Coda

When evaluating Coda for your marketing or growth team, consider these three factors before making a decision:

Integration with your marketing stack

Modern marketing runs on a stack of tools from CRMs and analytics to email and project trackers. How well a new workspace integrates is critical. Coda shines in native integration: it offers hundreds of built-in “Packs” (integrations) covering everything from Salesforce to Google Calendar. This means a Coda doc can pull in live data or push updates to your other apps without complex setup. Notion, by contrast, has fewer direct integrations (around 100+ as of 2025) and often relies on Zapier or APIs for connecting external tools. If your team relies heavily on a diverse toolset, Coda’s ability to consolidate data streams into one doc can reduce silos. For example, marketers can manage campaigns in Coda while syncing data from Slack, calendars, or form tools in real-time. This integrated approach helps keep everything from lead data to content calendars in one place rather than scattered across sheets and apps.

Data complexity and content needs

Consider the nature of your team’s work: is it more data-driven or content-centric? Notion is often praised for its ease of writing and note-taking, making it ideal for content-heavy use like wikis, brainstorming, or drafting copy. Its block-based editor is intuitive for creating rich text documents and simple tables. Coda, on the other hand, is built for more data-intensive workflows and automation. It has robust table features with formulas, conditional formatting, and the ability to treat tables like databases that sync across pages. Marketers dealing with complex campaign metrics or growth experiments may find Coda’s spreadsheet-like power invaluable you can set up live dashboards or calculators inside your docs. Notion’s databases are powerful for organising content but have limits (e.g. no native chart visualisations and less sophisticated formulas). If your growth team needs to crunch numbers, automate updates, or build interactive reports (say, a campaign KPI tracker that auto-updates), Coda’s capabilities in data handling and buttons for automation provide an edge. Conversely, for straightforward content plans or knowledge bases, Notion’s simplicity might suffice. As one reviewer put it succinctly, “Notion is better for handling documents and wikis; Coda is better for databases and automation”.

Team size and adoption

The size and skillset of your team will influence the choice. Small teams or fast-moving startups often favour tools that are quick to adopt and require minimal training. Notion’s learning curve is famously gentle a small team can start capturing ideas and creating pages almost immediately due to its user-friendly interface. It also boasts a massive community and template gallery, so marketers can find ready-made content calendars or project templates easily. Larger teams or those scaling up have different needs. Coda tends to show its strengths as organisations grow: its features for structuring data and creating custom workflows become more valuable at scale. Coda can support complex, cross-functional processes in one doc (for example, a big marketing campaign with multiple sub-projects and data sources) without breaking down. However, it requires a bit more onboarding and a “builder” mindset there’s a learning curve to unlock its full potential. If you have a technically savvy ops person or “maker” on the team, they can design powerful Coda docs for everyone to use. In fact, Coda is often recommended for teams with “tech mavericks” who want to customise their tools. Agencies should also weigh this: a smaller agency might lean toward Notion for quick collaboration with clients, whereas a larger agency or one managing very data-driven campaigns could build a client dashboard in Coda for a more tailored solution. Ensuring the team is willing to invest time in learning Coda (or has someone to champion it) is key the payoff is greater flexibility, but only if the tool is fully adopted.

I haven’t used Coda in production yet my teams have primarily relied on Notion for wikis and project docs, along with Google Sheets and Airtable for heavier data work. However, staying up to date on tools is part of my job, and I’ve been researching Coda with a curious, analytical eye. Here’s my honest take on Coda compared to Notion, from the perspective of someone who bridges strategic marketing and hands-on execution.

First, I’m struck by the promise that Coda could reduce the fragmentation in my workflow. In agencies, we often juggled multiple Google Sheets, docs, and task managers; Notion helped by centralising a lot of our content and project info, but we still hit limits. For example, building a complex campaign dashboard in Notion often meant linking several databases and using workarounds for lack of formulas or roll-ups. Coda appears to handle that scenario more elegantly it’s essentially a doc with the soul of a spreadsheet. I’ve read that Coda allows tables to talk to each other and even sync across documents. The idea of creating a living campaign doc that holds briefs, task trackers, and real-time performance metrics all in one is compelling. From what I gather, people have built Coda docs that do everything from product launches to small-business CRM systems. As a growth lead, that flexibility piques my interest; it suggests I could replace a patchwork of Airtable bases and Excel files with one Coda doc per project.

