I’m sorry, but whatever the “to-be-built” tool, it’s going to take a technician with a minimum of basic knowledge to structure it.
Exemple notion :
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve intervened on Notion workspaces because they were a mess. and even more so if we have to integrate Make! Not everyone can understand how an API works.
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Hi Daragh,
Thanks for a thorough response.
At the heart of my response will be, “How long is a piece of string?” And I say that with sincerity.
- Start a doc with text, or a table for a simple to do list, or an inventory list, you’re up and running without thinking.
- But now you want to add the goods movements, and adjust the rolling balances, and you’re going to quickly realise you’re no longer in Excel - it is not simple to include “previous row” in a calculation. And a formula applies to a column, addressing a cell takes some effort. All of these are features, not bugs. But they are often the source of complaints and “bug” reports on the forum. Most people forget the many years of gradual learning that they had in Excel, and expect to be just as proficient in Coda from the moment they start.
- But at some stage you have all of the above in place, and then you want to add information from you accounting package. Fortunately for you, you are using QuickBooks, and you can simply pull that pack into your doc.
a. If you were a Pastel user, you would have had to write that pack yourself. But it can be done, with a little more effort. - And fortunately your business is growing, so you need sync pages to communicate with your customers, Artificial Intelligence to research information in the public domain, as well as AI to search this huge amount of data of that your business has now accumulated, and which you DO NOT want 3rd party AI’s to use in training themselves.
What I am trying to say here, is that Coda is as simple, and as complex, as you make it or need it. Whether you are a one person todo list implementation, or a large company with several thousand employees that are implementing Coda Brain
I think this is par for the course? That is why testing is such a fundamental part of software development, and should also be in any other business process. And that is why research has shown that 88% percent of the spreadsheet businesses rely on has errors in it. A bank lost something like $6bn a few years ago because of an error in their spreadsheets. As my Computer Science professor used to say: “Every non trivial piece of software has bugs in it. Any piece of software without bugs is trivial.”
Not sure what “Coda gets in the way” means but yes, there are many ways to do things in Coda, even the most simplest of things. But some people see that as one of Coda’s strengths - the ability to set it up their own way. There are frequent comments on the forum of people doing CRM and project management, because they could not get Monday.com, or Jira or whatever else to work exactly the way they want to.
I would like to look at this in a different way, it is not the size of the company that determines the need for greater expertise, it is the complexity of the requirement. If you look at @Coda_Solutions ’ doc that he shared above. It is for a company with 20 employees, and very few makers in Coda would have been able to implement that.
But it is just a ramble,
Rambling Pete
I agree with a lot of the concerns presented here.
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Not much community, YouTube is dead, twitter barely gives updates, forums are most active but not as frequently posted as one would expect.
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No roadmap. Beyond single page sharing what are the plans for 2025? What can users expect?
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No focus on consumers only focused on enterprise. I feel like coda is an incredible tool with broad reaching capabilities that could be used for a lemonade stand to a sprawling S&P500 organization. But everything is so tech and enterprise focused anybody like me who works for a small business will immediately pass on it
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Ai. Lots of focus on ai by coda, I get not wanting to miss the boat. But what if you are boarding the wrong boat? Is snowflake the best platform? Is their Ai going to maintain a quality over its competitors that makes this relationship fruitful? Or will Nvidia’s open source ai dominate and make all this hard work for nothing?
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Mobile is unusable. I can’t get my docs to work, they constantly need low memory mode. The phone app needs a complete overhaul and it has never presented a good vision for coda.
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I think a phone app is known as small business and not Enterprise. Enterprise usually has people at their desks (home or remote).
Enterprises use desktops, laptops, pads, mobiles, and whatever other devices suit their particular needs.
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I’m new to Coda and I can tell you why we are moving forward with Coda over Notion.
As a background, I’ve been seriously playing with both, and was ready to jump on Notion and then discovered Coda. Here’s my thoughts:
- I have not had the experience that Notion is easier to use — it APPEARS that way — but once I understood both tools a bit, and clarified what my team needed, Coda was a clear winner. I have learned, the hard way, that clarity of purpose is key to getting the most out of any tool — honestly, Coda forced me to think through that more than the ready-made Notion template that “almost” made it.
