The Ultimate Notion vs Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024

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Ease of use

Formulas

Coda's more robust formulas make simple tasks easier, and complex tasks possible.

Notion recently updated their formula language! This page will be updated soon.

In the meantime, the tl;dr is that Notion launched

Formulas 2.0⁠

bringing their capabilities much closer to the powerful formulas in Coda. However, there are still significant gaps in terms of capabilities (like Coda’s action formulas and inline canvas formulas) and ease of use (like type hinting and auto-formatting).

I highly recommend this blog post comparing Notion’s updated formula language to Coda’s from Scott,

The Coda Guy⁠

, Weir—it does a great job outlining the remaining gaps between languages:

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While both Notion and Coda have a native formula language, Coda’s is significantly more powerful, easier to use, and able to integrate into more parts of your docs.

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Coda’s formula language is much more thoughtfully designed, blending the best of spreadsheet formulas with programming languages, while Notion’s formulas are largely taken from the world of spreadsheets, with all the frustrations and challenges that entails. A longtime Codan wrote a fantastic blog on the design of their formula language that covers this topic excellently.

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Almost all formulas are quite difficult to write and maintain in Notion’s formula language for a few reasons:

All formulas need to be nested, they can’t be chained.

You can’t add newlines or comments to your formulas.

References to columns are written in plain text and break if the name of the column changes.

There is no concept of types visible in the formula language, so you can’t see the type of each element you are working with.

Advanced Formula Comparison: Recurring Tasks

To take these differences to the extreme, take a look at the formulas required to build recurring tasks in Notion and in Coda. These formulas do the same thing, but it’s obvious which is easier (or even humanly possible) to write and understand.

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`Ease of use The niceties and annoyances of everyday use.`⁠

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Formulas

Notion recently updated their formula language! This page will be updated soon.

Advanced Formula Comparison: Recurring Tasks

⁠⁠⁠Ease of useThe niceties and annoyances of everyday use.⁠

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`Ease of use The niceties and annoyances of everyday use.`⁠