Control who can read, comment, and edit your docs — and when you're ready, publish them to the open web without anyone needing a Coda account.
Every person you share a Coda doc with gets one of three access levels. Understanding exactly what each level allows — and what it prevents — is essential before you share anything beyond your own workspace.
| Capability | Can View | Can Comment | Can Edit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Read pages and table data | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Leave inline comments | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Edit page content & table cells | — | — | ✓ |
| Add or delete rows | — | — | ✓ |
| Create or delete pages | — | — | ✓ |
| Change sharing settings | — | — | Doc owner only |
| Submit form responses | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Read-only. Good for external stakeholders, clients reviewing deliverables, or employees who need to consult a reference doc without being able to change anything.
Read plus inline comments. Ideal for reviewers giving feedback on documents, designers getting approval on briefs, or managers reviewing plans before sign-off.
Full editing access. Use for team members actively working on the doc — updating tasks, filling in data, writing content. Treat this level as trust-based.
There are two ways to give someone access to a doc. You can invite them directly by email — they'll get a notification and the doc will appear in their Coda workspace. Or you can generate a share link and send it via any channel: Slack, email, a QR code, a calendar invite description.
Coda lets you share at the folder level — not just the document level. When you share a folder with a person or team, every doc inside that folder inherits that access level. Add a new doc to the folder later and it's immediately accessible to everyone the folder is shared with, without any extra steps.
This is the right model for team workspaces. Instead of sharing 30 individual docs one by one, you share the Engineering folder with the Engineering team and the Marketing folder with Marketing. Access is automatic and stays consistent as the folder grows.
Individual docs can also be shared with access settings that differ from their folder — you can share a doc with extra people who aren't in the folder's share group, or restrict a sensitive doc to a smaller audience even if it lives in a broadly shared folder. Folder access is a floor, not a ceiling.
Publishing a Coda doc makes it publicly readable by anyone on the internet — no Coda account, no login, no invite needed. The published version is a clean, read-only rendering of your doc. Visitors can scroll pages, interact with embedded content, and submit form responses, but they can't edit anything.
Common uses: public knowledge bases, company wikis, landing-page-style announcements, event information pages, and open-source project documentation.
A Coda form is a view of a table that's designed to accept new row submissions. When you create a form view, Coda generates a dedicated public-facing URL for that form — separate from the doc's own share link. You can share just the form link with respondents who don't need (and shouldn't have) any access to the underlying doc or table data.
This distinction matters: a respondent who submits your form sees only the form fields. They cannot see the table, other rows, or anything else in the doc. Their submission adds a row to the table, fully siloed from whatever else is in the doc.
Anyone with this link sees a clean form. They submit and their response lands in your table. They never see the doc, the table, or other submissions.
People with access to the doc can see all pages, table data, other rows, and any saved views — depending on their access level.
You can mark any page as hidden so it doesn't appear in the doc's sidebar navigation. Hidden pages are still accessible — if someone has the direct link, they can open it. And if you embed the page's content elsewhere (via /view or a link), that still works. The page is just invisible in the nav, keeping the sidebar clean for regular users.