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The Ultimate Notion vs Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024
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The Ultimate Notion vs Coda Evaluation Guide in 2024

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Integrations

Connecting with the rest of your tools and data.
While both Notion and Coda offer public APIs and native integrations, there is quite a gulf between the breadth of capabilities and available integrations when looking at native support. In addition, Coda’s integration platform offers a much stronger ease of development, better security, and a larger existing ecosystem.

Public APIs

Notion and Coda both offer extensive public APIs that allow you to fetch and make changes to content throughout your workspace.
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Notion API
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: In Notion, you can interact with blocks (content on pages), pages, databases, users and comments. You can read and make changes to both structured and unstructured content, though you are only able to make simple changes to the unstructured content on pages and the schema of databases.
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Coda API
⁠
: In Coda, you can interact with docs (including permissions and publishing), docs, pages, automations, tables (and their columns and rows), formulas, and various account and analytics information. Similarly, you can read and make changes to both structured and unstructured content, but there are limitations on what types of unstructured and table schema changes you can make.
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Coda Admin API
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: In addition to a regular user data API, Coda offers an admin API which provides access to administrative and organizational capabilities in Coda. You can manage doc permissions, run automated exports, monitor audit events, manage folder structure and access, control group membership, monitor integration use, and manage workspace users.
Both tool’s APIs offer robust capabilities, but also have their limitations. It’s generally safe to assume that you can build powerful connections to external services, though you should review their API documentation in detail to ensure you can do everything you hope to do.

Native Integrations

Notion and Coda also both offer native integration capabilities allowing you to sync in, and in some cases make changes to, data from external services right in your docs.
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Notion Integrations
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: Notion has
~80 integrations
⁠
available to date. Notion integrations provide three main features:
Link previews: Pasted links will unfurl into rich preview cards with information from the source (for example Slack messages or Github PRs).
Embeds: Pasted links will unfurl into a live embed from the source (for example a chart or whiteboard).
Synced Databases: Pasted links will expand into static databases with rows from the source (for example Jira issues or Github PRs). Note that only a handful of integrations support this and third-parties cannot add this capability to their integrations yet.
⁠
Coda Packs
⁠
: Coda has over
600 publicly available Packs.
⁠
Coda’s integrations, called Packs, have similar but more extensive features:
Pack cards: Similar to Notion’s link previews, links will expand into either rich inline mentions, or more expansive preview cards.
Embeds: Also similar to Notion, you can embed content from almost anywhere. But in Coda, you can also use full-page embeds to bring in external content, like a Miro whiteboard or an Amplitude dashboard, as a full section in your doc.
Sync Tables: Most of Coda’s Packs feature two-way sync tables, similar to Notion’s but supported on many more services, and capable of pushing changes back to the source (for example changing the status of your Jira issue right from your tracking doc).
Formulas: Packs can add custom formulas to Coda’s formula language, allowing you to look up an address, get the weather for a location, pull the latest stock price, and much more.
Actions: Packs can also add actions, triggered by button presses or automations, which take external actions like sending a Slack message or an email.
As you can see, both tools offer a wide range of integration capabilities, but Coda’s Packs tend to be more full featured and capable of doing more within your doc, while Notion’s integrations focus largely on previewing external content.

Other important considerations

Apart from functionality, there are are a few other significant differences worth noting:
Custom integrations: Notion integrations are created by interacting with the
public API
⁠
that I discussed above, while Coda Packs are created with a dedicated
SDK
⁠
. Moreover, you can build Packs entirely in your browser with an online IDE in your workspace home. Building Packs is significantly easier than building Notion integrations because Coda handles one of the most challenging aspect of any online connector—authentication. You simply tell Coda what kind of security the API you are working with requires, and it will add the appropriate UI, store, and append the appropriate credentials for each request you make. There are also extensive
guide
⁠
and
examples
⁠
, so getting started is quite easy. Many non-developer but code-curious folks are able to build Coda Packs, but the same people would absolutely not be able to build Notion integrations.
Security: Coda’s Packs
take security very seriously
⁠
—all Packs are run in a secure sandbox environment where they have limited access to your data as well as communicating with the external world. In addition, since Coda handles all authentication, third-party extensions never have access to your credentials. This means that many IT teams will never be able to approve third-party Notion integrations, but will readily be able to approve Coda Packs.
Taking this all together, I hope it is reasonably clear that while both tools offer integrations, Coda is strongly ahead in terms of capabilities, adoption, and security.

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Features
The expansive capabilities of two all-in-one workspaces.
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Ease of use
The niceties and annoyances of everyday use.
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