The Ultimate Notion vs Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024

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Features

AI capabilities

Coda AI and Notion AI capabilities, and how they actually help with your work.

Note: I asked my colleague Katy, Coda AI Marketing Manager, to write this page. She’s spoken with hundreds of makers about how they’re using Coda AI.

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In 2023, Coda and Notion launched their AI integrations, allowing you to use AI capabilities natively within each tool.

When the Coda team 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 adds 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 Notion AI are context aware—meaning AI can use your existing content as background information when generating responses or suggestions. For example, if you are writing a blog, AI can reference your notes, instead of just starting from scratch.

As mentioned

earlier⁠

, Notion’s wiki model makes organizing and finding your content difficult, and Notion AI struggles to understand what context is relevant. Notion’s AI feature set can only reference the information in the current table or page, or all the pages in your teamspaces. The lack of depth in its awareness forces you to choose between reorganizing your content repeatedly, or getting a less desirable AI-generated outcome.

In comparison, you can choose what you want Coda AI to reference as context, including data synced in from other tools. For example, if you are writing a sales team newsletter, you’re able to @ reference the page with the team meeting notes, the table with synced Salesforce account data, and the table with team member bios—all in one prompt. Even though this relevant information is on different pages, Coda AI has the power to incorporate everything into the draft, making it easier to wayfind and quickly polish.

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.

Notion AI capabilities

Notion AI is helpful for the beginning of the writing process, but has a limited surface for editing, collaboration, and final touches.

Creating new content: Notion AI can help when you are writing about a new topic, or have basic notes on a page. It also creates simple tables, like what you generate in Powerpoint.

Creating content based on other context: Notion AI can only reference information on the same page. For example, if you are trying to write a product brief based on personal notes, meeting notes, and customer feedback, you’d need to copy/paste onto one page.

Brainstorming and editing: Editing support is limited to a small prompt box. You can’t actively collaborate with Notion AI, and your prompt disappears each time you ask for more edits.

Sharing feedback: Notion AI just generates new text instead of sharing suggestions.

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Notion AI can’t fulfill this request unless you pasted the meeting notes on this page.

Notion AI can’t fulfill this request unless you pasted the meeting notes on this page.

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You have to manually cross-reference feedback with your text, and you can’t actively collaborate.

You have to manually cross-reference feedback with your text, and you can’t actively collaborate.

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Coda AI capabilities

Coda partners with you throughout the writing process, especially as a collaborator and editor.

Creating new content: Coda AI can write about new topics, or convert notes into first drafts. Coda AI’s also able to generate complex tables, which means you can add functionality like voting, or quickly turn the table into a chart.

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.

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.

Coda AI references any pages and table data, no matter where it lives in the doc.

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(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.

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

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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. So you can:

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

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

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

Notion AI capabilities

Notion AI can summarize and find information, but has limited capabilities when syncing in data from other tools.

Answering questions: Notion AI Q&A answers questions based on your team’s content across your teamspaces. It provides summarized answers, and then lists resources.

Sharing the latest insights: Notion AI blocks only summarizes or finds action items, and only on the current page. They can’t give other insights.

Generating dashboards: Notion AI can create summaries and tags, but has difficulty understanding what columns to reference, and has limited abilities when tagging data from other tools.

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Notion AI can summarize and find information from pages across your space.

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Notion AI blocks can only give summaries/action items, and only on the current page. It hallucinated the quotes shown.

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Notion AI can add summaries and tags to each row, but has difficulty knowing which column has the context.

Coda AI capabilities

Coda AI provides 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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Coda AI answers questions and shares links to other pages with more information.

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AI blocks that share more than just a summary, and can reference other pages and tables.

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AI column generates tags for each row, easily 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 evolves your workflows from accomplishing one small task at a time to creating an automated solution that allows your team to fully offload a series of items, on an ongoing basis. So you can:

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.

Notion AI capabilities

Notion AI struggles to integrate with other tools, which largely limits its capabilities to Notion-generated data.

Getting insights from data in other tools: As mentioned, Notion and Coda both offer extensive public APIs. Notion’s native integrations are mostly embeds and previews, with only a limited number of synced databases. This significantly limits Notion AI’s ability to use data from other tools as context.

Sending AI-generated content to other tools: Similarly, Notion’s limited number of native integrations also limits the ability to send AI-generated content to another tool, such as generating a summary to post in a Slack channel.

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Notion AI isn't able to read and reference information from the few synced databases Notion offers.

Notion AI isn't able to read and reference information from the few synced databases Notion offers.

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Notion AI blocks are not able to provide insights about data from Jira.

Notion AI blocks are not able to provide insights about data from Jira.

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Coda AI capabilities

Coda has over

600 Packs,⁠

powering Coda AI as a truly connected AI work assistant. It can 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: Once you sync in data from other tools, you can apply any of the above writing and knowledge assistance examples using this data as context.

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.

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

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Generating Issue summaries that get sent to Slack automatically.

Generating Issue summaries that get sent to Slack automatically.

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More examples

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 Notion AI or Coda AI, these resources can help you get started.

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Notion AI overview⁠

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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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