Why teams use productivity apps like Notion, Coda, Confluence, and Airtable
A comparison guide to the most popular productivity apps.
Joe Bauer
Product Marketing Manager
Why teams use productivity apps like Notion, Coda, Confluence, and Airtable
By Joe Bauer
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Productivity · 7 min read
Docs and writeups: An open canvas for collaboration.
Docs and writeups are spaces that put important content in a single, accessible location (usually a shared document). Team members can then add notes, suggest edits, and ask questions, all in the same place. Examples include meeting notes, product launch briefs, and voting/daily checkups. Below, we’ll go through how Airtable, Coda, Confluence, and Notion handle all three.Meeting notes.
Keeping meeting notes is a great way to document discussion topics, action items, and promising ideas. In Notion, users can take advantage of the meeting notes template and put all of their meeting info in one location that features a familiar, doc-like format. Airtable’s version looks more like a spreadsheet but is still easy to navigate and format. Coda’s template features a little bit of both, with options for adding blocks of text and putting individual notes in rows within a table, and for bringing in content from other tools. It also features Coda AI, which can summarize notes and pull out action items automatically. And while Confluence doesn’t have a dedicated “meeting notes” template, their Daily Standup option can be repurposed to do the job.Product launch briefs.
A product launch brief, aka a step-by-step breakdown of the product launch process, is another popular doc/writeup. In Airtable, it takes the form of a Kanban board, complete with tailored views based on user permissions. Notion, Confluence, and Coda offer templates that look a lot like document outlines, with separate sections for each part of your launch plan. Coda’s, however, also allows you to directly embed launch information from other applications, including a roadmap in Jira and designs from Figma. This also reduces the risk of information silos and ensures the entire team is working with the most accurate data.
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Voting/daily checkups.
If you want to know how your co-workers are feeling (either generally or about a specific topic), a voting or daily checkup template is an easy way to measure team sentiment. While all four applications have a basic upvoting or table-based “check-in” option, Coda’s is particularly robust, combining open dialogue and opinion-based feedback: Dory (named after the beloved, question-asking fish) and Pulse.
The winner: Coda.
Coda’s flexible and highly customizable interface makes it simple to combine notes of all types, from meeting highlights to product launch status updates.
The runner-up: Notion.
With easy-to-navigate templates for meeting notes, launch briefs, and voting, Notion offers another good option for collaborative writeups.
Team hubs: A one-stop shop for critical knowledge.
Organizations need dedicated spaces to store their most important knowledge and information, which is where wikis and team hubs come in. These can take a few different forms, from traditional wikis and knowledge bases to OKR and goal-tracking templates. In any case, teams use them as a central home to collect reference materials, connect external data, measure progress, make decisions, and more.Team wiki/hub.
The terms “wiki” and “hub” can be used interchangeably and range from the static to the interactive. Airtable’s team hub template, for example, simply lists team roles and current projects, as does Confluence’s. Coda’s, on the other hand, includes everything from connected tables for tracking team goals, voting functionality for collaborative decision-making, and organizational tools like pages and subpages. Known for its wikis, Notion focuses on putting logistical information in a single location for easy reference.OKRs and goals.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are your team’s metrics for success. All four of the most popular productivity apps include OKR and goal-tracking templates, with some more detailed than others. Airtable’s and Confluence’s options are formatted like a basic spreadsheet—familiar to navigate but not visually engaging. On the other hand, Notion’s and Coda’s include progress bars and nested priorities. Coda’s template also lets these goals live alongside other strategic planning assets like roadmaps, vision memos, and Figma mockups, keeping the tab and context switching to a minimum.
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Knowledge base/docs.
Organizations typically use knowledge bases/docs as repositories for HR- and logistics-related information, sort of like a digital manual. Coda, Airtable, Notion, and Confluence format their knowledge-base templates slightly differently, but they essentially act as organized, easy-to-navigate lists of helpful links.The winner: Coda.
