My impressions after 2 weeks

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I want to share my thoughts as a paid user for the first 2 weeks where I used Fibery almost daily. Maybe it will help new potential users and Fibery team as feedback. I used most Fibery competitors, especially Coda and Clickup, Notion not too much, but enough to keep my personal wiki there.

Overall impression is highly positive, even though there are a few annoyances which I’m sure will be fixed/added soon.

What I liked over Coda/Clickup and the major reasons why I’m moving 70% of my stuff to Fibery:

The way you can set relationship between data

Coda requires a cross-doc hack for deeper connections, Clickup is very weak regarding this… they have something called “linking” but’s very basic. In Fibery everything is so smooth and simple.

The UI and UX

Coda UI feels a bit strange and even though I like embedding views inside docs, they are not clean. Their board view is also really bad, but they have the feed view which is super cool (and I miss it greatly). Clickup has a great looking UI but feels too heavy, I don’t need lots of stuff.

I also don’t like how they handle different views - it’s hard to navigate. Both UI and UX in Fibery is really good (with the exception of a few stuff), I can find things easily and can make the data show almost exactly as I want.

The board view and whiteboard view

I used these a lot, especially the board view since I used Trello for a few years. Coda has it so bad I can’t use it and there’s no native whiteboard. Clickup has a great looking board view but doesn’t compare in flexibility with Fibery. The way you can set the card size, display data inside and row grouping in Fibery is quite awesome.

Other awesome things

  • back-references - quite big one, even though I haven’t used it much yet. I find that now I need to think twice if I need a relationship or I can simply use a mention and a back reference - which shows great flexibility.
  • creating entities in batch directly from docs or whiteboard - amazing!
  • showing items/entities in the left side and being able to add their own views there. Super cool! I just hope you can do something to filter them out, hide them or add them to a folder.

There are also few things I miss a lot in the other tools and I’m obliged to keep 30% or so of my workload there.

Less featured permissions/sharing options

Both Coda and Clickup are great at this, Clickup being a bit better. What I miss the most is view or even entity level sharing or permissions. I just want to share one thing to a co-worker from a different app and I can’t do that. I also can’t share anything to non-users… a business works with lots of different people and docs are shared between them, we can’t get everyone inside Fibery just to share a doc.

Automations and integrations

This is a big one. Even though I managed to use Integromat and Fibery API to make some things work as I want, I spent 2 days on it. I can’t imagine too many people being this patient.

Automations in both Clickup and Coda are really good. Clickup is also better here, it’s easier to set them up - they are a good starting point. Some examples:

  • setting up reminders or daily summary emails
  • when an entity is created/changed => do this and that to another entity or create a new one
  • pull data from 3rd party services directly - Coda and Stackby(another competitor) does this great.
  • buttons that can be set by non-devs. Even for devs takes too much to set things up, test, etc…

Other important but not so big issues

  • table view is very basic. No way to edit items in bulk and no grouping there (you can check Clickup list view grouping)
  • can’t search in docs and other fields. I like how fast I can search for stuff using names, but there should be an extra option called like “Advanced” that will let you search deeper.
  • would love more style options on rich edit like font color and text background color

A few notes about the very first impression

I think Fibery has a great potential, just that it’s a bit confusing at first. I’m a dev and overlooked it a few times just because I didn’t understand what’s the deal with all that arrows connected to colored blocks, it looked super complex and scared me away a little… I had to dig a bit to get it. For non-devs I’m sure it’s hard.

I think the biggest selling point is the flexibility it gives for a company to set up their own system exactly as they want and if you figure out how to present that clearly I think it will be huge.

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As someone very familiar with ClickUp and Coda, I love how well you captured key differences here.
Can I ask if you regularly use those other two tools? And if so, how do you decide what processes you use each one for?

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I used Clickup more often than Coda lately. In Coda we have what’s more related with docs: company wiki which is semi-private, hiring stuff and even tests that we send to candidates and some other documents that we send to clients and collaborators which are also semi-private(shared by private link).

Permissions and a better wiki is what holding me personally to not move them from Coda to Fibery.