- I find Coda as pleasant if not more pleasant to use than Notion. (I’m an Apple guy when I have a choice, and to be honest, the best document creation experience on the market is Craft. But Craft cannot do what Coda can do.) I still use Notion because I have a different team that relies on it, and I think overall it is a great tool. But at least after a few months of testing, I think Coda will serve my teams needs over the long haul better than Notion. I have not had any technical issues with Coda, and it hasn’t been finicky. I have not found it to be slow, as some have indicated.
- Formulas in Coda are fair superior and once I got a sense of what I could do with them, Coda was a clear winner in terms of being able to scale our work as our client base and research grows. One doesn’t need to adapt to the software as much as is typically thecase. It is quite flexible.
- The charting functions (while not fully what I want, and if Coda could make some key improvements, they would grab people from competitors who rely on external tools to craft reports; if a Coda person wants my “white paper”, let me know!) are, at least in my experience so far, superior, if not fully adequate.
- Notion seems to want to become an OS: Mail, Calendar, Docs, Tables, Forms. While there are obvious advantages to that, there are drawbacks. I do not want everything running through Google to have things work (for a whole host of reasons). I don’t want to be locked into another OS, either. We are locked into having MS be part of our stack, and our datacenter is WIndows NT. We need that and cannot give that up at this time. No, I don’t love MS. I’m pretty confident the integration with Outlook will work well for us, as will the Zoom integration, among others.
- The strength of the Notion community, especially the micro-economy that has grown around it, is a mixed blessing. I’ve gotten the sense that the hype around Notion is connected to the sustainability of this micro-economy. Great if that’s your thing, but it has also lead me astray. (I just don’t need yet another productivity guru telling me how their template will revolutionize my life.) I don’t see all that with Coda. Less hype, less overpromising. The template economy in particular is a mixed-blessing. I spent a good bit of time and some cash trying out templates. They were good, worked, and developers seemed fine. But I learned that studying the far fewer templates in Coda, learning how they worked and functioned, and then building my own system, is ultimately the way to go. Yes, it takes more time up front. But the result is turning out to be superior. Coda is customizable, and there are many ways to accomplish things, and this helps me tailor our processes to my teams’ proclivities, and not make them bend to the software. I can give examples if anyone wants.
- Rapid software development is also a mixed-blessing. We all want the best, coolest, most functional tools yesterday. But the more I played with Notion, the more I started to get the sense that this push to develop, develop, develop, would come back to bite me. I have an impression, and I understand it is just an impression and not well-researched, that Coda is a company / platform that I’m more comfortable using. The Notion Calendar app is great, but the more I used it, the more I was like, eh. Like I said, I just can’t commit to Notion’s sorta-closed system. That does not mean its wrong, it just doesn’t mesh with the reality of the work we do. Winning the long race is more important to us. I don’t want my team constantly navigating significant updates all the time. I want a great, reliable, powerful, and safe tool. Introduce meaningful improvements when it is obvious they are meaningful and needed, and do them well.
- Cost: I will have 10 active members and only one doc creator, and this includes access to AI. Much of our work relies on contract work, and being able to bring people in and out, including clients, without increasing cost; this is a huge plus. The price difference matters. That the functionality is better matters (aside from your specific case!).
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I totally agree with this. As a college student who depended on Notion, my main reason switching to Coda is the features available in the free plan + the customization. I used Notion for almost 3 years, but I realized I never had a good workflow with it. I’d build dashboards as a way to manage my assignments & due dates + every other aspects of my life like a daily journal database, but then I’d end up only using them for a month before feeling bored with it. What’s worse is Notion started to slow down with how much notes I added for my classes. I’ve only used Coda for 4 months now, on the free plan (Notion’s pro plan is free for me until I graduate college, which is coming soon for me, so that’s also why I’ve been switching over to Coda) with over a thousand rows or so added, and I’ve yet to see it slow down.
When I found Coda, I loved how much I could do with formulas and buttons more than Notion’s buttons (which I think still can’t handle big formulas & wide variety of automation with a single click, not sure). Just an example, I just recently was able to create a “quiz app” in Coda that has buttons connected to three databases, filtering questions and adding my answer for each session I take a quiz as a way to study. I don’t think I’d be able to recreate what I made into Notion.
Here’s my take: Coda is marketed towards companies/businesses/enterprises, period. Not that that’s a bad thing, it’s probably what’s making them the most money. But Coda missing out on the marketing towards individuals is probably what’s slowing them down. They’d need to find influencers to give them more exposure on Youtube etc. to actually compete with Notion at the individual level. As much as I also don’t like the “productivity” hype, you have to admit that is what seems to be appealing at the individual level for Notion users. Notion appeals to college students like me because Youtubers make “aesthetic/cute layout” videos, and they even sell those as templates. I doubt people actually even use them daily though, especially since Notion can just upend their formula code like they did before and render their templates useless unless they update it. I’ve even been thinking of making my own videos on Youtube to at least get some traction for Coda and share what I’ve built, just ‘cuz I’m 10x happier with what I’ve created in Coda in a month vs. what I’ve done in Notion in a year.
