My thoughts on the practical differences between storage of permissions/metadata in Google Drive vs. Coda:
Google Drive
Positives
- No need to remember yet another password
- Can share your docs with Google Groups
- Full text search across your Coda docs via the Drive search bar
- Can see your Coda docs alongside other doc types in the Drive UX
- Respects (some) of Google Drive’s administrative settings (e.g., don’t share outside the domain).
Negatives
- Can only share with Google-backed accounts
- Depending on your privacy viewpoint, you may not be happy sharing any information with Google.
- Restricted from changing doc ownership across team/company/domain boundaries with a set of hard-to-understand rules Google never documented fully.
- Weird corner case where access to a doc from a Coda Folder doesn’t mesh well with Google ACLs if you’re not otherwise an editor - we turn off the Share dialog in this case.
Coda
Positives
- Can share with any email address; doesn’t need to be Google-backed (unlike above).
- Faster doc opens - the Google Drive API isn’t particularly fast at responding to access checks.
- No need to share data with Google
Negatives
- No full-text search across all docs (this is on our roadmap)
- No ability to see other doc types beyond Coda in the Coda doc list
- Still lacking some administrative limitations (e.g., don’t share outside domain)
In my opinion, not having to worry about your sharees needing to have Google accounts is a big win, especially in cases where you’re sharing outside of your team - working with external contractors, cross-company initiatives, etc.