Top 5 reasons teams move from Quip to Coda

Where and why Coda wins over Quip.

Joe Bauer

Product Marketing Manager at Coda

Top 5 reasons teams move from Quip to Coda

By Joe Bauer

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Tool consolidation · 7 min read
If you’re considering switching organizational systems, I feel your pain. Deciding to learn a new program, transfer data, and get the whole team on board can be exhausting. But in my experience, it’s like that old thought experiment about buying a new pair of shoes. Sure, you could buy another pair of the cheaper shoes that you know, even though you also know you’ll have to replace them in a year. They’re familiar and good enough! Or, you could find a really perfect pair of shoes that were crafted to last. They’re going to be more expensive but you’re going to wear them for so many years that you end up saving money in the long run. That’s worth the hunt, the initial cost, and even a little toe-pinching as you break them in. I think of productivity tools like Quip and Coda in the same way, so we’re digging into those two potentials today. Quip began as a mobile note-taking tool before turning toward a more collaborative build. In 2016, it was acquired by Salesforce and began to focus specifically on sales teams. Coda is an integrated docs system, wiki, and asynchronous working platform. It was born out of a need for better collaboration across teams and industries, and that flexibility and focus on instant sharing is baked into its earliest strings of code. When you’re looking for your perfect organizational fit, you need honesty, not a sales pitch. Coda has written about these two products before, and after interviewing hundreds of makers who have switched to Coda, I’ve only become more convinced that Coda has everything a team could need. Obviously, I work at Coda, and I’m enthusiastic about what we do. But I’m even more excited about helping you find the perfect system for you. I’ll celebrate with you when you find the right fit, whatever it is. With that in mind, here are some of the reasons teams have told us they decided to move from Quip to Coda.

1. Coda is where high-performing teams get work done together.

 In the wider software world, Quip and Coda might fall into the same general productivity software category. But they’re very different products designed for very different purposes. Quip started out as a note-taking system and functions well along the lines of that original design: as a word processor and document storage/sharing space. However, your work is never “just notes.” You need data to inform decisions, visuals to support a structure, and a collaborative space to brainstorm. When that all lives in different places, as it does in Quip, it’s hard to keep up your momentum. Teams that use Quip have said it just takes more time to get anything done. They can’t always trust they have the latest numbers, so they’re emailing or Slacking back and forth to get the right spreadsheets to reconcile. That leads to yet more time copy/pasting between duplicate docs, which sometimes leads to crucial manual errors. Everyone I talked to needed additional ways to track projects and keep everyone on the same page. Quip worked to store their data but it wasn’t a place where their teams could come together and get stuff done. At the end of the day, Quip isn’t the one place your team goes because it can only reasonably support unstructured data. Coda, on the other hand, was built as an all-in-one collaboration platform. Of course, we have a powerful docs system that will fulfill any writing needs your team may have, but Coda is a document, database, and project tracker in one. Your databases and documents are stored in an interconnected workspace that collects your word processing, data accumulation and analysis, and team communications. Everyone can see the numbers or status updates they need at any time, chat with stakeholders, and make their own updates in the same workspace. No more versioning and emailing the same spreadsheets until you’re drowning in appended dates. Coda speeds up collaboration, allowing teams to draw insights, make decisions, and communicate in the same place where they get work done.

2. In Quip, individual docs and sheets turn into a mess.

 On the note of long email chains looking for the latest version of one doc, Quip functions on an ecosystem of individual, disconnected docs stored in linked folders. That’s definitely a familiar infrastructure. Think Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Despite marketing promises that Quip is collaborative and cross-functional, we haven’t talked to many teams who actually used the product that way. Team members create individual docs and make copies of the ones that are shared with them, creating quickly bloated folders of endlessly iterated docs—the so-called “Quip sand” that so many users experience.
So you have 10 different Quip Docs that you're running your team off of, and the information can be stale like the minute that you share it because you're pulling it from a different system that's not even integrated into Quip.
Nicole S.
You can embed tables into your Quip docs but they’re fairly static elements. We’ve talked to several teams who had hoped to use Quip for writing, data, and productivity but found themselves defaulting back to Word, Excel, and their favorite project tracker. Coda docs, however, function a bit more like a workspace—where you can link things together in pages and subpages that are always pulling from the most current information. And your docs talk to each other behind your back (OK, on a screen in front of your face). When an update is made in one table, it’s reflected everywhere, so you’re never questioning data accuracy. The docs grow with your data, and you’ll never have to copy and paste new data into a dozen disconnected tables to reconcile all the company spreadsheets. Update your data, messaging, or project status once and it’s accurate everywhere, immediately. You can even customize who on which team sees what, without creating new docs.
Of course, every tool will need some level of “gardening” (e.g., archiving old docs, consolidating and migrating information, etc.), and we recommend spending weekly time consolidating and cutting! But I promise you, it’s a much less painful process when you’re not trying to get everyone on your team to delete 10 old versions of the same spreadsheet.