So TLDR; I relate with the OP. I think Coda definitely needs to rethink their marketing. I think it’s great for individuals & hits most of what you need with bonus powerful customization abilities. But barely anyone talks about it as being able to replace Notion (which for me, it did!). Also Coda’s mobile app, definitely needs some more love & care put into it 
But I don’t mind making mobile layouts for buttons/pages I use the most of.
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Thanks, everyone, for this discussion. I had been planning to move toward Notion, but just to let you know, I’ve switched to Notion three times and to Coda twice. I’m struggling to build a system that fits my needs with either tool. Honestly, building a system to organize my life has been challenging, especially since I’m designing it with scalability in mind, so it’ll work if I ever have a team in the future.
The biggest takeaway from this whole post is that people seem to think Excel is similar to Coda, and that the learning curve for both is alike. But honestly, they are quite different. Coda is much more complex.
Coda isn’t just a front-end or back-end tool; it’s everything in one place. This can be an advantage or disadvantage, but what really cleared things up for me is realizing that Coda is like a hub. It’s similar to having an operating system that connects all the smart switches in your home. This hub lets me integrate everything I use while excluding clunky or redundant tools, as Coda’s more advanced and integrates well with many irreplaceable tools.
Lastly, the Coda community is incredibly skilled and supportive. Although content on Coda has slowed down recently (which I hope will change, or that Coda will address it), the community itself is full of experts and experienced users who have dealt with all kinds of challenges.
Because of all these insights, I’ve stopped switching back to Notion and am sticking with Coda!
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This topic deeply aligns with thoughts I’ve been reflecting on over the past couple of years.
While Coda remains a useful tool, it has struggled to keep pace with the evolving needs of its users, falling short on a dozen fundamental requirements since 2018.
Competitors have been advancing rapidly, and what was once Coda’s unique strength - a formula-driven data hub with an intuitive interface - doesn’t really stands out.
Coda currently struggles with both handling big data and delivering a nice UX. While many of us can tolerate performance limitations, the platform needs a distinctive edge, and lately, it’s harder and harder to find it.
I still use Coda, but if it continues to neglect its loyal user base needs (quite a few of whom are already moving on), I may soon (next 2 quarters) feel pushed to leave as well.
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I’m genuinely curious, where would you move to? Do you know where the other former power-users you mentioned moved to?
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Longer answer than expected 
:
Since 2018 I’ve promoted Coda to many hundreds of people (likely thousands already) and the main thing I hear is “I want to just use it, not build”. Evidently UX becomes increasingly important because people using Coda is good for data analysis and management but bad for users who resist to enter the data. Eventually, users win.
AppSheet
PowerApps
FlutterFlow
ClickUp
Notion
…
Sometimes even back to Google Sheets (with the new Tables option) because believe it or not some people like it better than Coda - 7 columns doesn’t take the entire screen AND the tables are actually usable on mobile.
We use whatever the users will like.
I absolutely hate the process of transferring from Coda to another tool. The management hate it for even more reasons. The users… they usually hate the idea but prefer the result of the switch.
Coda can kill all these with not so many upgrades, but until then I will keep hearing that Coda is just not easy/fast/nice/mobile-friendly enough and users will win.
And I spend too much time in “developing” Coda while rarely feel heard anymore.
I suppose in 2 quarters it will became evident if Coda is turning into a dashboard with powerful formulas for big data operators. This would mean that most of us here are wasting our time with Coda because we will never get those dozen upgrades that we so very much need.
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Just to chip in… we will still hear about Dory rituals and rituals of powerful teams. Like, c’mon, what is the world is Coda even thinking?
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Hey Stefan,
Thanks for the long answer, I appreciate it!
If there’s an out-of-the-box tool that does exactly what the user needs, then they should go for it. And if they want something custom and don’t want to build it themselves, pay someone else to build it. What’s the problem?
In your experience do users resist because they are supposed to build the functionalities they need? I assume if they had a competent builder implementing the workflow, the users wouldn’t be so unsatisfied.
