It was first released on April 23, 2007 and won the 2007 Apple Design Award for Best User Experience.

The concept for Coda came from the web team at Panic, who would have five or six different programs for coding, testing and reference.

[3] Assigned to the project were 5 engineers, 3 people on support and testing, one designer, and one Japanese localizer.

Another notable feature is the ability to add a Local and Remote version to each site, allowing the user to synchronize the file(s) created, modified or deleted from their local and remote locations.

Coda 1.6 and later supports plug-ins, which are scripts usually written in command line programming languages like Cocoa, AppleScript, Perl, or even shell scripting languages like bash, that appear in Coda's menu bar and do specific tasks like appending URLs or inserting text at a certain point.