The Ultimate Confluence vs Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024

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Cost

How much will an all-in-one workspace cost, or save, your team.

There’s more to cost than the number of your annual bill. Confluence is typically pretty cheap because of its position as an add-on to Jira, but Coda’s non-traditional Maker Billing model is usually most efficient for large and growing teams. Unlike Confluence and other productivity apps, Coda can help teams cut costs in three different ways. I’ll explain below.

Consolidation

Confluence primarily acts as a wiki for your team, but as I mentioned before, it often is hoisted into other use cases like knowledge management, writeups, and note-taking. But you can only stretch it so far, which means your teams needs to look elsewhere to cover other essential use cases, like project trackers, databases, automations, workflows, etc.

Coda’s is an all-in-one doc for your team, meaning it looks to replace a variety of tools across a range of

Use cases⁠

. In other words, Coda saves you money by cutting out the long tail of tools your team is currently using.

It’s common to see both Confluence and Coda replacing tools like Google Docs and Microsoft OneNote in the

Docs & writeups⁠

space, but you’ll pretty much never see Confluence replacing Airtable and Smartsheet in the

Trackers & databases⁠

space, like Coda does—mostly because Confluence relies on other Atlassian products for these types of use cases.

In addition, Coda is often able to replace dedicated apps like Asana, Slido, and SurveyMonkey in the

Apps & workflows⁠

space. And it can even replace—or at least reduce spend on—third-party integrators like Zapier and Tray.io. More on seat reduction below.

Seat reduction

Coda can also help you save money by reducing the number of seats that you purchase in expensive apps like Salesforce, Asana, Jira, and more. Every team has a few heavy users who leverage its full functionality, but most of your spend is allocated toward underutilized seats. You shouldn’t pay full price for someone who simply needs to view a Salesforce report, create a new task in Asana, or change the status of a Jira issue.

I’ve worked with countless companies to replace these seats with Pack-enabled Coda templates that give their team access to information without the cost.

What’s also helpful is Coda has two-way integrations with many of these expensive tools, so you can pull information like Salesforce account records or Jira tickets into Coda as well as push updates back to the respective tool. Not only does this mean saving money but it also saves them from switching tasks, simplifying their workflows.

As I mentioned earlier, Confluence’s integrations are extremely limited, so you are not able to do this same type of data sharing given their current capabilities. The only exception is for viewing data from Jira, so you may be able to save a small number of Jira licenses for users who only need view only access to specific Jira data that you can pull into Confluence. You can read more about the specifics on the

Integrations⁠

page.

Billing model

Finally, the most obvious point of comparison when it comes to price is the billing model.

On the surface, Confluence charges less per license at $6-11 per month, while Coda charges $10 or $30 per month for their low and middle tier options, respectively.

However, Coda has a unique billing model that charges only for the users who create docs—every other member of your team is free. This means that most of your team can enjoy all the privileges of being an editor (writing text, adding tables, syncing data from Packs, and everything in between) without spending a dime. You can share a doc with a team of five or with the entire sales team of 500, and it’s the same price.

Confluence, on the other hand, charges for every single user. When you’re using Confluence as org-wide wiki, this translates to paying for your entire company to have access. In reality, a handful of team members will add or edit content, many will only need ”read-only” access, and most will rarely touch the tool. But regardless of usage, you’ll pay the same price for each seat because everyone needs access to the wiki for transparency.

Confluence typically isn’t super expensive on the surface, but as I’ve pointed out, the value doesn’t justify the cost, so it often feels expensive. Confluence itself is an add-on to Jira, but given the product gaps that I mentioned in

Integrations⁠

, you’ll likely end up needing to purchase several integrations or macros to make it accomplish your needs. Those are typically billed each month on a per seat basis, which can drive your bill through the roof.

Recap

Examining the cost of Confluence and Coda is not as simple as comparing their pricing pages. Assuming you’re already using Confluence, I’d recommend considering what other apps you’ll be able to cut out and how many seats in apps like Asana, Salesforce, and Jira that you can reduce by switching to Coda. This

cost savings calculator⁠

can help you estimate how much you can save, but I’d recommend

speaking with someone from Coda⁠

to get a better understanding of your savings.

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