Coda by Grammarly vs. Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Coda by Grammarly
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Coda, acquired by Grammarly in early 2025, is a template-based document creation and collaboration solution, supporting a variety of use cases.
$0
per month
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Social Squared is a SharePoint Discussion Board App that can be deployed across SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. Social Squared improves productivity and efficiency by providing structured discussion forums for employee and student discussions. For Microsoft SharePoint Social Squared is a SharePoint discussion board application where users can post questions within relevant forums and receive answers to their questions from subject matter experts. The…
$2,200
per year per installation
Pricing
Coda by GrammarlyLightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board
Editions & Modules
Free
$0.00
per month
Pro
$10.00
per month per doc maker; unlimited editors (paid annually)
Team
$30.00
per month per doc maker; unlimited editors (paid annually)
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
Social Squared Discussion Board
From $2200
per year per installation
Social Squared Discussion Board Enterprise Edition
POA
per year per installation
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Coda by GrammarlyLightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsWith Coda, you only pay for Doc Makers. Often one person creates a doc, others edit it, and some simply observe from afar. Instead of charging for everyone, we only charge for the people who create docs. Interested in enterprise pricing? Visit coda.io/enterprisePrices stated are minimum per installation for "stock" products. $2.20 per user/year on top of base price. Enterprise editions can be amended to suit business needs if deemed necessary, additional costs incurred and TBD. All packages include free technical support. Free upgrades available to latest versions of tool as they are released.
More Pricing Information
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User Ratings
Coda by GrammarlyLightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(25 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.8
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
4.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Coda by GrammarlyLightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board
Likelihood to Recommend
Grammarly
Coda is great to build a place for your users to go to and see information. It is easy to navigate through and the variety of content creation is great. However, it is not always easy to create what you want and there is a lot of playing around and learning. Coda also sometimes misses some functionality which is expected. For example, downloading a list of users that have access to the platform. Being able to send push notifications when a new page has been created etc. Overall it is a good tool to use just be prepared to invest time!
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Lightning Tools
Their customer service it top notch and always responsive. I struggled in the beginning a little bit because I'm not tech savvy and we had to add it to our SharePoint site but they helped me along the way and even had share screen meetings with me to assist!!
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Pros
Grammarly
  • Flexibility. It's easy to get started on a small scale, but add more complex organization strategies as needed.
  • Integrations. It's simple to ingest data from sources like Zapier for time-saving automations.
  • Useful components. View table data across different formats like cards or custom detail views.
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Lightning Tools
  • Organizing Data
  • Opens up discussion, whether publicly or anonymously
  • Easy to setup
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Cons
Grammarly
  • It takes getting used to in terms of how the formulas per column is implemented, in contrast to how we build tables in Excel. For organization/team purchase, it would be worth considering having a training for the core team of users. Right now, we do a lot of self-learning.
  • Inability to email charts or image without these objects being hosted on a third party. The community has been great in providing workarounds but it would be much more convenient to be able to have such ability natively.
  • APAC Support. I'm based in Malaysia, due to timezone differences, even with a livechat implemented, the support for each step and conversation takes up to 24 hours per response. Having some hours covered in our timezone would greatly improve customer support experience.
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Lightning Tools
  • I would love to be able to assign various people as administrators of different topics (this may be an option now but a couple years ago it wasn't)
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Likelihood to Renew
Grammarly
Coda is definitely something that has been proven to drive positive impact in our organization. We have many divisions that can benefit from this that we have yet to explore. It would definitely be worth renewing.
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Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Usability
Grammarly
There is a little bit of a learning curve on where to point and click to add in different elements and make edits. But it is still very manageable once you get the hang of it. I do still have some issues with some of my connected pages updating each other when I don't want them to sync. So I'll end up editing one page, and it will make the same edits on another page.
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Lightning Tools
Our employees really like the fact that they can find things easily with the search feature and add questions and comments as they see fit.
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Reliability and Availability
Grammarly
So far in the past year, we haven't had situations that Coda has gone down for us which is great.
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Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Performance
Grammarly
We haven't done any integrations - the initial part of our experience we found that for docs with complex formulas, the page tends to load slowly but in recent months, Coda has improved and optimized the loading times in general and we generally don't find any problems in terms of speed anymore.
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Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Grammarly
Mainly due to timezone differences. I think Coda's support in general is well implemented and executed. They know their stuff and are helpful. But since I'm not in the same timezone, solution rates are slower for me, and that's not something I prefer. I work in customer service, too, and more often than not, time is important. Shortening the solution time would be a much greater experience.
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Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Grammarly
I'm relatively inexperienced but this experience is meaningful. It would have been nice to have some guidance from Coda so that we understood more on Coda's purpose and potential.
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Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Grammarly
While all of the products listed have great features and platforms, there was always one thing missing from them that I would need to get from another application. Coda was the first one we used that really combined some of the best parts of those products and allowed us to use it in one place. I also appreciate the flexibility of creating your own framework and workflow, unlike in other tools where you have to follow how they capture data and organize projects.
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Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Grammarly
I think scalability is definitely good here since it's based on number of doc makers. Implementation into each dept becomes simpler. That being said, due to the nature of our work, we find it easier that we have a "super user" and then a team of other doc makers. This would make the doc creation and management more efficient.
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Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Grammarly
  • Increased insight for all stakeholders involved--both in terms of overview and details
  • Better grip on issues and escalations--reduced friction, confusion, and higher clarity on status, next actions, and ownership.
  • Reduced time required by those who need to maintain all information. Record (a detail) once and use multiple times.
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Lightning Tools
  • We signed up for a 3 year contract and hope to do another 3yr contract when this one is up. :)
Read full review
ScreenShots

