Carta

Vorteile

Love how Carta automatically updates me as to when I have more vested options and shows a progress bar as to how far I still have to go for all of my stock options to vest.

Nachteile

No complaints but I probably haven't used this software at a deep enough level to truly find anything difficult or something to dislike about this software.

Vorteile

- In-depth knowledge database that gets you started quickly
- Easy to use interface that allows for efficient navigation
- Carta combines equity and salary compensation benchmarks and adjusts for size, location, industry
- Well structured reports, funding overviews, cap tables, and ability to create a data room for investors
- Free annual 409A valuation report

Nachteile

- Expensive for startups
- Salary compensation tool should be included in base subscription
- More comparative details with similar companies (benchmarking functions)

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Carta

Vorteile

As start up COO, Carta has been saving lots of time to grant stocks or stock options. Before using Carta, we always had to go through the attorney and it was hard to track.

Nachteile

It would be great if Carta has option to sell or exercise stock options directly. Then, it automatically sends the emails to existing shareholders and among them, if there are who are interested, they have options to purchase

Vorteile

When I have issues with this software (which is often), Carta's support team is usually very responsive and will work with me on the issue.

The software itself works fine, I guess, as it rarely has technical problems. The offered tutorial does help, and I appreciate the Carta team for putting the tutorial together.

Nachteile

Not very intuitive to use! A major part is requiring a good foundation in securities and stock options knowledge, which I clearly do not have.

One HUGE gripe I have with Carta is that there is no quick way to bulk update a set of option grants, but rather I have to go into EACH option grant, upload the document I need to upload, add a note of what I am updating, wait for 5 seconds for the update to occur, and repeat with the rest of the 1000+ option grants. I have been uploading/updating these option grants for a few days now while trying to do my other work, and I am still updating as I write this review on a Saturday evening. I don't know whether to keep on updating while cursing at the Carta screen, or just call it quits for the day. Also, the update generates an email notification for the option holders, and of course a good amount of them send me questions afterwards despite our team having already prepared a mass message for our Chief Sales Officer to send out that explains these notifications. I'm at the point where I'm inclined to curse out the next sales employee that asks me what these Carta notifications are for.

Vorteile

Equity management is turnkey. Ability to share with our Attorneys and Accountants. Ability to quickly pull data and reports for outside Funds and Auditors. Self-serve option portal for Employees.

Nachteile

Some of the nuances are complex, but the Software works. It takes some training, but the effort is worth the time to keep all your Equities in a single ledger.

Vorteile

I love how we can get updates based on several other clients' comp data. This allows us to remain competitive.

Nachteile

I would love to see historical data. Ie: With existing employees who are brought in at an IC_ or MGR_ level, a couple of years ago, it would be helpful to see where they were brought in within the band (XX%ile) back when the market was showing that historical data.

Vorteile

The ease with which data can be entered

Nachteile

Reports for Audit purposes can be painful

Vorteile

Their documentation and blog are very helpful in understanding all the terms and nuance of stock options.

Nachteile

There is nothing that I don't like - the software does a solid job servicing our need for managing stock options.

Vorteile

Easily see all investments with my current company. Easy to read and understand. I get an email each month with updated vested shares.

Nachteile

None that I can think of at this time. Will see when I am fully vested.

Vorteile

Easy and efficient way to check on equity status. I also like the language / articles that Carta provides about stocks and stock options.

Nachteile

The platform is straightforward and easy to use I have no complaints

Vorteile

La semplicità di utilizzo e l’ intuitività sono sicuramente due dei punti forti di Carta!

Nachteile

Al momento non ho riscontrato nessun aspetto negativo (a mio riguardo e per l’uso che ne faccio)

Vorteile

If you're looking for a simple piece of software to track employees' options and their vesting schedules, Carta gets the job done. Employees will be notified as options vest over time, and can even simulate exercising their vested options.

Nachteile

The average person does not understand what options are, or how vesting schedules or exercising options works. Carta could improve this experience for users by perhaps incorporating basic explanations of terminology into the software (ie: with info buttons next to certain terms). This would certainly give users an increased understanding of and sense of control over their financial assets.