3. Quip has two true integrations. Coda has over 500.

 Quip does play well with Salesforce and Jira but the data only really functions in one direction. For example, you can view your Salesforce data but you can’t edit it within a Quip doc. And just because Quip is owned by Salesforce, it doesn’t mean it offers the deepest or most intuitive integration on the market. There are seven other apps you can connect to your Quip docs but overall, it’s not really designed for integrations. Coda, on the other hand, was built to support your entire team’s work. That’s why we made room for them to bring their favorite apps along. We call our integrations Packs, and our library has over 500 of them, plus the option to customize your own Packs.
Coda’s robust Salesforce Pack provides similar functionality to Quip’s Sales Live App and then some. With Coda, you can sync Salesforce data and utilize Coda’s visualization and table functionalities to boost productivity. Additionally, Coda allows for two-way sync with Salesforce. This game-changing capability means that any updates made in Coda will be reflected in Salesforce and vice versa. That means no more copy/pasting Salesforce records! Plus, your Salesforce account info can live alongside your Figma designs, Jira tasks, and Snowflake usage data within a single Coda doc. The way that technical collaboration supports our end goal of human collaboration is something we’re very proud of. I’d encourage you to try the Salesforce and Jira Packs, both of which allow you to view and edit data from either end. So if you’re discussing updates during a meeting and need to highlight changes in Salesforce data or resolved bugs in Jira, you can do it from the meeting doc in Coda, eliminating the need for follow-up tasks.

4. Quip is staying stagnant while Coda is constantly improving.

 Since their acquisition in 2016, Quip hasn’t really changed (see their product updates page). Honestly, I can’t think of many digital products I use today that have stayed the same for that long. It’s just not keeping up with today’s rapidly changing digital landscape. And in fact, Quip is actively deprecating features, making customers worry they’ll need to migrate to another tool, and fast. That lack of investment in development is, unfortunately, equaled by the lack of investment in customer support. If you have an issue with Quip, there are a few anonymous emails and 1-800 numbers you can use to get in touch. However, human support is hidden behind Salesforce bureaucracy. At Coda, we know that live collaboration necessitates reliability and speed. And that means product evolution. We’re excited about the idea of growth and change and always looking for ways to improve—even if it means throwing a few challenges to our fantastic engineers. With Coda AI, teams can access a connected work assistant that understands the actual information in your company, acts as an informed collaborator, and can take real action at scale. Need to send the same-ish follow-up email to 100 people? Coda AI can do that for you without you having to personalize each greeting. Need to turn a meeting into an actionable to-do list? Coda AI has that capability as well. Coda AI shares insights, helps with content creation, and finishes tasks, so teams can reduce busywork and increase their impact.
While we’re currently using AI to speed up some processes, we also know where trendy tech sometimes gets in the way, especially when it comes to communication (hello from a human!). AI helps our team work with increasing efficiency but humans write the communications you read and the customer support staff (all people!) are both accessible and eager to help.

5. Coda has tried and true templates.

 While every team is different, many of us have similar day-to-day workflows. So we went ahead and built a library of templates so you can get started on any given project without getting bogged down in designing the reporting system. You can do everything from building an AI-powered bug-tracking system for your engineering team to setting up a ready-to-use brainstorming session for your marketing team. These templates are flexible too, so you can drag and drop them anywhere on the canvas. As a distributed team, we’ve gotten pretty dang good at working remotely but collaboratively here at Coda—thanks to our team-focused templates, like Dory and Pulse, and $100 voting. These simple templates are powerful ways to keep your team on the same page, and you can drop them into any doc.
Quip does have a few dozen templates ready to go for you as well. But Quip templates are, again, more like a Word Doc layout than a communication tool. They can structure your notes or your data but they aren’t reactive, growing pieces of code that keep your team members in communication or your projects up to date.

Ready to switch to Coda?

 Teams switch from Quip to Coda regularly enough and we’ve talked to hundreds of users and heard a dozen reasons why they made the change. If you’re curious about the work involved in migrating over to Coda, we’ve already made a guide for the process that you can read here. Again, I want you to find the software that works best for you and your team, so I hope you’ll keep comparing based on your needs. Ready to work truly collaboratively? Reach out to our sales team to get details about migration, pricing, and more. If you’re an enterprise customer, contact your account rep so we can support you at each of your migration. We also recently released our Quip importer, which lets you bring your content into Coda in about 30 seconds. Try it out here.
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