Coda was a great product but a bad idea for our company. Coda made a big product direction and pricing change that drove us away.
Last year, we searched for a documentation tool that could grow with our burgeoning team, then nearing 90 members. In the age of smart documents acting like apps, we were drawn to Coda. Coda offered a compelling twist to the conventional pricing model—it charges solely for creators. This approach was aligned with our company’s dynamic, where only about 10% of our staff needed full editing capabilities. The rest could engage as editors, accessing, reading, and adding sub-pages to company documents without incurring extra costs.
However, our experience over the year went from excitement to anger. We paid around $4K over the past year and created thousands of documents. When we had to leave Coda, it was an unpleasant experience, and we also realized that relying on Coda as a source of truth for our company data was a bad idea.
Their price change was the first factor that drove us to move away. It costs 10/user/month plan would cost us $900/month instead. Our free editors merrily contributed to Coda docs. We invited clients to collaborate with us as editors. By early 2024, Coda 4.0 was released with a big change: editors can no longer add pages or rename page titles in a Coda doc. This is similar to limiting a Wiki contributor from adding a chapter, or a Notion collaborator from being able to create a subpage. Imagine that!
Moreover, we encountered what I’ll term the ‘stickiness trap’: while Coda’s powerful integrations allowed for sophisticated documentation, each Coda doc was independent of other docs. Cross-doc integrations were subpar. Its complexity made it challenging to maintain standardization across the company.
Coda got me in love with two-way write-ups. We enjoyed using reactions on collaborative documents. We learned quite a few things about how Coda built the company culture, attracted smart people to build beautiful smart documents, and empowered a community to build on top of Coda.
Coda tables and formulas are innovative. Notion pioneered powerful tables, but Coda took them to the next level with their formulas. We had a lot of fun with Coda. We tried to develop a lot of advanced uses of tables and automation in Coda. We built a few Coda Packs, which are like plugins or addons in other software. Coda became even more exciting when we got early access to AI features.
However, over time, we realized we brainwashed ourselves on Coda’s approach and forgot the biggest pain: there’s no good way to build a single source of truth. We thought the problem was us. We’re not smart enough to make all these cross-doc integrations work.
When Coda 4.0 was released, the new pricing pissed off a lot of people. Free users, aka editors, can no longer rename pages within a single document. Imagine if you use Coda for a wiki, you pay for your creator license, hoping that you don’t have to pay for all contributors to the content. Now contributors can only make in-page edits. The community tried to respectfully push back this new change, but there was just so much corporate speak to justify this action. It’s clear as day: they have a sticky product and they believe that users should just start paying for more creators. Well, it’s now adopting Notion pricing. Now Coda loses the single differentiator from Notion. Now it’s an inferior product compared to Notion. We were disappointed, and we moved away.
Our search for alternatives led us to Outline. Notion seems to facilitate easier exports. Coda does not. Moving our data required custom scripts and did not support image exports in markdown. The transition was challenging, especially for smart tables, which lost their functionality outside Coda. We reverted to basics, finding Google Docs and Sheets adequate for our needs, with Outline serving as an effective wiki platform due to its clean interface and straightforward export options.
This experience taught me the importance of data portability and ownership. For our company, I have the support of our staff to move things. For personal notes, I had to rethink my approach.
My personal experience with Coda highlighted the vulnerabilities of relying on proprietary cloud platforms for note-taking. I’ve since embraced Obsidian for its philosophy of local file ownership while loving the Zettelkasten method. The simplicity and interlinking capabilities of plain text notes have proven invaluable. I learned to respect and embrace the Obsidian Manifestos. More on that another day.
Many smart friends are on Notion. Notion’s free plan allows for unlimited usage if you don’t need team features. Well-funded teams can use Notion. I’m grateful Notion sets such a high bar, and I’m tempted to go back to my old Notion, but I hate to think about having to export out of Notion one day. My notes should just be plain text, dumb enough to last forever, and smart enough to be interlinked. Obsidian is so addictive now thanks to its speed and powerful plugin ecosystem.
Notion sets the high bar on just-works and wow features. Notion is great, though pricy, for teams. We are happy paying users to Outline. Tom, Outline founder, was kind and responsive to our developer who built the migration tool. One day we may self-host and port the data over. Thank you, Outline, for being thoughtful about portability and the open-source approach.
Obsidian is not for teams yet. Now, I plan to build a tool to sync what I write from Obsidian to Outline so that it can be shared with coworkers. Pages on Obsidians can also be turned into smart documents, and I also hope to create something collaborative by syncing to GitHub or something else. Let’s write and build!