Coda vs. Notion: Which workspace app is right for you? [2026]

I've been using Notion to take notes and organize my life for a few years now. But after hearing enough rumblings about Coda (now owned by Grammarly) as an equally powerful alternative, I decided to take it for a spin to see how it stacks up against my tried-and-true.  

I spent time comparing the two tools, feature for feature. Here's what I discovered—and how to decide which is right for you.

Table of contents:

• Notion vs. Coda at a glance

• Notion offers more flexibility; Coda scales better for teams

• Notion is better for text; Coda is better for data management

• Notion's desktop and mobile apps are more refined and include offline mode

• Notion's AI is more capable and includes agents; Coda has AI on all paid plans

• Notion has a thriving user community; Coda provides expert-led trainings

• Coda is more cost-effective for teams

• Coda has more app integrations, but both connect to Zapier

• Coda vs. Notion: Which should you use?

Notion vs. Coda at a glance

Coda and Notion are similar apps, and they even look pretty much the same. They do have differences, though. Broadly speaking, Notion is great at documents and wikis, well-suited for individual users and small teams, and has more powerful AI features; Coda is better-suited to data work, scales better for large organizations, and is more affordable if you're adding lots of users.

Here's a quick summary, but keep reading for a more detailed breakdown.

Notion offers more flexibility and a quicker learning curve; Coda scales better for teams

Notion is known for being intuitive to use and easy to set up. Once you create an account, you'll also have access to their Getting Started document, which gives you an easy-to-digest rundown of the basics. From there, the app does a good job of guiding you through the rest of its block-based editor as you use it.  

Whether you want to set up a complex project management system or—like me—a simple home base for organizing work and personal projects, Notion makes it easy.

Notion's sidebar and dashboards make it intuitive to jump between pages and subpages and organize everything visually. (Notion has hundreds of dashboard templates for personal, work, and student use.) For example, I have a dashboard for Work and a dashboard for Personal, with quick links to various projects within each. Everything is easily accessible from the sidebar.

Notion is also incredibly flexible. For example, say you're creating a simple database comparing travel destinations. Both Notion and Coda let you enrich each row with notes, but Notion also turns each row into an infinitely expandable page of its own. Like a workspace version of Inception, you can create databases that contain pages, then put databases and subpages within those pages, and so on until you're satisfied.

If you're used to Notion, the first thing you'll notice about Coda is that it takes hierarchy more seriously. Rather than a pages-within-pages free-for-all, Coda is more similar to a traditional file system: workspaces contain folders and folders contain docs.

Once you're inside a Coda doc, you can add pages and subpages, all of which show up cleanly on the sidebar.

Coda's interface presents some minor downsides for solo users. It feels more rigid than Notion, and it's harder to jump between everything in your workspace within a single view. 

But those same qualities also make Coda better for many team use cases. Navigating a Notion workspace with a half-dozen (or more) layers of subpages can make it challenging to find what you need, especially if you're onboarding new team members. With Coda, docs can reduce that overwhelm by serving as a more focused workspace for individual teams or projects.

Because of Coda's relative lack of templates, you'll probably need to learn it by building from scratch rather than importing templates and tweaking settings. Coda does have some templates, but they're mostly for narrow use cases (like this Kanban board below) rather than fully-realized dashboards, hubs, or systems.

Notion offers a staggering 30,000+ free and paid templates, including 4,000+ in its "Planning and Goals" category alone. If you want to create an entire workspace for your company in one click—including a team wiki, projects hub, content calendar, and CRM—Notion has dozens of company hub templates that let you start with something prebuilt and customize it.

Notion is better for text and note-taking; Coda is better for data management

I use Notion every day to organize research and write long-form content, and the aspects I like most about it aren't available in Coda. First and foremost is Notion's infinite page nesting, which is especially handy for research. I'll often go at least three levels deep with nested subpages, especially if I'm pulling from lots of sources and need to keep things easy to browse.

With Notion, you can also add those nested subpages anywhere while you write or edit, making it easy to create dynamic documents that let you access the context you need without making things too crowded.

You can also achieve this a bit more elegantly with toggles. Coda can do toggles too, but—perhaps unsurprisingly at this point—Notion lets you infinitely nest toggles within toggles, while Coda doesn't.

