The Ultimate Notion vs Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024

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Scalability

Reliability

Your data should be available when needed and function as expected.

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Adding 8 four times in

Notion⁠

vs in

Coda⁠

when there are more than 7 formula references. Unfortunately, only one of these is correct.

When you house your entire team’s universe in an all-in-one tool, it’s unwaveringly important that you can always access it and that it always performs as expected. Both

Notion⁠

and

Coda⁠

have an excellent track record of uptime, so you can generally feel confident knowing your data will be accessible.

Generally, it’s safe to assume that both tools work as expected. But I’ve heard from a variety of users, and verified for myself, that there are a number of cases where Notion will make some rather egregious errors—where features seem to be working (i.e. you see a sum at the bottom of a table of numbers) but are actually broken.

In the example shown above, it turns out that Notion has a hard limit on the number of chained formula dependencies (explored in detail

here⁠

) that causes basic mathematical calculations to fail. I’ve heard a number of horror stories from Notion customers like this one on

Reddit⁠

about how an undocumented limitation can cause subtle but insidious errors. This example has been known and unfixed for several months. Up until very recently, there was no warning, communication, or documentation of this issue. With Notion Formulas 2.0, you now get a small warning and the column stops working completely.

You can take a look at the issue yourself by comparing the exact same setup in Notion and Coda respectively:

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Loading marsh-drizzle-f64.notion.site⁠

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Loading coda.io⁠

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Frankly, in looking at an example like this that has been a known issue for months, it is very hard to imagine trusting any important calculations to Notion. It’s not a surprise then that I’ve seen many Notion users continue to use Google Sheets or Airtable alongside Notion for their structured data use cases.

Given the focus on powerful structured data use cases, Coda has invested heavily in data accuracy and integrity, building a robust and reliable formula language. In the many years I’ve been using Coda, I’ve never seen a single issue like this.

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`Performance Every tool has its limits, and you want to be sure that you won’t hit the limits of the tool you choose.`⁠

`Support Everyone gets stuck at some point. The question is how easily you can find help to get unstuck.`⁠
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Reliability

⁠⁠⁠PerformanceEvery tool has its limits, and you want to be sure that you won’t hit the limits of the tool you choose.⁠ SupportEveryone gets stuck at some point. The question is how easily you can find help to get unstuck.⁠⁠⁠⁠

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`Performance Every tool has its limits, and you want to be sure that you won’t hit the limits of the tool you choose.`⁠

`Support Everyone gets stuck at some point. The question is how easily you can find help to get unstuck.`⁠
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