The Ultimate Airtable vs. Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024

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The Ultimate Airtable vs. Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024

AI capabilities

Note: I asked my colleague Katy to write this page. She’s the Product Marketing Manager on the Coda AI team and has spoken with hundreds of makers about Coda AI.

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Coda AI, which became generally available in October 2023, and Airtable AI, which is currently in beta, each enable the native use of AI within their respective tools

When Coda was deciding if we should pursue an AI-integration, we first explored what an ideal AI work assistant would even look like. We interviewed executives, investors, IT admins, and everyday users of productivity tools to have frank conversations about the typical work day. We collected hundreds of examples of ideal use cases from teams of all sizes, and then categorized these into three types of assistance.

Writing assistance: Creating briefs or other content, editing, reviewing, or summarizing text, or generating new tables.

Knowledge assistance: Answering questions, finding content, or getting specific insights from data (granular and high-level).

Task assistance: Generating a holistic AI solution that connects to other tools and performs tasks at scale.

Since then, many makers have shared that this set of criteria helps them brainstorm how and where to use AI for their work. As you are evaluating any AI-enabled tool, this framework can also act as a scorecard to understand how generative AI can add value to your team. If you’d like a deeper dive on Coda AI’s broader capabilities, explore

this doc.⁠

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AI that understands your work.

Coda AI is like having a VERY knowledgeable assistant looking over your shoulder, who understands the content of your document, who can answer specific (and general) questions, editing their answers directly into your document.

- Max Xyzor, CTO, Agile Dynamics

Both Coda AI and Airtable AI are context aware—meaning AI can use your existing data as background information for the prompt. For example, if you are writing personalized emails, AI can customize these based on each person’s name, title, and company.

mentioned earlier⁠

, Airtable starts in a “base” and largely focuses on structured data, which greatly limits the number of use cases for Airtable AI. For example, it’s difficult to use Airtable AI as an editor, to answer questions, or to provide high-level insights about all your data.

In comparison, Coda’s doc structure and ability to organize structured (tables, charts) and unstructured data (notes, writeups) makes Coda AI a more powerful and flexible AI assistant. Coda AI builds and edits content like a helpful collaborator, and gives detailed or high-level insights, even based on data brought in from other tools.

You can choose what Coda AI should reference as context—for example the page with meeting notes and the table with customer feedback. Coda AI’s different features also accomplish a wider set of goals—for example, pulling different types of insights for a report.

As you explore the examples below, think about the type of content your team creates, and how they would take advantage of a context-aware AI work assistant.

1. Writing assistance: From blank page to final polish.

Writing assistance goes beyond generating new text on a blank page and into creating informed content to share, plus helping you brainstorm, edit, and finalize your work. So you can:

Use AI to create content for briefs, reports, writeups, blogs, retros, and more.

Get help across the writing process, from first draft to final version.

Generate new tables, such as a table of potential names for a new feature, or a table of potential metrics and their definitions.

Many makers I’ve spoken with have different writing roadblocks—whether that’s getting started, or agonizing over the final touches. As a result, it’s essential to a choose an AI-enabled tool that’s able to meet you where you are, throughout the writing process.

Airtable AI

Airtable AI has extremely limited writing assistance capabilities. It cannot help with editing or reviewing, and new content is generated in a limited surface.

Creating new content: Airtable AI can create first drafts within a single row, which provides limited space for reviewing.

Creating content based on other context: Airtable can only reference information in the same row. For example, if you are trying to write a product brief, you’d have to add the relevant notes to the same row.

Brainstorming and editing: Airtable AI can regenerate content, but cannot edit or give suggestions.

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When trying to use customer feedback to generate a writeup, Airtable AI can only reference notes from the same row.

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Newly generated content is in a limited surface, and Airtable AI cannot help with editing or reviewing.

Coda AI

Coda AI converts data and notes into first drafts, suggests edits, and leaves comments like a helpful teammate.

Creating new content: Coda AI’s doc surface and AI chat side panel make it easy to create new content, or brainstorm ideas for first drafts.

Creating content based on other context: Coda AI lets you @ reference any pages or tables across your doc as context. For example, if you are writing a product brief, you’re able to specify which pieces of customer feedback or discussion notes are relevant. Airtable AI is limited to referencing only data in the same row.

Brainstorming and editing: Coda AI chat engages in an active dialogue with you in the side panel. You’re able to ask for five more versions of a sentence (and five more after that), and then pick your favorite.

Sharing feedback: Coda AI reviewer also leaves comments with feedback, so feels like a helpful team collaborator, and makes it easy to tag others with questions and ideas.

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Coda AI references any pages and table data, no matter where it lives in the doc. (You can test this prompt

here⁠

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Coda AI gives feedback as targeted comments, so you can easily make changes, or tag a colleague to ask their opinion.

More examples

More examples

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2. Knowledge assistance: AI that knows your team.

Knowledge assistance includes different types of insights, such as a summary, an ongoing analysis, a quick answer, or simply getting the link you need in the moment.

Getting the insights you need from your data, including answers to specific questions, or AI tags that can create charts and dashboards.

Asking questions about your content, like vacation or PTO policies.

Finding the resource you need, such as a link to the image library or latest meeting notes.

