Spent some time building up some templates in Coda to test whether I could abandon other tools my team currently use in favour of this, as I genuinely like the product more than tools like Monday which is overpriced and we don’t even use half it’s AI features for project management and collaboration purposes. The thing that ultimately blocked us was the lack of client friendly views.
I built a client level folder, with a master page that has all the core internal planning information, then a connected page that connects all it’s tables to the master and just filters out columns or information the client doesn’t need. Unfortunately I found after that I can only share the entire folder or nothing. I tried working around this with hiding the master page and publishing the doc, but then I found you can’t make any edits on the published doc so that doesn’t work since we need client to be able to leave comments and add items in the tables.
So the final solution would be to create a synced page that lives completely outside the folder and just share that one page, which already breaks the entire purpose of folder organisation and would be a nightmare to manage when we have a large amount of clients.
But the final nail in the coffin was even with this backwards hack to share a file cleanly I finally learnt the clients would all have to create Coda accounts to make any edits. I know forms are a feature but they won’t be flexible enough for the kind of collaboration we do, and unfortunately while I love the product itself, the inability to just simply share and collaborate with clients is the one thing that makes the whole product unusable for us.
We’ll have to stick to other software like Monday and Google products that allow is to easily share and collab with clients in the meantime, but if this is a planned feature or something that could be considered, I’d love to eventually switch over, as the template pages I built where actually great.