many Coda users have had BAD EXPERIENCES with other SAAS platforms as a result of an acquisition. They need REASSURANCE from Coda. Especially since most Coda makers are NOT users or fans of Grammarly.

I have reached out to all my clients, but given the season, not everyone is as available as usual.
Those I have spoken to were very FEARFUL at first - “are our Coda automations and databases at risk?”

Can I ask that the message be modified to put this assurance UP FRONT?

Respect,
Max

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I liked all your comments to help people see your point.

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I can understand that coda views ai as a sort of space race. I think what most people are frustrated with is how singularly focused coda has become with it.

It’s gotten to the point the mobile aspect of coda is completely unusable and there has been zero communication about how or when they will fix it.

Single page sharing, is that still happening? No idea

But I’m sure when an ai engineer sneezes we will know about it.

Ai is great in concept videos and board room chats about the possibilities. But right now in practice for most users it isn’t providing results. I have stopped even trying with it because I’m tired of fighting with something that outputs nonsense. It’s basically good at summarizing text and that’s the only thing I have gotten it to do well.

It feels very much like the meme of the drowning kid is all the features we actually need vs the ai kid being held above the water proudly. Coda just isnt listening to it’s community and their outrage is justified.

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Thanks for the nice list @Nad , you have always shown great skill in clear communication.

I perceive the many responses in this tread as a way to vocalise a deep concern. Many of us had such high hopes and we often feel that we are almost ‘there’ (where ever it is). Coda is one of these rare products you fall in love, at least I did.

I also believe that the core product (functions & actions) will be improved in the months to come, only then the benefit for Grammarly will be clearly visible and so it will be for the many GR users. There are not that many options on the table, other than better (functional and in the experience).

Besides, Grammarly is a larger company (around 1300 employees I believe) so maybe they can use some of the technical resources to fix long standing coda issues to polish the product that are not directly related to Coda Brain.

More details here.

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Hi Phil,

You are absolutely spot on. I think (hope?) that this time around Coda is not only listening but will act better going forward.

While Coda is reaching for the future their customers still need to live in the present. And that needs to be reflected in both Coda’s developments AND their communication about those developments.

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Isnt the whole point of integrating Ai with coda is so that it can access the information in your doc and not all the information on the internet? Saying that coda doesn’t do a good job with its formula language because there is so much other language out there is really why people don’t find it useful. If codas ai isn’t trained on how to use coda what good is it? If I ask it to organize my table, and filter by certain columns but it doesn’t understand how codas filters work, is that intelligence we need?

Nobody would be complaining about ai if the ai actually seemed intelligent and worked. But it doesn’t, it’s become bloatware that adds more distractions. They can work on Ai if they want to be a leader in ai race. But they also can’t forget people use coda right now, for work they have to get done today. They need features promised years ago that took a back seat because Ai came about. I have been waiting for single page sharing since 2020, how much has it’s development been hindered by this chase for ai?

And if Ai is so great why isn’t coda showing us how they use it to complete the features we actually want? Why is development still so slow if Ai is so productive?

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I saw the word ROADMAP!!!

Are we getting one, maybe January? Wink wink!