Confluence vs Coda: Which is a better fit?

Casandra M. : My name is Casandra. I am an administrative support manager working for a relatively small company. I think we have less than 20 employees. And the Confluence app, I would say, probably a four out of five rating. Before Confluence, I pretty much was just texting back and forth to the owner of the company. That's who I work directly under. And she's the clinical director, she's the administrative director, she's just pretty much the entire head of the company. And it was texting and emailing back and forth, and the emails and the texts would get lost amongst each other. And it was just very complicated to have to go through and refer back to find emails and refer back to text messages that were sent weeks and months prior to really try to keep track. We tried an Excel sheet, we tried writing things down, and somewhere along the line things would just get convoluted or complicated because she would try to edit things on the spreadsheet, there would be a complication with me being able to share the spreadsheet, or the editing permissions would change for some reason. And so, with the Confluence app, we both had direct access to the app and it was just us two. There was no, she was locked out of it or she couldn't gain access or we needed to get a new password for it. It was just she always had direct access and I always had direct access, and she could edit things, change things right from there without complications. And then I would see those changes and I would be able to check things off as I go. So it was really easy to keep track of and it made our communication and process much more streamlined and much easier to accomplish. We chose Confluence, just kind of winging it and hoping. We were shooting in the dark and just grabbing different apps we researched on Google, apps that could help us. And that was one of the ones that popped up, and it was really just a "let's try it and see what happens." And it ended up working out really well. It was relatively easy. It was slightly confusing at first, but it was very quickly much easier to understand. Just initially, I think, onboarding with any sort of app or new technology is going to be slightly confusing, but it was definitely less confusing than the majority, I would say, than everything else that we've used. And it was easy to get into it. I don't know. It was complicating initially, but not overly complicating. It's just as confusing as any new product would be. But as soon as we got the flow of it, it was fine. I would personally say that it doesn't cost anything and, again, it's not that challenging to figure out. And for me, it streamlined the process, and for the company, it streamlined our processes. So it's not going to hurt anything to try it. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And if it does, great. You're not any worse off if it does or doesn't work. So.

Dave: Hi, my name is Dave and I'm a director of a design agency. And today I'll be reviewing Coda, which I give five out of five stars. For more reviews like this, click on the link below. Before Coda, I was using a variety of tools, including Dropbox Paper and a few other ones, for my internal documentation. I felt that since I was having to use several tools, it was just hard because I was bouncing around in different places to really get the job done with something that I could really do all in Coda, so that's why I switched. What I love about Coda is, not only does it really take the idea of a platform where you can build out internal documentation and it really extends that and offers tons of integrations, but once you drill down into specific documents, you can comment on those documents and you can see basically live feedback from someone else, which is great if you're collaborating. I also like that they have a ton of integrations with other platforms, for example, Airtable or Miro. I will often take documents from those platforms and then embed them in my Coda document. That allows you to just basically have everything central in one platform and not having to shift between different things and just makes everything very accessible. It really saves a ton of time, it's great. Getting started with Coda is very easy. You'll be up and running pretty much within 10 minutes. You can just pick a plan, jump in, and then they have a lot of themes and templates that you can start with that if you haven't worked with a platform like this, that will get you going or you can just jump in and start with a blank document. I love that on the left hand side of each document you can easily add tabs and new documents and really just makes it a joy to work with, it's super easy to work with. For anyone considering Coda, I recommend you check out the free plan. It'll pretty much give you everything that you need to get going. However, if you find that you need additional features, for example, you need to have multi document sync or things along those lines, then check out their paid plans, which they're very affordable, they fantastic job of pricing things out and making things very much within reach for small businesses. So check those out, it's really a great platform and I love it.