Coda’s strengths compared to Notion seem to lie in its more advanced functionality. The ability to add buttons that trigger actions or workflows is a big plus I imagine setting up a button to log a campaign idea or update a KPI across pages, which is not something Notion can do natively. Coda also natively integrates with external apps through Packs, meaning I could, say, pull in Salesforce lead data or push updates to Slack without relying on third-party automation tools. In my current Notion-centric setup, we often use Zapier to bridge those gaps (e.g., logging form responses into Notion, since Notion alone can’t automate that). The prospect of reducing external automation and having a more automated doc is attractive. Additionally, Coda’s tables support formulas more akin to Excel/Sheets, which means less compromise when doing data analysis. For instance, calculating ROI or weekly growth rates inside Notion was always cumbersome; Coda could let us compute and chart these metrics right alongside the project notes. As someone who values data-driven decision making, I see Coda’s more powerful tables as a major advantage.

That said, I remain cautious about Coda’s limitations or trade-offs. One concern is the learning curve Notion felt instantly familiar to my team, whereas Coda’s “build whatever you want” freedom might overwhelm colleagues who aren’t inclined to tinker. In previous agencies, getting everyone to use a tool consistently was half the battle. If Coda requires more upfront training or a different way of thinking (formulas, logic, etc.), I’d need to justify that investment. I’ve noticed Coda’s community, while passionate, is smaller than Notion’s vast ecosystem of users and templates. When we started with Notion, the abundance of ready-made templates for content calendars and SOPs was a godsend. Coda does have templates, but I suspect finding marketing-specific ones or community advice might be harder at this stage. Another practical factor is that Notion’s interface (on web and mobile) is very polished and our team is comfortable with it; some colleagues even use it for personal notes. Coda’s UI is clean too, but I’ve heard its mobile app is a bit less robust and that it truly shines on desktop for complex docs. As a growth lead, I can’t ignore the human element: the best tool is the one your team actually uses. So while I’m excited about Coda’s capabilities, I’d need to ensure the team sees those benefits and doesn’t stick to old habits (like clinging to familiar spreadsheets).

In summary, from my outsider-yet-experienced viewpoint, Coda looks like a powerful evolution of the all-in-one doc concept one that could empower a marketing team to build exactly what they need. It could address some pain points I’ve seen with Notion, especially around data and automation, essentially letting our documents work for us instead of against us. But the flip side is that Notion remains beloved for its simplicity and strength in handling content and knowledge sharing. If I were choosing for a new team today, I’d clearly outline our needs: if we anticipate a lot of structured data tracking, repetitive reporting tasks, and cross-tool workflows, I’d be inclined to pilot Coda. If our focus is primarily collaborative note-taking, quick wiki updates, and we want frictionless onboarding, Notion might still win. It’s even conceivable we’d use both for instance, keep our wiki pages in Notion but run campaign trackers in Coda though that introduces complexity. My honest verdict is that I’m very curious to give Coda a try in a real campaign. The potential is there for it to become the central growth playbook where ideas, data, and results all live together. The next step would be hands-on testing to see if Coda can deliver on that promise without overburdening the team.

What is Coda and how does it work?

Coda is often described as a new type of document that blends the flexibility of docs, the power of spreadsheets, and the utility of apps into one canvas. In essence, it’s a platform where you start with a blank page but can evolve it into a powerful tool as your needs grow. A Coda document (called a doc) isn’t just text on a page; it can contain tables that function like databases, interactive controls (buttons, sliders), formulas that perform calculations, and integrations with external services. This all happens in a single unified space. Coda’s philosophy is that your entire team should be able to work in one doc, finally ending the ping-pong between docs, sheets, and specialized apps for different tasks. It provides a set of building blocks pages and subpages for structure, tables that can talk to each other, views to display data in various ways, and packs to connect with other tools which you can combine to design a workflow that fits your team.