Coda dominates the all-in-one doc space by connecting information across multiple sources in real time, ensuring your team is always up to date.
The runner-up: Notion.
There’s a reason Notion’s wikis are so popular, and its OKR template is functionally robust and visually appealing.
Trackers and databases: Measuring what matters.
Trackers and databases help teams stay on top of current projects, calculate budgets, triage bugs, and more. Popular templates that fall into this category are projects and tasks/epics and issues, product roadmaps, and issue trackers.Projects and tasks/epics and issues.
Basically, these two amount to the same thing: tasks that need to get done. Confluence’s project status template focuses on just that—status. Those from Notion and Airtable, however, include more details such as assignees and subtasks. Coda takes it a step further, including visual dashboards and breakdowns by status and owner.
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Product roadmaps.
A product roadmap is a plan for feature development and releases, and has to reflect the latest updates and changes across multiple teams. Those product teams that are more familiar with table-based roadmaps might prefer the Airtable or Confluence options, while those used to board- or timeline-based layouts might lean toward Coda’s or Notion’s.Issue tracker/project tracker.
Staying abreast of engineering issues is key to keeping your customers happy. Both Notion and Confluence offer issue trackers (although Confluence calls theirs epics and issues), as does Coda. Airtable does not include an issue tracker specifically but their project tracker template can be customized for that purpose.The winner: Coda.
When it comes to measuring progress, the devil is in the detail, and Coda displays all critical project information without being cumbersome—no tab switching or complicated workarounds required.
The runner-up: Airtable.
For teams with extensive experience with traditional roadmap and sprint planning, Airtable’s templates follow a tried-and-true, recognizable format.
Apps and workflows: Advanced and extended functionality.
Productivity apps can be so powerful that teams use them to create additional applications and detailed, tailored workflows. These include sales CRM, design review/huddle/story-mapping, and capacity planning/forecasting/workload planning. Let’s go through each below.Sales CRM.
A sales CRM is a database for all customer- and prospect-related information. In Coda and Notion, GTM teams can pull in and track customer communications, deal data, and recent activity, all in a single, visually appealing template. Airtable’s sales CRM template is very table-based, which limits customization. While Confluence does not currently have a sales CRM template, they do have one for account planning.Design review, design huddle, story-mapping.
Design reviews, huddles, and story-mapping sessions give the entire team a chance to share feedback on visual content. The most effective templates for these activities allow for embeds of wireframes, images, etc. Unfortunately, Airtable’s story-mapping template doesn’t include that capability, and Confluence only supports copy-paste of screenshots. Notion and Coda, on the other hand, let users bring in a variety of visual and text-based materials, including illustrations and annotations.
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Capacity planning/forecasting/workload planning.
Today’s busy teams need to stay on top of who’s doing what—both in the moment and for the future. In Coda, leaders can do that with a project forecasting template, which outlines team member bandwidth in a customizable doc interface. Both Airtable and Confluence use basic tables for the same task, while Notion offers a more flexible option.The winner: Coda.
Coda’s flexibility lets you mold your systems to your workflows, not the other way around.
The runner-up: Airtable.
Airtable forces you to work the way your database is structured. So, if you organize your databases by Projects, Tasks, and Resources, you can’t see a marketing “view” of everything in one place. You can to go to the projects to see marketing projects, tasks to see marketing tasks, etc.
Boost team productivity with Coda.
High-performing, efficient teams at well-known global enterprises use productivity apps to collaborate, improve efficiency, and for tracking/reporting. The four most popular choices—Coda, Airtable, Notion, and Confluence—have a lot of similarities. But ultimately, flexibility and the ability to scale are why Coda wins across all critical use cases. Want to learn more? Read our evaluation guides for Notion, Confluence, and Airtable. See Coda’s capabilities for yourself by trying our importers. We’ve made it quick and easy to import your data from Notion, Confluence, or Airtable into Coda, and experience the difference in functionality and usability our platform provides.Related posts
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