Coda, meanwhile, is a more capable tool if you're dealing with lots of data and want lots of options for organizing and displaying it. While tables in both apps seem quite similar visually, they have some meaningful differences in terms of functionality.

Here's an example of a project management chart in Notion:

And here's a similar one in Coda, including advanced features like voting systems and progress trackers:

Coda was at one point a more reliable tool for formulas, with slick functionality that works more or less like a spreadsheet app.

But Notion has caught up recently. It's straightforward to add formulas without dealing with code, and if you have Notion AI, you can also use natural language to create impressively complex formulas.

Notion's desktop and mobile experiences are more refined and include offline mode

Notion's apps are available across all major desktop and mobile platforms, including macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS. You can also access it from a web browser and use Notion's clipper extension to save web pages to your workspace.

If you're like me and do almost all of your work in a browser these days, desktop apps might not normally factor into your decision-making process. But Notion's desktop and mobile apps now include offline mode, which is a big deal for an app that aims to be your workspace for everything.

Offline mode is implemented in a clever way: in addition to toggling it on for individual documents, you can also ask Notion to automatically download all of your recently modified docs. This makes it much more likely you'll actually be able to access your projects when you open your laptop on a flight or in a cafe with terrible Wi-Fi.

Coda doesn't offer offline mode, which leads to some clumsy workarounds, as one Coda consultant reports: "I train all my clients to keep their main Coda Document open on their laptops at all times, and to hibernate their laptop instead of shutting down… this way, they always have their main doc up and running, even if they have no internet connection."

While Coda's web app offers a polished experience, its iOS and Android mobile apps are much weaker, with many users complaining about sign-in issues, laggy performance, missing features—and no offline mode.

Notion's AI is more capable and includes agents; Coda offers AI on every paid plan

Both platforms incorporate AI, but Coda AI is the more basic—and affordable—of the two. It helps you create or summarize content, ask questions about the contents of your documents, and automate repetitive tasks. You can use AI by clicking on Coda's AI assistant anywhere in your workspace or by typing /ai within your document.

Coda AI's most time-saving application is its column-based AI. You can set up a prompt for one row—like summarize, find sentiment, or categorize—then quickly auto-populate the rest of the column.

All Doc Makers on Coda paid plans get access to AI. Pro plan users get 2,000 AI credits/month per Doc Maker, while Team and Enterprise plan users get 6,000 and 12,000 credits, respectively. What does this actually mean in practice? A user on the Pro plan can generate about 80,000 words with AI in a month, or roughly ~4,000 words per workday—fine for most people, though potentially limiting if you're creating lots of long-form content.

Notion AI includes all the content generation, summary, and AI search capabilities that Coda does. But it also goes further by helping you:

• Build entire databases and forms

• Process files like PDFs and images

• Conduct web research from within Notion

• Record your meetings and create transcripts with action items

• Analyze data and present insights via reports, tables, or charts

• Search across multiple workspaces (like Notion, Slack, and Google Drive)

You can also create Notion Agents, which tackle entire projects rather than just one-off tasks. For now, this feature includes a single Personal Agent, which you can personalize with instructions, memory, and access to your workspace (as well as workspaces in connected apps) for full context. Soon, Notion will let you create multiple team-wide Custom Agents designed for specific roles and functions.

Using Notion Agents is more or less like using ChatGPT: just click "Notion AI" on the sidebar, then type in what you want to build.

One of the most immediate use cases for Notion Agents is to use them to set up customized dashboards, forms, and databases for you.

Another handy way to deploy Notion AI is to use it to automate multi-step projects, like creating an end-to-end product launch plan. Notion Agent can read your product docs and notes, create a launch plan with milestones and dates, generate tasks, assign owners and due dates, draft internal kickoff docs, and update project status as the work progresses.

Notion AI used to require an additional monthly fee, but it's now bundled together with Notion's $24/month/user Business plan. You don't have to track credit usage like you would with Coda, which is a nice perk, but since every user on your team needs to upgrade to Business, it does mean that AI access can get pricey.

Notion has a thriving user community; Coda provides expert-led trainings

Notion has an unusually fanatical user following. You can find Notion community groups on every continent except Antarctica, a fan-created swag shop that sells Notion-branded hoodies and socks, and dozens of monthly in-person events around the world (including one cozy-sounding event in Montana titled "Notion Newbie Tea Time").