How Coda works under the hood: Each Coda doc is like a mini-database and app combined. You can create a table to store any kind of structured data (campaign ideas, content calendar entries, budget line items, etc.), and that table can have different views. For example, you might have a master table of marketing tasks and then create a Kanban view (board) or calendar view of that same data. Unlike a static spreadsheet, Coda’s tables support relations and lookups across tables (similar to relational databases). This means you can link a “Campaigns” table with a “Tasks” table so that each campaign entry can pull in all tasks associated with it. Notion also allows linked databases, but Coda takes it further with more Excel-like formula language and the ability to sync data across docs or sections. Crucially, Coda enables automation: you can set up buttons that when clicked perform actions (e.g., mark all tasks complete or send a notification), and you can even configure rules that trigger automatically based on conditions (like “if a campaign’s end date passes, email the results to the team”). In Notion, achieving this level of automation typically requires external services.

Another key aspect is Coda’s Packs (integrations). These are pre-built connectors to popular apps and services. For instance, there are Packs for Google Analytics, Twitter, HubSpot, Gmail, Slack, and many more. Using Packs, a Coda doc can pull in live data imagine a table in Coda that automatically fetches the latest website traffic from Google Analytics or the status of leads from HubSpot. You could also push data out: a button in Coda might create a Slack message or add a task to Asana. While Notion introduced an API and some integrations, Coda’s library of Packs (500+ and growing) offers more out-of-the-box connectivity for marketers who want their doc to act as a control centre. Both Coda and Notion can be further extended with Zapier for virtually any integration, but Coda might save you that step for many common tools by having native support.

To sum up, Coda works like a Lego toolkit for building your team’s app. It starts as a document, but by adding tables (for data), formulas (for logic), and packs (for connections), you construct a custom solution be it a simple social media calendar or a full-fledged growth experiment tracker. Non-technical team members can interact with the doc easily (updating entries, using buttons, filling forms), while power users can set up the underlying structure. This flexibility lets Coda docs evolve with your team’s needs. A marketing coordinator might begin with a basic checklist, and over time the head of growth turns that into a dynamic dashboard with automated reporting. The doc grows as big as your ambition.

Replacing or complementing other tools (Notion, Airtable, Sheets, wikis)

One of Coda’s selling points is tool consolidation. Both Notion and Coda pitch themselves as all-in-one workspaces that can replace many single-purpose tools. Let’s break down how Coda can replace or complement specific tools commonly used by marketers and founders:

• Notion (for notes, wikis, basic project tracking): Coda and Notion overlap a lot in functionality. Both can serve as an internal wiki, project planner, and document hub. If your team uses Notion primarily as a wiki or content repository, you could recreate that in Coda by making pages for each knowledge area (e.g., brand guidelines, campaign playbooks) and subpages for specific docs. Coda supports rich text and embedded media, though Notion’s editing interface might feel a bit more polished for pure writing. The advantage of moving a wiki to Coda would be integration with live data for example, a “Content Ideas” page in a Coda wiki could include a table that’s tied to your content pipeline, showing real-time status of each idea. In Notion, that content pipeline might exist as a separate database page, whereas in Coda it can be displayed contextually within any doc page. If you love Notion’s ease of use, adopting Coda for wiki purposes might require a mindset shift, but it adds the possibility that your wiki and your data trackers live together. Some teams actually use both: they keep Notion for simple note-taking and some client-facing docs, while using Coda for heavy-duty tracking and more interactive documents. This dual approach can work, but it means maintaining two sources. Ideally, if Coda is fully adopted, it can handle documentation and wiki needs and be the place where the data lives, eliminating duplication. Notion’s huge template gallery and community tips give it an edge in quick-starting standard setups (like a marketing team wiki), but Coda’s increasingly capable templates and the ability to design custom solutions can catch up, especially for needs that aren’t one-size-fits-all.
  
