Slite vs Coda

You're probably just learning about Slite after having heard of the all-in-one tools like Notion and Coda (amongst the many other team "knowledge base" apps on the market), and wondering which is right for you.

If you're truly looking for the knowledge base "category defining" app—there's no one better than Slite. They are actually moving this category forward in what it traditionally has meant to be a shared team knowledge base/documentation tool.

What we actually love most about Slite is their simplicity and focus. They have the cleanest UI/UX of all the tools we've tried in the space. And while you can still modify the design, your team will never get lost in the formatting, nor can you actually make a document look bad in Slite (unlike competitors).

I mean it's what we ultimately chose for our internal team knowledge base after using all of the competitors on the market for years.

What ultimately made the decision for us? Well, we had Slite set up alongside Notion and Coda, and we just naturally gravitated toward Slite, whether it was building out a collaborative work environment for our customers, or just internal blog posts and documentation.

We just found that we could get in, get work done, and get out. Whereas accessing internal documentation in Coda was super kludgy as you're jumping between documents, almost like using Google Docs as a knowledge base, which made things quite disjointed.

Slite just got out of the way while enabling us to get our work done in an enjoyable way. So if you're feeling overwhelmed in Notion, maybe the answer for your team is actually opinionation and simplicity? 🤷

Slite actually had one of the first true examples of how AI will evolve a category for the better. While Notion went the direction of "now you can generate content using AI!", Slite was more of the mindset of "hold on, the actual problem is that we, as a shared team, already have so much information. Some outdated and requires updating, some entirely outdated and should be ignored. What if we could help you sort through all of this information to help your team find the actual answers they are looking for?

Here's an example of the Ask by Slite product in action, notice how it writes an answer based on the various sources of information in the knowledge base while showing which part has come from each document?

An example of the AI functionality within Ask by Slite

The only downside currently is that Slite does not have an developer API (so you can't build custom integrations with it)—and while we'd love to have these capabilities to integrate Slite a bit deeper into our other tools, we haven't found that to be too large an issue for the way we recommend teams use Slite.

We used to be huge fans of Coda for internal documentation and shared customer documentation. When it first came out, it was competing with Google Docs, and it was just better on every single front. And to that end, it still is.

We mainly used it as more of a collaborative project manager mixed with knowledge base solution, to where we'd spin one up when beginning work with a new customer, and it'd be the sole place we'd communicate and document.

The friction point grew over time as documents increasingly felt separate from one another. Jumping between internal documentation and customer documentation was like moving in and out of folders in Google Drive, and quickly searching across all of this was just too much.

That and the team at Coda decided they were going to double-down more on the no-code and database functionality of Coda and less on the knowledge base/documentation side of things.

I must admit, they did an exceptional job at this—in terms of re-thinking Google Docs and turning it into something that's just better in all ways, they accomplished that and more. It's just also with that, they began strutting the line of an all-in-one tool, to which if you've read enough on the site, you'd see that this is a category we see poised with issues.

We've seen some companies do some incredibly impressive things with Coda—heck, we were one of them. What we see with tools like this though is they start out with a clear focus and purpose—let's build an MVP for a non-standard process we have going on in our company, one that no other tool on the market fits into.

And we agree with that premise! Where it falls apart is shortly after that, when the team starts seeing the capabilities of Coda, and begin rebuilding all other systems into Coda. The exact same reason why we don't recommend using Notion as your CRM is the same reason we don't recommend using Coda as your CRM.