Coda by Grammarly Screenshots

Screenshot of One unified surface means ideas aren’t limited to a file type. A project doesn’t have to be split across tabs of documents, spreadsheets, and apps.Screenshot of Packs are a version of integrations or plug-ins. They connect the  doc to the apps in use every day, so as to pull live data in or push updates out automatically.Screenshot of Drag-and-drop templates provide a quick-start shortcut to commonly used templates like Upvote/Downvote, To-Do List, and Team Sentiment Tracker.Screenshot of Slice, dice, and chop data using Views. A View is a mirror of data that can be tailored to unique needs, all while staying connected to the source.Screenshot of When accessing the doc from a mobile device, it should feel like an app. Doc pages become tabs, buttons become swipe actions and doc notifications become push notifications.Screenshot of The Doc Gallery contains docs self-published by the Coda community. These published docs have a webpage-like interface and have varying levels of interactivity like view, play or edit. Find and share tools, templates, tiny apps, interactive handbooks, and anything else that can be built in Coda.

Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board Screenshots

Screenshot of MODERN, RESPONSIVE SHAREPOINT DISCUSSION BOARD
Discussion Forums can be created for a variety of different reasons. This example is a Forum Group for the Microsoft 365 technologies such as Teams, Planner, and SharePoint. Forums are then created within the Forum Groups for more specific discussions. Under the SharePoint Forum Group, there is a Forum for SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online. Anyone looking to ask a question regarding SharePoint 2019 for example would be able to post their question under SharePoint On-Premises rather than SharePoint Online. This also allows subject matter experts to focus more on the questions that they can respond to and provide value.Screenshot of SHAREPOINT DISCUSS BOARD – TOPICS VIEW
When navigating into a forum, the topics and discussions that are taking place are shown. Any new topics that not yet read will be highlighted. It also displays whether topics have been answered, their average ratings, how many views and posts are within the topic, and also provides the ability to subscribe to the forum to be notified of new posts within it.Screenshot of READING DISCUSSIONS AND PROVIDING FEEDBACK
Social Squared offers a threaded discussion view with the ability to provide feedback to other users.

Posts can be rated, voted upon, or liked by users in order to give feedback to the user creating or responding to a post. Additionally, replies can be marked as answered or marked as featured, which gives readers of forums assurance that the response they are reading is validated to be the correct answer.

Users also receive feedback through the earning of badges. The more users post or mark posts as answered, the more points are rewarded. This makes it easy to spot subject matter experts.Screenshot of SUGGESTED TAGS
Social Squared provides a rich text editor for creating and replying to topics. The Rich Text toolbar provides functionality such as inserting images, YouTube videos, Stream Videos, Formatted Code Inserts, as well as font formatting.

While typing, suggestions on how to tag a post appear. Selecting an existing tag will provide consistency in the tags used making it easier for other users to discover the post.Screenshot of SOCIAL SQUARED TAG CLOUD VIEW
The Social Squared Tag Cloud view makes it easy to navigate to posts within a specific category even if they span multiple forums. The more a tag appears in different posts, the more prominent it will be in the tag cloud. Users can navigate to posts with the tag in one click.Screenshot of DISCUSSION BOARD WITHIN MICROSOFT TEAMS TAB
Social Squared is a Discussion Board App for Microsoft Teams Tab’s and Microsoft Teams Personal Apps. Social Squared provides information workers the ability to post questions within relevant forums, and receive answers from their team. The Discussion Board layout for posts makes it easier to find answers to questions that may have already been asked before. Through features such as “Mark as Answered”, “Forum Moderation”, “Post Rating”, “Post Likes”, “Post Voting”, users will be assured that the answers they are reading are validated.