Or is it that they don’t have an in-house builder and then when the external is gone (you?) and they try to expand the scope everything goes to hell?
Have not tried AppSheet nor ClickUp, so can’t say much about them.
PowerApps?? Really??? I still have nightmares from when I had to work with them for a while.
FlutterFlow is just FE, still need something for the backend. You can do anything with it, but it requires quite some technical knowledge and the learning curve is even steeper than Coda!
Doesn’t Notion have the same problem as Coda, that you start with a blank canvas and have to build everything yourself?
Don’t want to sound contrarian, but have tried quite a few low-code tools and none has such a sweet spot as Coda.
To be fair, I mainly built stuff for myself and for the company I work for and so far I have been able to work my way around to avoid any deal-breaking pain. But I’m just recently starting a couple of projects with ‘external’ clients, so I guess then I will feel more accutely all the pains you have described.
Yeah, I can feel the frustration in many top-makers. The community is not what it was.
What happens in 2 quarters?
Thanks again for your answer and let’s hope Coda picks up on those features after they release Brain!
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Coda fills the gap where out of the box tools don’t exist or are too expensive. And some are willing to pay to get a solution designed in coda. The problem is that a lot of Coda UI gets in the way for users. Some of the interaction design in particular is confusing.
For example:
- hovering over a related item provides a user with a popover detailed view that confuses the user (showing unrelated columns from default view)
- not enough control over detailed views which means it isn’t easy to design simple context specific layouts
- lots and lots of other UI elements that are unintuitive to users coming from spreadsheets as their tool
It’s not unreasonable to argue that there will be a learning curve for a new tool, but the reality is that some of these layout and interaction are hurting adoption and the lack of ability to configure it is very frustrating for advocates of the product to get the but in from end users and clients.
I too share Stefan’s frustration that a superior tool like Coda is losing out to inferior products because the users can get it to look the way they want at the cost of functionality and maintainability.
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I agree the paper cuts you mention can be very annoying for some use-cases. But when you build an app so flexible you can not anticipate everything that will be built for it, so the design choices Coda made might make sense for some use-cases but not for others.
If you want to be able to configure absolutely everything then you need to switch to the likes or FlutterFlow or Weweb, but then the effort to implement something equivalent is at least 10x or 20x the effort in my experience.
Maybe I don’t have enough experience yet with clients, but so far I’ve been able to provide so much value to my users with Coda compared to the tools they used before that even if they were confused sometimes they were mostly happy to overlook those flaws.
That said, there’s some stuff that they could implement that people mention all the time that would not hurt any-use case and improve lots of them like disabling search, decent mobile app, etc. etc.
Hi Pablo,
Nice questions. Maybe it’s worth mentioning that the underlying problem is not making but using Coda docs.
The problem is for Coda. We makers love it, but users hate it. And users win.
The concept of empowering small teams to have enterprise level tools is what probably draws most of us to Coda. If I use Coda to protype and then have to build it somewhere else it loses 50%+ of the purpose of Coda.
No, those who are makers are fine. Users hate what makers did.
Top reasons are:
a) they end up in hidden pages just by swiping left and right on the trackpad
b) lack of proper Back and Next button which leads them to all sort of places which terrifies them
c) Notifications and emails which lead them to some deep space instead of where it’s supposed to
d) bad mobile experience - particularly calendar layout and table layout
e) UI utilizing so little of the screen estate and somehow ugly
f) slow and sluggish
Those who want to migrate from user to maker find it hard to convince that what they’ve built is good. Because what they’ve built is just not pleasing and they need to learn all those hacks and tricks to make it look OK.
It’s a nightmare for builders but not so much for users. Again, users win!
True! But the advantage of coda (working with data) is not an advantage if you don’t have users who fill in the data and then users who use the data. So… users win
Notion and ClickUp are a compromise and I am not fan of neither for different reasons. Coda is good for tech-savy users but ClickUp makes more sense for them because it comes with a lot of out of the box solutions which I would otherwise have to build in Coda. Notion is going in the same direction. So… it’s very narrow target group left for Coda users.
I’ve invested a lot of in my 8 years Coda relationship. If Coda doesn’t want to communicate and listen to me, I need a new relationship
To sum up my (well documented) view on Coda:
Coda is a very powerful tool for prototyping. As business innovation manager it is pretty useful to me with it’s flexibility, quick iterations and easy visualization. But when it comes to implementing the strategy and scaling business on top of it, Coda sucks! So much that it becomes a waste of resources.
