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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
Ease of use

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Notion's overreliance on search compounds with their search shortcomings.
Finding documents and information in your Notion workspace is primarily done through search. However, Notion’s search functionality has a number of key limitations that make it quite difficult to use—and makes the overreliance on search problematic. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but here are some examples of Notion’s search shortcomings:
Notion search used to
only search the first part of each page
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, making it difficult or impossible to find what you were looking for. This has now been fixed for new pages, but is still an issue for any created before this change was made.
Notion only highlights one matching result per page, so you are all but guaranteed to need to use cmd/ctrl-f in conjunction with native search.
Notion provides limited previews of search matches, making it very hard to know if you’ve found the right content.
Database search in Notion (the search box at the top of a database) does not search the content of the pages contained in the database, only the properties of those rows/pages.
Notion’s universal search runs entirely on the server, so if you are offline, you can’t search at all. In Coda, search within docs works while offline.
Often, in large workspaces, scoped search (meaning searching a specific table or doc) is actually preferable to universal/global search as you can restrict the number of possible matches found.
Notion’s search speed is known to slow down dramatically when searching within large workspaces.

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Ease of use
The niceties and annoyances of everyday use.
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