Whenever apps have this level of enthusiasm, it's a good sign that the team is highly engaged with users and incorporates their feedback to improve the product. In Notion's case, it also means you can find answers to any questions you have relatively quickly via Notion's communities on Reddit, Discord, Facebook, LinkedIn, and elsewhere.

Coda's user community is far less active. Notion's subreddit, for example, is over 100x more active than Coda's based on the number of posts and comments per week. But if you're looking for expert-led training and support, Coda has plenty of options: users on the Team plan get access to on-demand group training, while Enterprise users get dedicated success managers. There are also frequent Coda training webinars that anyone can join.

Coda is more cost-effective for most teams

At first glance, Notion seems more affordable than Coda, and in some scenarios, it is. But it's not always so black and white. 

Entry-level plans for both tools cost $12/user/month, but Notion's Business plan costs $24/user/month while Coda's Team plan costs $36/user/month. 

There's a big caveat, though: Coda only charges per Doc Maker (users who actually create documents). Editors can collaborate for free. With Notion, every workspace user—even if they're just viewing or commenting on a doc—has to pay for a seat. 

That makes Coda more affordable for most teams, despite the initial sticker shock caused by higher per-seat pricing. As one Reddit user explained, "My org has six users but only one doc creator, so I pay for one account." A team of six people—one Doc Maker and five editors—on Coda's Team plan would pay just $36/month instead of $144/month with Notion.

Note: You can invite guests to review Notion documents for free, but they can only access the individual articles you invite them to, not the whole workspace. 

Both apps also offer a free plan. I have a soft spot for Notion's free plan, having used it for years as a personal workspace without running into issues. (Though the 5MB file upload limit on the free plan is a bit of a buzzkill.) Coda's free plan lets you add 10MB files, which is nice, but it also places limits on the sort of pages you can share: they can't have more than 50 objects or 1,000 rows per doc. That said, if you're not sharing docs with other people and just need a free personal workspace, you'll likely have a similar experience with either app.

Coda has more app integrations, but both connect to Zapier

When it comes to app integrations, Coda has the edge: it offers over 600 app integrations, while Notion offers 190 or so. 

You may need to upgrade your plan to get the integrations you need, though, since both Notion and Coda tier integration access by plan. Entry-level paid plans include basic apps, team plans add more, and enterprise plans include everything. 

Coda also takes the unusual step of offering a la carte pricing for integrations, so if you really need to integrate with Salesforce but don't want to upgrade to Enterprise, you can pay an additional fee instead. It's hard to see this being an economical choice, though, since the fee is up to $30/month per Doc Maker for access to a single premium integration. Most people will just upgrade plans instead.

In any case, both Coda and Notion connect to Zapier, so you can connect them with thousands of other apps to fill any gaps.

Once you've connected your apps, you can automate daily tasks like adding new calendar events or form responses to your database. Learn more about how to automate Notion or how to automate Coda, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Coda vs. Notion: Which should you use?

Notion is often touted as the most flexible tool for individual users and small teams, and after my testing that feels true for me too. As a solo user who just needs a workspace for research, writing, and light project management, I found Notion to be easier to mold to my needs. 

But if you have a larger team, Coda's advantages start to come into play—particularly its pricing model and its ability to more rigidly separate projects and teams.

Here's a quick recap of how to decide which app makes sense for you. 

Choose Notion if:

• You're an individual user or a small team

• You need a tool that's easy to set up and use

• You want to delegate work to AI agents

• You want your entire team to have AI and document-making capabilites

• You want to get started quickly with Notion's 30,000+ templates

Choose Coda if:

• You're a large or scaling organization 

• You need the app for data management and automation, not just text

• You're willing to navigate a slightly longer learning curve

• You want to create clear project or team-based guardrails within your workspace

• You want to reduce costs by only giving certain users access to document creation and AI features

Related reading:

• Notion vs. OneNote: Which note-taking app should you use?

• Airtable vs. Notion: Which tool do you need?

• How a Notion expert automates his workspace

• Craft vs. Notion: Which is best?

This article was originally published in December 2023 by Katie Paterson and has also had contributions from Shubham Agarwal. The most recent update was in January 2026.