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Carta Reviews: 4.4/5 — Solid Choice
Carta is a platform that helps people manage equity, build businesses, and invest in the companies of tomorrow. Our mission is to create more owners. Carta manages over two trillion dollars in equity for nearly two million people globally. The company is trusted by more than 30,000 companies, over 5,000 investment funds, and half a million employees for cap table management, compensation management, liquidity, venture capital solutions, and more.
| Capabilities |
API
|
|---|---|
| Segment |
Small Business
Enterprise
|
| Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, Mobile Android, Mobile iPad, Mobile iPhone |
| Training | Documentation |
| Languages | English |
Compare Carta with other popular tools in the same category.
The software works okay for cap table management - no problems there.
Every interaction with sales and CS has been a massive cluster and nightmare. I've sunk hours into finding past emails to share with them when they accidentally billed me over 2x our contract cost. They aren't supportive when you have issues, are slow to reply, and now, 2 years in, with no changes to our contract or number of stakeholders, they're trying to increase our subscription cost by 250%. It has been an egregiously bad experience.
The need to consolidate equity holder contracts and manage equity grants.
All info in one place. Employees can see their stock options and the cab table online for partners.
expensive and they are not supporting startups like other companies with discount
equity and VC shares management
Carta is a cap table management platform. It's something that can be relatively well done using even a simple excel spreadsheet and dropbox folder. However, Carta does candidly make it easier to manage (and importantly for employees) to view your equity within the business. It's a safe go-to for Cap Table, but now there are dozens of others, including Pulley that offer a near identical service.
After a "teaser" price for 1 year, Carta representative reached out saying they're tripling (3x) the cost of our license for the subsequent year. It's not impossible, but definitely inconvenient to transition. We will be offboarding, but it's been a headache. My recommendation: start with someone else. Carta ethics and price gouging are far from acceptable.
Cap table management.
There is little to like about Carta directly. Our investors do like it however and have pushed us to use it so they are presumably happy with it.
The list of things to dislike is large. 1. It is a very buggy piece of software. I often get error messages that are not helpful. Support also isn't very responsive. 2. The user interface is extremely confusing. There are only 4-5 actions I take in Carta and they are always difficult to find. 3. It is extremely expensive for what is effectively a spreadsheet.
Carta is our cap table management software.
Sales process was smooth. The fact that you get an onboarding person is helpful in theory. I don't know what else I would like about it, since we haven't been able to get past onboarding!
The required templates are inscrutable and the onboarding help is inadaquate to get through their template.
Trying to use it to get organized as we set up an employee stock option plan
The people that I spoke with are friendly.
+ Pricing is very opaque. + Interface is absolute garbage. + Support team sent me in circles.
We want to offload the mental load of managing a cap table.
The pages are well laid out and easy to navigate.
Carta’s handling of the Affirm IPO was a debacle. I believe that Affirm no longer works with Carta as a result. Every employee’s sell order was accidentally canceled on the day of the equity release. Carta did not have any alerts system, and did not notify affected employees for a month. Some employees were left tens of thousands of dollars worse off than had the error not occurred. I would generally be concerned about the quality of their software. Amusingly, one employee had $50K worth of stocks go missing from their account. Carta’s software engineers had to deploy a bug fix for these stocks to be visible again!
Switched providers now
Free 409a for portfolio companies, simplifies equity tracking when many stakeholders
Massive pricing increasing, pricing mistakes versus agreed pricing, major technical issues (unable to support EUR denominated share prices), lack of clarity on roadmap (operational metric reporting), complete lack of accountability by customer success and support team, poor onboarding.
Equity cap table management. It has helped our portfolio companies save money on 409a, it has also simplified administrative tracking for us (post implementation).
The ease of sending grants and managing cap table
Search tools can sometimes make it tough to find Board Docs
Cap Management
The service makes managing your cap table pretty easy. They do not have a great support system, but their platform is easy enough where you can figure out how to manage your documents.
Carta raised pricing on us by almost 10x without warning or explanation. When asking them about this, they basically dismissed my frustration with the way they went about charging us by essentially saying they dont want me to be frustrated but there's nothing they can do about it. Let me note that with this new price increase I was never sent a letter or email letting us know that our price would increase. Additionally, they did not send any receipts to our account and the only way I found out about the charges was that I happened to be doing our books. Unfortunately, this is not a company you can trust. We are, essentially, stuck at this point because we simply do not know what to do to manage the documents that we had entrusted to them when we first started our company.
We are trying to solve the problem of issuing vesting stock options to new employees on a small scale, and managing our cap table and document storage.