  
• Airtable (for databases) and Google Sheets (for spreadsheets): Many marketing teams use Airtable or Sheets to manage structured data such as contact lists, campaign tracking, budgets, or content calendars. Coda can often replace these by providing database functionality within your documents. Like Airtable, Coda tables allow different field types (text, select dropdowns, dates, people, etc.), and you can relate tables to one another (link records). However, Coda also has the formula prowess of spreadsheets you can write formulas that pull in data from other tables or perform calculations across rows and tables, something Airtable formulas do in a limited way and Notion formulas do in a somewhat quirky way. For example, if you currently use Google Sheets to aggregate weekly metrics (web traffic, conversion rates) and then copy those into reports, Coda could automate that. You might set up a “Metrics” table in Coda that uses packs to fetch data from Google Analytics or another source, then use formulas to calculate trends, and finally display the results in a nicely formatted write-up section of the doc. This removes the need to juggle separate spreadsheet files. Compared to Google Sheets, Coda’s tables are more structured (every column has a type and you can have controls like sliders or checkboxes), which can reduce errors and make data more readable to the whole team. Compared to Airtable, Coda is more flexible in presentation you can have multiple views and put explanatory text around your tables. If your team likes Airtable’s interface, Coda’s table view will feel familiar, but Coda doesn’t force you to view everything as a grid you could, for instance, create an update page where you pull in just key numbers from a big table to show in a digestible format for your CMO.
  
  
• Traditional wikis or docs (Confluence, Google Docs): Some companies use dedicated wiki tools like Confluence or simply shared Google Docs for documentation and meeting notes. Coda can replace these by offering a similar rich text environment with the added benefit of being connected to your data. For instance, instead of a static Google Doc for a marketing plan, you could have a Coda doc that not only outlines the strategy but also includes live project status from the task table and an embedded chart of the budget spend. This ensures the document is always up-to-date with the latest information. One Coda case study quote comes to mind: a Product Marketer at Intercom mentioned creating a Coda doc in a day to keep several internal marketing teams up-to-date on all activities, which became their living source of truth for two years. This highlights how Coda can serve as a dynamic wiki/portal. Teams that find their knowledge base in Notion or Confluence gets stale might appreciate that in Coda, data and documents coexist, reducing the effort to update two places.
  
  

In summary, Coda is positioned to be the one tool that can replace a patchwork of Notion+Airtable+Google Sheets+wiki. In reality, teams might not abandon everything else overnight there’s usually a transition. Some start by complementing: for example, continue using Notion for lightweight notes but introduce Coda for a specific complex workflow (perhaps an **“Marketing OKR tracker” or a “Launch checklist app”). Over time, as the team sees the benefits, they may consolidate more work into Coda. The ultimate benefit is reducing context-switching: your campaign plans, execution tracker, results dashboard, and retrospective could all live in one Coda doc, whereas previously that might be a Google Doc + an Airtable base + a Google Sheet of results, etc. Coda believes your docs should work for you, not against you, and achieving that often means unifying where information is kept.

How B2B marketers can use Coda (use cases and examples)

Coda’s flexibility can be abstract, so let’s look at concrete use cases for marketing and growth teams. Below are examples of how B2B marketers or founders might leverage Coda to streamline their work, with relevance to growth campaigns, project tracking, and knowledge management:

Campaign planning and tracking

Imagine you’re launching a multi-channel marketing campaign. In Notion, you might create a project page and perhaps a couple of linked databases (one for content pieces, one for tasks). In Coda, you can build a campaign hub doc that contains everything: a brief, task assignments, asset links, and real-time status updates. Start with a table for campaign tasks, including fields like owner, status, deadline, channel, etc. Because Coda allows personalised views, each team member could filter that task table in their own way (e.g. a designer sees only design tasks, a content lead sees only blog tasks) without breaking the underlying data. Alongside the tasks, you might have another table for content assets (blog posts, social media copies, ads), which links to tasks so you know which asset belongs to which task or campaign phase. Using Coda’s packs, you could integrate with external channels for instance, a pack to post to Twitter or LinkedIn could be triggered when a piece of content is marked “Approved”, automatically posting the tweet copy stored in the doc. Even if you don’t automate postings, you can use the Gmail pack to set up a button like “Notify Sales” that sends an email to the sales team when a campaign launches, pulling details from the doc. Voting tables are another neat feature Coda highlights for marketing: you can create a table where team members vote on campaign ideas or creative proposals, and the results tally instantly. This could replace the clunky process of collecting feedback via email or Slack polls. The result is a campaign plan that isn’t static it’s an interactive project board and single source of truth. Everyone from growth strategists to copywriters works in the same doc, updating their parts. A change in one view (say updating a task status in a Trello-like board view) is reflected everywhere else automatically. This real-time single source of truth ensures the whole marketing team and stakeholders stay aligned.