If I was a business innovation manager at Coda, I would’ve focused on partnering with (open-source) no-code app/desktop builder and in an year time rule the entire SME segment.
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I have just seen your comment and i just shared a good solution for table view in mobile, check it out i think you will change your mind about this point
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Hard to disagree with you, you obviously have much more experience than me working with clients and bring very good points.
Still think that you can partially mitigate a lot of the issues and there’s no other tool where you can build such advanced tools with so little effort, but as you say, if all those paper cuts make your users not want to use your tool, then it’s just a waste.
Btw, if you have not already try Glide, the back-end part is quite quirky after you go beyond the basic stuff and even crazier work-arounds than in Coda are sometimes needed but it allows to build quite complex logic. The front-end part is very neat and slick, not super flexible but quite easy to build!
You’ve given me a lot of insights and things to consider. Thanks!
The concept of Coda as a document builder is undeniably attractive. Its visual branding—featuring puzzles and LEGO-like building blocks—hints at creativity and modularity. But in practice, Coda.io feels like a platform where its functional potential becomes overly complex, overshadowing its creative accessibility. Yes, it’s powerful, but without proper training, a steep learning curve, or more intuitive visual tools, most users can’t fully tap into that potential.
This creates a frustrating paradox: Coda.io has so much to offer, yet its complexity makes it intimidating. A more thoughtful and user-friendly UX/UI could bridge this gap. And let’s be honest—Coda doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Many of the best ideas have already been implemented by competitors. What frustrates me is that Coda tends to ignore this and, when it does take inspiration, the ideas often feel unfinished. Take “Subitems” or database views, for example—both are clearly drawn from Notion, but they lack the same polish and depth.
The real issue here is balance. There’s a massive gap between Coda’s capabilities and its creative potential. Imagine if every LEGO piece had to be bolted together, and you had to do it blindfolded because the interface wasn’t intuitive. That’s how using Coda can feel for the average user. How far can you push the concept of a builder if the trade-off is making the experience cumbersome? At some point, it’s like saying, “Here’s some binary code—now go create whatever you want!”
The community has left countless thoughtful suggestions and ideas—feedback that deserves to be taken seriously. Coda.io has clearly reached a critical stage in its development, and it’s time to rethink the balance between power and usability to truly fulfill its potential.
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Hi,
Wanted to chime in here. After going down the rabbit hole of software and software building, I realized that Coda, while it has the lite version of database, backend, and frontend capabilities, it more closely aligns with something called Middleware software.
Middleware is “glue” software that helps different applications and operating systems work together by allowing them to communicate and share data. It can use APIs, message queues, databases, and other methods to facilitate communication and data exchange. Middleware can also handle tasks like security, authentication, or data transformation.
Oracle, for example, has enterprise level middleware solutions like Oracle WebLogic and SOA Suite to help businesses connect applications and systems for seamless integration and automation. However, the price tag varies widely depending on factors such as the specific product, licensing model, and use case.
To give an example, oracle has middleware solutions called Oracle WebLogic Suite, with a price tag around $35,000 per processor license. There is also Oracle SOA Suite, it typically requires a custom quote, often upwards of $60,000 per processor license.
The ability to build middleware functionality in Coda is well worth having. However, there are critical and sometimes deal breaker limitations as discussed here and elsewhere. Coda is marketed as an all-in-one document collaboration and productivity platform but I find myself not using it in that manner. It seems that Coda has an identity crisis among the sea of other productivity platforms and is getting left behind.
What if Coda were to build some of these requested functionalities/tools/UI components (that would be considered extra) and package/sell them like Procreate does their brush kits? They could generate revenue from non-enterprise users and keep users happy.
With that being said, I came across a front-end software that can either be embedded via iframe link and/or managed via pack - Bubble.io. This was done with just the free/developer plan.
Here’s the platform:
Here’s a preview of a log in section:
Here is a quick video demo of the Bubble.io interface for that template with an embed in Coda:
Here is another video demo of a chat template embedded in Coda:
While it’s possible to do everything in Bubble.io, I would still use Coda to leverage the use of Bubble.io’s free plan. Their pricing is based on workload units per month. So what Coda can’t do, use their workload units on as well as their API workflow to connect to Coda’s API (i.e. push button) and let Coda do its thing.
There are so many possibilities with Coda docs but for me I would use it as “middleware software” and design it for users who are working on building this software and leave the front end to Bubble.io for users who want to use it.
Just some thoughts…
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