Coda vs. Notion: What Enterprise Engagement Data Reveals About Your Collaboration Strategy

Access vs. Adoption: Understanding the Metrics That Matter

Forget the marketing hype and feature comparison charts — are your teams actually using the apps in your tech stack?

We see a lot of IT departments identifying apps with similar capabilities. Many companies license both Coda and Notion (we’ll get into why duplicative apps dominate SaaS sprawl another time), but don’t have visibility into how their employees and teams are actually using their SaaS apps.

Both platforms offer similar core capabilities, like content blocks, databases, and collaboration features. So what does Productiv’s data say about how the apps get used, and by what company.

For this analysis, “engagement” is defined as occurring when a user logs in and performs an action within the app. This can include editing a document, adding content, or collaborating with teammates. This is a critical distinction from simply having access to an application or logging in once, and requires building and maintaining an engagement connector rather than just relying on SSO login data.

As a refresher:

• SSO connector: Reveals authentication data (who’s logging in), but offers limited insight into meaningful activity after login
• Provisioned connector: Shows which users have been given access to an application, but provides no visibility into whether they’re actually using it
• Engagement connector: Delivers comprehensive visibility into how users are actually interacting with applications, capturing specific actions that indicate true adoption and value realization

Our analysis of engagement data from over 25,000 users (11,703 Notion users and 13,320 Coda users) across 90 days reveals surprising patterns that challenge conventional wisdom about these popular collaboration tools and provides actionable insights for IT leaders making strategic portfolio decisions.

Coda vs. Notion: The background

Both Coda and Notion made a significant impact on the collaboration and workspace front. Notion launched in 2016, positioned as an “all-in-one workspace” that combines notes, docs, wikis, and project management. Coda arrived in 2017, marketing itself as the app for flexible documents, spreadsheets, and utility apps, all in a single canvas. 

Notion gained early traction with startup founders and creative teams looking for a visually appealing, flexible system to organize information. Coda, with its more robust formula and automation capabilities, seemed to position itself for enterprise teams looking for powerful, doc-based applications and workflows.

Notion isn’t shy about revealing its 100 million users, while Coda has been a bit more reserved about their footprint. Which makes sense — Notion appeals more strongly to individuals, with a better free plan and model for single users. Coda, on the other hand, has a stronger draw with companies, offering bulk discounts on licenses. 

The Engagement Reality: Coda’s Surprising Advantage

Marketing narratives position Notion as the user-friendly option with its “all-in-one workspace” for notes, docs, and wikis, while Coda is viewed as more technically complex but powerful with its “doc-based applications and workflows.” 

Here’s what Productiv’s engagement data says:

• Over a 7-day period, Coda maintains 23.3% user engagement compared to Notion’s 10.7%—more than double the rate
• At 30 days, while the gap narrows, Coda still maintains higher engagement
• At 90 days, Coda reaches 62.5% of licensed users engaging with the platform, while Notion achieves only 43.5%

This consistent pattern may challenge the assumption that simpler tools drive higher adoption. Despite Coda’s steeper learning curve, users who adopt the platform engage with it more frequently and consistently. Alternatively, as you’ll see in a moment Coda customers tend to be larger organizations, which likely affects usage patterns. 

Key Takeaway: This suggests that investing in training and implementation for more robust tools may yield stronger long-term adoption and ROI, even if initial deployment requires more resources.

Departmental Usage: Clear Patterns Emerge

When we examine engagement by department, specific patterns emerge:

• Engineering teams: 67.6% engagement with Coda versus just 44.2% with Notion
• Product teams: 67.6% for Coda versus 49.5% for Notion
• Marketing teams: 63.9% for Coda compared to Notion’s 51.9%
• Operations departments: 64.2% for Coda versus 44.9% for Notion
• IT and security: The most dramatic difference—61.3% engagement with Coda versus 22.1% with Notion
• Sales teams: 56.5% for Coda versus 46.6% for Notion (the lowest overall engagement from any department)

The only area where Notion outperforms is in customer success, where it achieves 59.4% engagement compared to Coda’s 43.9%.

