Coda launches next version of project management app

After launching Coda 1.0 back in February, Coda has launched its biggest update yet to the project management app. According to a blog post written by co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrota, Coda 2.0 was designed to be simpler, cleaner, faster and easier for teams to use.

The new version now has filters and conditional formats to organize team members' most common interactions while working in documents. Additionally, the building block compositions are now drag-and-drop templates available inside documents.

Building on the redesign that started in July, Coda 2.0 has fewer shadows, more open space and section headers. Coda also made performance improvements in an effort to make scrolling, calculations, searching and section-switching smoother on the project management app.

With Coda 1.0, makers and teams outgrew their document lists quickly, and had a hard time organizing them. To try and combat this, Coda 2.0 includes a workspace and folders. Folders enable teams to add users to a team folder to give them access to all documents automatically. There is also a private working folder called "My Docs" that enables users to work on something separately, before dropping it into the team folder.

There are also new features to secure documents. Teams now have a locking feature at both the document and section level. Coda will also soon add a permissions feature, which lets makers ensure people are only interacting with information they should be editing.

After requests from users, Coda has also added Cross-doc, which integrates Coda with the other apps a team uses. It enables users to pull data from one document into another.

Gartner named Coda one of its 2019 "Cool Vendors in Content Services," citing its no-code programmability and the ease of creating document-based applications as reasons for its inclusion on the list.

"The accessibility of this approach empowers business users to create solutions (or adapt existing ones) for activity coordination and tracking, collaboration, information sharing, resource allocation, or process modeling and automation," according to the Gartner report. "This is most useful in cases where the requirement may not be fully understood in advance, or where they are continuously changing."

As for the challenges of Coda as a project management app, Gartner pointed to the competition of vendors working on "empowering nontechnical business users" and long-term differentiation. Additionally, Gartner stated that awareness of what is possible is very low, and often comes with a degree of skepticism.

It's free to make documents, but as they evolve into team tools, users can level up to a Pro, Team or Enterprise plan. The Pro plan is $10 per month per document maker, the Team plan is $30 per month per document maker and the Enterprise plan requires a consultation for a quote.