The Ultimate Notion vs Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024

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Ease of use

Voting tables

A common task highlighting how simple doesn't always mean easy.

One of the most popular

rituals⁠

we see in Coda is the use of a voting table to help guide discussion. At Coda, we call this type of voting table a ‘Dory’ after the forgetful fish. We use this ritual to help steer Q&A to the most important questions, not the loudest voices. Similarly, we use voting tables to help pick the best option when writing proposals or PRD’s. You’ll be hard pressed to find a doc at Coda that doesn’t have a Dory somewhere.

Unsurprisingly, this is also a common request in Notion—when the promise is an all-in-one doc where you can take meeting notes, collaborate on PRD’s, and run your daily stand-ups, you very frequently want to rank ideas based on collective sentiment. So how does this work in Notion and Coda?

We often hear that Notion is ‘simpler’ and ‘easier to use,’ but in practice, we’ve often seen from customers who move to Coda that the lack of simple building blocks in Notion means that daily tasks can become cumbersome and complex.

Building a voting table is a fantastic example of how simple doesn’t always mean easy—Notion is simple in that it has fewer building blocks, but it’s absolutely not easy in that running a simple ritual for your team involves complex, inscrutable formulas and the end result is painful for your team to use.

So let’s compare the experience of building and using a voting table in Notion and Coda side by side. Notion knows this is an important process for many teams, so they have a help article guiding you through the process, and if that wasn’t helpful enough, there are plenty of external articles with suggested ‘workarounds’ for the lack of a native feature for voting.

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Here’s what the Notion help article recommends you do:

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In short, add a Person column, write a complex formula, then ask users to add themselves manually to the column to upvote. Oh and if the column name changes, go manually update the formula to match. Tl;dr: good luck.

How about in Coda? Well, it’s simple. Use a built in template like /voting table or /discussion tracker, both of which feature Coda’s native reaction building block. Choose an appropriate icon, select how you want to display votes, and you’re off and running. No formulas, no fuss.

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But let’s jump back a step. What if we want to emulate exactly what Notion recommends in Coda?

Notion

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Formula

if(empty(prop("🔺 Upvoted By")), 1, length(prop("🔺 Upvoted By")) - length(replaceAll(prop("🔺 Upvoted By"), ",", "")) + 2)

Coda

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Formula

[🔺 Upvoted By].Count() + 1

You can see that when replicating the columns and formulas in Coda, exactly as recommended by Notion’s help article, the Coda formula is a fraction of the length, ten times easier to understand, and doesn’t break when you change the name of the column. There’s simply no comparison.

And what about doing it the Coda recommended way in Notion? Well, see for yourself.