Growth experiments and project dashboards

Growth teams often run experiments across product and marketing (A/B tests, new channels, conversion optimisations). Coda can be used to manage an experimentation pipeline. You might set up a doc with an Experiments table capturing hypothesis, owner, metrics, and results. Each experiment can be a row that expands into its own page (Coda allows rows to be opened as pages for detailed info, similar to Notion’s page-per-item in databases). The benefit here is you can incorporate live data. For example, if an experiment is running, you could connect to analytics via a pack or a CSV import so that the performance metrics update in the doc. Coda’s formula system could calculate statistically significant results or ROI automatically once data is in. Many growth leads use spreadsheets for this, but then copy results to a slide deck for sharing with Coda, the experiment doc itself can serve as the dashboard. You could have a section that is an “Experiment dashboard” that rolls up key KPIs from all experiment entries (using formulas to summarize data from the table). Additionally, Coda supports charts as a view of a table, so you can turn your data into a visual graph or bar chart within the doc (Notion notably lacks built-in charts). This means a growth team meeting can be run straight from the Coda doc: discuss the hypothesis, look at the live graph of results, and log next steps, all in one place. Furthermore, because experiments often involve cross-functional teams (product, marketing, sales), Coda’s granular sharing can be useful you might allow the whole company to view the “Growth Experiments Hub” doc and comment on it, while only the growth team can edit. This transparency can replace sending weekly update emails; instead, colleagues know they can check the Coda doc anytime for the latest experiment outcomes.

Content calendars and knowledge bases

Content marketing teams frequently use calendars to plan blog posts, newsletters, etc., and maintain knowledge bases of guidelines and research. With Coda, you can have a content calendar that doubles as a content repository. For instance, a table for “Content Pieces” can include fields like title, author, status (idea/draft/published), publish date, and channel. You can view this table as a calendar to see your planned publishing schedule. Each content row could open to a page where the content brief or even the draft text is written. Coda’s advantage is that if you need to incorporate data (like keyword research or SEO score from a tool), you could integrate that via a pack or paste data into a table that the content piece links to. The knowledge base aspect comes in with additional pages: you might have a page for “Brand Voice and Guidelines” and another for “SEO Best Practices”. Unlike a separate Confluence or Notion workspace for knowledge, having it in Coda means those guidelines can be directly referenced by your live documents. For example, you can create a small table of “Approved Messaging” for product descriptions, and content creators can lookup values from it to ensure consistency. Coda’s search across docs helps here, too team members can quickly find that one reference doc or snippet because everything lives in one ecosystem. When onboarding new marketers or agency partners, instead of giving them a stack of Google Docs and links, you can simply share the Coda doc which contains all playbooks and also the current plan. One type of team that benefits from this is a distributed marketing team or agency working with a client: they can maintain a client’s content calendar, results dashboard, and notes all in one shareable doc, reducing back-and-forth. Notion is often praised for wikis and documents, but Coda can achieve the same while keeping those resources directly tied to execution data (ensuring your wiki isn’t just static text, but a living part of your workflow).

Marketing/sales funnels and CRM-light use

While dedicated CRMs (like HubSpot or Salesforce) are standard for serious sales pipeline management, early-stage startups or marketing-centric teams sometimes track leads and campaigns in spreadsheets. Coda can act as a lightweight CRM or funnel tracker integrated with your marketing plans. For example, a founder-led growth team might list target accounts or leads in a table with statuses, and use Coda’s packs to automatically pull in information (maybe enriching leads via an API, or logging when an email was last sent via Gmail integration). You can link this with marketing campaigns: if you ran a webinar, you could mark which leads attended in the CRM table, then have a view that filters those and triggers a follow-up task. Essentially, you’re crafting a custom mini-CRM aligned with your marketing initiatives. One of Coda’s strengths here is you can automate status changes or reminders. If a lead’s status changes to “Qualified” in the table, you could have Coda ping the sales Slack channel or create a task for a sales rep. This kind of automation would normally require a dedicated tool or a glue of zaps; in Coda it’s part of the doc’s capability. Agencies running account-based marketing could also use a Coda doc per client as a CRM+project hub hybrid, then roll up key info to a master doc using cross-doc sync (Coda allows syncing tables from one doc into another if needed). That way, each client’s data is separate but the agency leadership can see an aggregate dashboard. Notion wasn’t originally designed for CRM functionality (though people attempt it), so a team with such needs might find Coda more accommodating due to its stronger database features and automations.