Airtable AI

Airtable AI can only provide limited insights, at the row-level, lacking the ability to generate trends, answer questions, or review data from multiple sources.

Answering questions: Airtable AI is not able to answer questions about your collective data, it only summarizes or shares action items for each row.

Sharing the latest insights: Airtable AI only gives insights about data in the same row.

Generating dashboards: Airtable AI cannot create tags that easily turn into dashboards—it can only generate text.

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Airtable AI can summarize each row, but not entire databases, or answer questions.

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Airtable AI-generated tags are text, making it difficult to see trends.

Coda AI

Coda AI provides significantly more insights, from answering questions, to fresh analytics from data across your doc, and synced in from other tools.

Answering questions: Coda AI chat answers any questions about content across your doc, and provide links to pages with more information.

Creating fresh summaries: Coda AI blocks can share more than just the latest summary, no matter where the source data lives across your doc.

Generating dashboards: Coda AI column generates tags, text, sentiment, and more for each row—so you can do much more with your data, such as quickly build dashboards.

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Answering questions and sharing links to other pages with more information.

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AI blocks that share high-level summaries and reference other pages and tables.

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Generating tags for each row, converting data into dashboards. (Explore

this doc⁠

to see how!)

We were sitting on hundreds of customer requests that nobody had ever actually looked at. I created a Jira table sync that pulls in all of the customer tickets... and an AI column to auto-tag all of these issues, like “what’s a hot topic?”

It’s actually been like pretty life changing because, it was just like so much information that I could not deal with on my own.

- Product Manager, Enterprise Customer using Coda AI

3. Task assistance: Your AI-enabled solutions.

Task assistance includes more than just accomplishing one small task at a time, but creating an automated solution that allows your team to fully offload a series of items, on an ongoing basis.

Build a holistic AI solution that connects to other tools and perform tasks at scale.

Bringing content in from other tools, and using AI to gain insights.

Generate updates and messages you send to other tools, keeping one source of truth.

Airtable AI can only support a limited number of tasks, whereas Coda AI drives entire workflows.

Airtable AI

Airtable’s limited integration ecosystem impacts Airtable AI’s ability to plug into workflows that rely upon pulling data from multiple sources, and sending new content to other tools.

Getting insights from data in other tools: As

mentioned earlier,⁠

Airtable only has 34 out-of-the-box integrations, and again, Airtable AI only generates content at the row-level. This adds limited value to your workflows.

Sending AI-generated content to other tools: Airtable’s sync tables with apps like Salesforce are read-only, so you can’t seamlessly have Airtable AI draft summaries, messages, or updates, and push these back to Salesforce, like you can in Coda.

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Airtable AI only creates content in each row, and only integrates with a limited number of tools. While this is helpful in some cases, Coda AI is more valuable as a connected work assistant.

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This prompt would be unsuccessful, since Airtable AI cannot easily reference entire databases or data from other tools. In comparison, Coda AI can generate this message, and send it to Slack.

Coda AI

Coda has over

600 Packs⁠

powering Coda AI as a truly connected AI work assistant. It’s able to reference data from tools like Salesforce and Jira, then craft updates to send outside of Coda. This allows you to develop comprehensive AI-driven workflows.

Getting insights from data in other tools: Unlike Airtable AI, Coda AI can easily review data synced in from different tools (and in the same prompt). For example, Coda AI can pull weekly team trends, even if projects are tracked on multiple pages or within different tools.

Sending AI-generated content to other tools: When you want to share AI-generated content outside of Coda, add a button to send with one click, or an automation to do it regularly. For example, have Coda AI summarize weekly Jira issues, and automatically send these updates to your team in Slack.

It’s been really exciting to see how our customers are using Coda AI as a connected AI work assistant to create automated workflows. While each team uses it differently, let’s dig into sales and product teams as examples.

Coda AI + Packs: Your holistic AI solution.

An AI solution for sales teams.

Based on call notes, Coda AI:

Creates summaries that get logged to Salesforce.

Lists action items to send to Slack.

Generates follow-up emails, to send via Gmail.

Creates follow-up agendas for Google Calendar.

This means sales reps can spend more time on customer engagement, account strategy, and follow up faster.

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An AI solution for product and engineering teams.

Within Coda, create Jira issues, tag them, and push updates back to Jira tasks—without paying for extra licenses or bugging a developer.

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Answering questions about your Jira issues, or brainstorming next steps.

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Generating Issue summaries that get sent to Slack automatically.

More examples

Here are other ways Coda AI integrates with data from other tools to help with your workflows.

Summarize

Github Pull requests⁠

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Planning flow with Jira (and AI)⁠

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Coda AI + Slack: summaries & action items⁠

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Coda AI + Salesforce⁠

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Score leads⁠

from Salesforce using specific criteria

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AI for prioritization⁠

(based on your GCal and Salesforce data)

More resources

If you would like to further explore Airtable AI or Coda AI, these resources can help you get started.

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Airtable AI overview⁠

Guides:

How to get started with Coda AI⁠

How Coda AI can help with your work⁠

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Coda AI template Gallery⁠

with 100s of docs you can copy.

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How makers are using Coda AI⁠

blog and video.

Gallery

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