The Ultimate Confluence vs Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024

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Ease of use

Collaboration

Confluence's publishing model limits how teams collaborate.

Let’s start with collaboration. If you’re looking for a static knowledge base to host company policies or a team knowledge base, Confluence can work quite well. As a broad statement, Confluence is best for scenarios in which you publish content and others largely consume the information.

Teams tend to hit roadblocks when they overextend Confluence to serve collaborative scenarios and act as a team’s single source of truth. And the reason is self-evident—Confluence was designed and built as an internal publishing tool. Your team needs to toggle between viewing and editing to make changes, and only a limited number of teammates can collaborate in real time (up to 12 editors at the same time). But given these constraints, for any team of more than about ten people, Confluence simply doesn’t have the live editing experience you would expect from a modern, collaborative tool.

Coda was built from a fundamentally different premise. Coda was meant to be the single place where teams come together to get their work done. Coda has the collaborative features that you’ve come to expect from modern doc tools like Google Docs. For example, you can see your teammates’ edits live in the doc, suggest changes, and use inline commenting.

To make this real, I’ll give an example of how both Coda and Confluence recommend running a daily/weekly stand up respectively. Confluence isn’t really designed for a collaborative scenario like this, but many teams stretch Confluence to make it work.

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Coda’s stand up template⁠

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Confluence’s meeting template.⁠

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What makes a good stand up meeting?

The four qualities that make a good stand up meeting are collaboration, effectiveness, efficiency, and cadence.

Collaboration: Stand ups are inherently collaborative meetings. Each person in attendance should be able to give voice to their updates, questions, and blockers. But that collaboration can come at the expense of the meeting’s efficiency.

Effectiveness: A well run stand up balances personal updates with the most important topics of the day or week. Meaning the meeting’s moderator, often the product manager or project lead, must have clear direction as to which questions are blocking the team and ensure that they are answered first. A lack of clarity here can easily cause the meeting to run over or stall team production.

Efficiency: Stand ups are meant to be quick touch points to align the team. When updates spill over past the allotted time, it directly takes away from the team’s “make time” and can cause some to disengage.

Cadence: Last but not least, stand up meetings always have a regular cadence. Whatever template you choose, I’d recommend making sure it’s easy to set up!

So, how do Confluence and Coda’s templates enhance these attributes?

Running stand ups in Confluence

As I’ve mentioned previously, what’s holding Confluence back from the start is live collaboration.

Confluence’s template consists of simple tables where teammates can edit the page and update their row. Teams under 12 people can edit simultaneously, but teams of 12 or greater will need to find a workaround.

Either way, it’s an unnatural experience to toggle between edit/view modes to keep up with your meeting, especially one you run regularly.

Confluence

Collaboration: Only for teams of certain sizes. No live collaboration.

Effectiveness: Equal voice to updates is not a given.

Efficiency: No way to flag the most important topics, meaning meetings can easily run over

Cadence: Difficult to set up/reset each time.

Looking at the side-by-side, one of the first things you probably noticed is Confluence doesn’t have any way to prioritize meeting topics outside of individuals bolding their submission. Because there’s no system for crowdsourcing topics from the team, the loudest voices tend to dictate where the conversation goes, rather than what’s most important. From my experience this is typically results in ineffective meetings that run long while dancing around what’s on everyone’s mind.

Perhaps most importantly, the Confluence template requires a significant amount of manual effort and complexity for you and your teammates. Each day you need to copy-paste the simple table and manually add the date as a title above it. Then your teammates need to write in their own name since there is no way to default to the creator of a row, like you can in Coda. And worst of all, all of the data lives in static, unconnected tables, so you can’t easily search, filter, or summarize your meeting notes after the fact.

Running stand up in Coda

Coda’s stand up template help you check the boxes for a quality stand up.

First, your team can collaborate alongside each other—adding sentiment, flagging requests, tagging each other, and adding topics to the agenda—without concerns for user limits or edit/view modes.

And since everything is live, your team can upvote topics in real time to make sure the most important items are discussed first, catering to the entire team instead of the loudest voices.

Coda

Collaboration: Everyone can access and participate in the doc at once.

Effectiveness: Attendees can flag what questions are most important so the meeting leader answers those first.

Efficiency: Async updates and topic voting makes the meeting short and sweet.

Cadence: Easily archive past topics without deleting meeting notes.

Coda also makes it easy to set up this template for the first time and reset it after each stand up. To get started, you can either copy this template from the Gallery or type “/stand up” into the canvas. After you’ve summarized each meeting and sent out any follow ups, you can simply check the Archive column for each row and click the “Archive all topics covered” button to prepare the template for the next meeting. This allows you to reference a previous meeting’s notes when you need to and shrinks your doc from a long list of days to something more approachable.

The cherry on top is in Coda you can go beyond this template in a variety of ways not possible in Confluence. For example, instead of sending the meeting notes manually, you can use the Slack Pack to automatically send a summary to your team’s Slack channel after the meeting, or even create a reminder to add sentiment before.

You can get by with Confluence’s stand up template, but Coda makes working together easier.

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