What type of team benefits most from Coda?

Coda and Notion both target the “all-in-one workspace” niche, but they have clear differences in ideal user profile. Coda tends to benefit teams that are data-heavy, process-oriented, and scaling up. If you’re a B2B marketing team that runs complex campaigns, deals with a lot of metrics, and loves to experiment with improving workflows, Coda is a strong match. For example, a growth team in a mid-size company or a tech startup with a dedicated operations or analytics person can exploit Coda to build tailored tools that exactly fit their process (whether it’s a campaign request system, a content production pipeline with automated QA checks, or an integrated OKR tracker). These teams often have the resources to designate a “Coda maker” someone who can spend time building and maintaining the docs and the payoff is huge efficiency gains once the system is in place. As one analysis noted, the differences between Notion and Coda balloon as your team grows in size and complexity. A large marketing organisation with multiple sub-teams (content, digital, product marketing, etc.) will appreciate how Coda lets each sub-team view and manage their slice of the work while everything stays interconnected on the back end. Coda is also well-suited for teams that value automation and want their tools to do more of the heavy lifting if your mantra is to “maximise leverage through automation”, Coda gives you the canvas to encode that into your daily operations.

On the other hand, Notion (or simpler tools) often suffice for smaller teams or those early in their growth journey. A small in-house marketing team or a young agency (just a few people) might prioritise ease of setup and a shallow learning curve. In such cases, Notion’s out-of-the-box simplicity and the fact that “it just works” for creating pages and basic trackers is a win. If the team’s work is primarily content creation, planning, and general project management, Notion provides a friendly, visually appealing space to do that without needing an expert to configure it. These teams benefit from Notion’s big community; you can find a template for almost any scenario and adapt it in minutes. They might not miss Coda’s advanced features because the scale of data or complexity of workflow is manageable with simpler methods. Additionally, teams that are highly focused on documentation, wikis, or collaboration with external clients might lean toward Notion for its polished sharing experience (for instance, many agencies deliver client-facing reports or content hubs via Notion because it’s straightforward for clients to navigate).

That said, there is a middle ground of teams who can benefit from using both, or gradually shifting from one to the other. Some organisations start on Notion and “graduate” to Coda as their needs become more demanding for example, a startup marketing team that outgrows static docs and wants to build a growth experiment app might bring in Coda for that purpose while still keeping historical notes in Notion. Conversely, a team might use Coda for most internal workings but export or present certain info in Notion if they need a prettier interface for outsiders. The tools are not mutually exclusive, but maintaining two platforms does introduce overhead. Ultimately, the team that benefits most from Coda is one that is willing to invest a bit in customising their workflows in exchange for unifying their work and automating manual processes. If your marketing or growth strategy demands agility, iterative improvements, and lots of data coordination, Coda provides a canvas to build your own bespoke solution. Teams that embrace that builder mentality often report significant productivity boosts for instance, instead of adapting your process to fit a tool, you shape the tool (Coda doc) to fit your ideal process.

In conclusion, for an in-house marketing/growth team dealing with multifaceted campaigns, numerous tools, and the need for real-time collaboration, Coda can serve as a powerful central hub. It offers the customisability to replace scattered spreadsheets, project trackers, and wikis with one integrated doc. A head of growth or marketing ops lead might find that Coda unlocks new efficiencies, like automating report generation or creating a “single source of truth” dashboard for all marketing activities. Meanwhile, Notion remains a strong choice for those who need a quick-to-implement, content-friendly workspace its strengths in simplicity are not to be dismissed. The decision comes down to evaluating the factors we discussed: integration needs, data complexity, and team capacity. By understanding these considerations and the potential use cases, you can choose the tool (or combination of tools) that will best empower your marketing or agency team to collaborate, innovate, and grow. The ultimate goal is to have a workflow where the tools amplify your team’s productivity and insights whether that’s achieved by Coda’s all-in-one doc-as-app approach or Notion’s slick document collaboration, or a mix, depends on the unique context of your team. Armed with this comparison and guide, you’re better equipped to make that choice and to get the most out of whichever platform you select.