Clickup is very good at to-do lists, tasks and having an overview of what work is needed to be done. We use Clickup mostly for that + running meetings (but I think we’ll move that to Fibery soon). Recurring tasks and summary/notification emails we got in the morning are also some very useful feature that might keep us for a while in Clickup. I guess all these will be fixed when Fibery will add automations.

However Employee On-boarding and training, User and Product management, Software development, Support KB and a few other stuff are or will be moved completely to Fibery.

I’m in touch with many SaaS companies (my customers and myself are SaaS companies) and I see lots of them trying to set up a system inside a single tool. If Fibery can get close to match their needs with basic stuff on each major category, people will switch without a doubt.

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I agree there is a huge need for somebody to solve getting a solution that can be a true “all-in-one.” Fibery has a way to go, but it’s very important that the team here wants to accomplish this. With some other tools, such as Coda mentioned here, even their Product teams are not completely committed to solving this. Real opportunity for Fibery if the roadmap comes together!

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The thing with all-in-one solution is that can become super heavy which leads to a bad UX feeling. This seems to happen with Clickup mostly. Fibery has the big advantage that you can easily “build” the app you work on so you won’t end up with much fluff that you don’t need.

Coda and Notion are somehow better at this than Clickup, Monday or other project management solutions, but they lack flexibility on data handling.

On any route they take, automation is a big must. Great data handling(including relationship setup) + great wiki and different data views(with powerful customization options) + automations => you can do amazing stuff and replace many tools

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Really interesting perspectives. I’m not a ‘dev’ in the traditional sense, but fibery was the first tool where I felt straight away that the developers’ mindset and intentions were really close to mine. Weirdly, I love it already, even though it has so many weaknesses compared with Notion/Coda/Clickup/Airtable…
I just feel comfortable in it, and have a hope that the things I am missing will not be too long coming (formula in name field, permissions by user role or group membership, version histories, embedding views in docs, etc.)

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@Chr1sG Thank you for the feedback! All these things are in plans for this year, the nearest is formula for name field.

Can you provide some info about desired permissions scheme?

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Hi Michael, and thanks for the prompt response. The permissions thing was something where I felt it might be easier to assign people to groups (like R&D, HR, marketing etc.) and then determine App access level based on group membership, instead of a per person level.

Obviously, I can imagine there are complexities when people are members of more than one group, but won’t be insoluble.

By the way, it seems like the access levels don’t work for Documents, or is it just me? I am able to edit docs within the App even when I have read-only access at the App level.

Also, there’s an interesting discussion to be had about what should/shouldn’t be possible for a user to do from within an App for which he/she has full access if there is a link to an entity in an ‘inaccessible’ App. Should he/she be able to create/remove links to uneditable entities? No easy answer I know :frowning:

I noted that a user can link him/herself to entities in Apps for which they otherwise don’t have permission, directly from the people page…

Hope I’m making sense :slight_smile:

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By the way, I really appreciate your open approach. The posts, the humour (https://fibery.io/anxiety) and the general transparency are awesome. I have occasionally been responsible for recommending platforms for companies I work for to adopt, but I have only once previously spent my own money on software (well, as a grown up, so ignoring all the Spectrum / Amiga games I bought in my youth) and I feel like paying for a month as a token gesture of appreciation.
For what it’s worth, I may be about to launch a startup, and I have no qualms about suggesting that we go with fibery, even though I saw that recently you updated your Go-To Market strategy to aim a bit higher than us :stuck_out_tongue:

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me too tried experiment with both click up and fibery , as no code , project manger , the positive side is the simplicity , the sporead sheet model data flow better compared to task based data flow relations , less relational data base model in click up .However from user , the more private , public need is not very clear both in click up and fibery , Item share allow more people to acess is the sucess for wikipedia able to the world britanic encycleopedia biz in few years , no one even imagines .Thus the b future expansion need to have more focus on this regards to members user , public open , guest , many complicate too inclick up . Thus public, closed more presently , semiprivate model can make , wiki doc more open , project semi private , task level closed permissions to new items . as user increas the cost goes to the company , underutilized for small biz , non profits , non gov biz