These variations indicate that technical teams value Coda’s robust formula capabilities and advanced data management features, even at the cost of a steeper learning curve. Customer-facing roles may benefit more from Notion’s simplified interface and lower barrier to entry.

This data illustrates how a department-specific approach can be appropriate to ensuring adoption of your SaaS. Depending on your budget, having multiple tools can be the right choice across your teams, or you may need to invest in different training to ensure optimal adoption. 

Company Size Dramatically Impacts Tool Preference

The most striking insight from our analysis is the clear correlation between company size and tool preferences:

• Enterprise organizations (ENT): Overwhelming preference for Coda, with 64.8% engagement versus just 11.6% for Notion
• Mid-market companies (MM): Also favor Coda, though by a narrower margin: 61.4% engagement compared to 57.5% with Notion
• Small-medium businesses (SMB): Dramatically reverse this trend, with Notion dominating at 78.7% engagement versus Coda’s 51.7%

This stark pattern reveals that as organizational complexity increases, the value of advanced capabilities begins to outweigh simplicity. Enterprise environments can better absorb initial training costs and realize greater value from sophisticated data management features. Smaller organizations, meanwhile, benefit more from Notion’s lower barrier to entry and simpler approach.

For large enterprises, this data suggests Coda’s more robust capabilities align better with complex organizational needs, despite requiring more investment in adoption. If your organization is growing rapidly, consider how your collaboration needs will evolve with scale rather than optimizing solely for immediate ease of use.

Why Enterprises Choose Coda: Technical Advantages

Looking beyond engagement numbers, several key factors explain Coda’s stronger enterprise performance:

1. Superior data management: Coda excels with powerful databases and cross-document syncing that better serve complex enterprise information architecture needs
2. Advanced formula capabilities: Technical teams value Coda’s robust formula functionality, which enables more sophisticated workflows despite creating steeper onboarding challenges
3. More flexible AI integration: Coda’s per-user AI credit system (likely to expand with Grammarly’s acquisition) provides more flexibility than Notion’s workspace-wide AI activation requirement
4. Enterprise licensing advantages: Larger organizations can benefit from Coda’s bulk discounts on licenses, making the TCO more attractive at scale

Meanwhile, Notion’s advantages in simplicity, user experience, superior mobile experience, and faster setup explain its dominance in smaller organizations and its popularity for personal use, which is why it ranks as the 10th most used shadow IT application.

Strategic Decision Framework for IT Leaders

Based on this engagement analysis, enterprise IT leaders should consider these practical steps when evaluating Coda versus Notion:

1. Align tool selection with organizational scale: For large enterprises, the data clearly favors Coda for most departments; mid-market organizations should evaluate based on technical requirements and growth trajectory
2. Consider department-specific implementations: Allow customer-facing teams to use Notion while standardizing technical departments on Coda if engagement patterns in your organization match these findings
3. Invest proportionally in adoption: When deploying Coda enterprise-wide, allocate appropriate resources for training to overcome the initial learning curve that delivers strong long-term engagement
4. Evaluate consolidation opportunities: If your organization maintains both tools, the data suggests that for most enterprise departments, consolidating to Coda may yield higher overall engagement
5. Implement engagement analytics: Deploy tools that provide visibility into actual usage patterns across your collaboration stack, rather than relying on license counts alone

Making Data-Driven Collaboration Decisions

The Coda versus Notion debate isn’t just about features, it’s about what actually drives engagement in your organization. This shows that despite Coda’s steeper learning curve, it achieves substantially higher engagement across most enterprise departments.

This underscores the importance of looking beyond feature matrices and ease-of-use claims to understand actual usage patterns as you build your IT strategy and capability map. 

Productiv’s visibility into actual engagement, not just license counts or feature comparisons, is essential for making strategic decisions about your collaboration stack. Only by understanding how your teams actually use these tools can you optimize your investment and drive meaningful productivity improvements across your organization.ion, drive employee usage and engagement, and ultimately improve employee satisfaction.