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When the discussion turns to Notion and Roam Research, I am always eager to get involved :)!!

I have spent months going between Notion and Coda, and I for one think Notion does little better than Coda. I gave up on Notion as an app for my team as the limitations were so great around things like notifications, limits in table view (you can’t see rich text unless you open a row), and importantly for my use case, traceability across “blocks” when relating to others.

This last point is particular relevant to both the comparison with Coda, and new-kid-on-the-block Roam. Notion has even greater limits around relating blocks across the app in free canvas that Coda. With Coda, you can create a button and show relations between two rows at least, although this requires work. In Notion, you just move your blocks around by using “change to,” and before you know it you can lose track of bunches of content. For free form journaling and referencing, I think this is a big drawback. In fact I went back to Evernote after trying hard with Notion. Another problem with Notion for me was you can’t simply write a few paragraphs of text - every single line practically is a “block.”

Roam has shown some great implementation however of the ability to create in a “network” fashion, and I think this is extremely relevant to Coda, given Coda’s focus on “making.” I would really like a few more features around reciprocal linking in Coda to kind of “close the loop” on what we already have in Coda with strong lookups, and @mentioning allowing quick reference to a row, but sadly only one-directional at the moment. Roam shows the potential and power of creating when you can see your content in various contexts as its created. In my use case for Coda as an all-purpose team management app, I have already seen great benefit to being able to relate stuff like CRM with Projects, Product with Feature Components, and a host of other items that typically can’t easily interact because teams have this stuff in different apps that can’t relate to each other at all. It’s a huge help in prioritization, planning, and even retrospectives too, since you can build notes around work and then create a sort of company log of decisions, repeat discussions around items that fester in a backlog, and so forth.

I’m glad to see talk here about Coda pushing forward on some of this reciprocal linking here:

I have been learning more about Roam and really think it shows the potential of getting reciprocal linking live in Coda. I will shamelessly yet again plug my request for that!

Always hopeful my comments are useful, and not just chatter! Speak with you all again shortly!