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
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. After Salesforce acquired Quip, the company decided to focus on sales teams but Quip wasn’t quite powerful enough to meet all of their needs. More than just sales teams adopted Quip but 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 handling unstructured data. 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. 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. 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 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.
3. Quip has two true integrations. Coda has over 500.
Quip does play well with Salesforce and Jira but the data only really functions one way. You can view your Salesforce data but you can’t edit it within a Quip doc—it’s pitched as an add-on to Salesforce these days. There are seven other apps you can connect to your Quip docs but overall it’s not really designed to integrate with other apps. Unfortunately, it’s wrong to assume that just because Quip is owned by Salesforce that it has the deepest or most intuitive integration on the market. Not only was Coda built to support your entire team’s work, we made room for them to bring all their favorite apps along. We call our integrations Packs, and we have a library of over 500 of them, plus the option to customize your own Packs. 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. The past vs. future of work.
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 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. But human support is hidden behind Salesforce bureaucracy. At Coda, we know that live collaboration necessitates reliability and speed. And that takes 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 can share insights, help with content creation, and finish tasks, so teams can reduce busywork and increase their impact.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.