Vorteile

It saves time and effort by giving up tiring spreadsheets that consume a lot of time and require a lot of manual operations. When I encounter a problem, Carta support team is usually quick to respond and works with me to solve the problem and is also easy to use, which makes work on developing data with high accuracy

Nachteile

I don't really have a complaint about Carta other than that it's hard to back up

Vorteile

It solved a hugely expensive problem very easily (I used to have to manage our cap table in excel, print out paperwork and issue my own stock certificates. However, every time I look at software options, I was stuck going back to the same system. Using lawyers is truly insane cost-wise, so we manged it in-house. I talked to users of all competitive products and every single one noted errors in those products that led to board-level action and highly expensive fixes. This is NOT something you want to mess around with. Carta, however, was FAR superior to all other options in ease-of-use, accuracy of data, security, rapidity of product development, and ability to scale along with our company. They could make any adjustments needed without the needs for costly external counsel or board interaction.

Nachteile

When we first started using it (nearly 5 years ago), we found a few bugs in accounting reporting on edge cases (we had a couple outlier cases unusual for a company of our size at the time ). The Carta team quickly made adjustments to their software to resolve the problems however (and have continued to respond quickly to feedback).

Vorteile

In theory, it should be easy to manage our portfolio of over 50 different holdings.

Nachteile

We are investors, not issuers. As investors, we have 3 big issues.
A). The site is SO SLOW, I literally end up e-mailing the portfolio company to ask for the information.
B) The UX for the portfolio is nonsensical. For example, if you accept a certificate, you are not taken to the holding,s rather to some summary page from which you then have to search for what you just accepted and if you are not in the right "portfolio", it doesn't show up.
C) Carta makes it very difficult for one to keep a backup.

Vorteile

Very easy to use
Option grants to employees are all done through the software
There are reports for all our needs, from stock based comp calculations, min disclosure for financial statement audits, etc...
Customer support is top notch. Chat feature allows you to live chat support team with minimal wait time.

Nachteile

Reports take a very long time to populate and the files can be extremely large. Some report files are over 20 MB's

Vorteile

I don't find the software to be very intuitive or helpful. It does appear that the people behind it know the business domain, but beyond that I can't say much for it.

Nachteile

Their customer service is impossible to reach, and when you reach them very unhelpful. They clearly don't value their customer relationships. They check in periodically to see if they can upsell me to add-on products that aren't useful to our business.

Vorteile

Carta helps us track all of our company's stock options in one place, providing simple reports and instant changes to our cap table.

Nachteile

Changes to Stakeholders now require more steps than they did in the previous format, it is a bit more time consuming when making a lot of changes.

Vorteile

It's easy to see when I can exercise shares, and it's easy to see my current holdings.

Nachteile

It's such a bare website. I would like some more features, maybe educationally-focused links and ways to track the value of the shares, if there is any information.

Vorteile

I like that it is commonly used in tech companies so many investors are already comfortable with it.

Nachteile

Some functionality is difficult to locate and the help function references a different version of the software than i have.

Vorteile

The pages were easy to navigate and well laid out.

Nachteile

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!

Vorteile

Overall, Carta makes it really easy to not only view your holdings, but each individual grant and what has vested. It also allows you to exercise options that are available to you.

Nachteile

Our company went through a re-price so all old grants had to be cancelled and reissued. It's not easy to tell which grants are active vs which ones are voided.

Vorteile

I do not like anything about this software.

Nachteile

Carta is awful, bottom line. We cancelled our account on November 6th, 2022 but they went ahead and charged us nearly $5k on December 18th. I have reached out to the "success manager" assigned to our account to refund our money since we cancelled and she just doesn't respond to my emails. I have called the support line but they just redirect us to our "success manager." They are an unethical nightmare. Avoid at all cost.

Vorteile

- Keeps track of multiple companies in a singular account
- Great data visualization tools for exercised vs. vested, etc.
- Repository for pertinent documentation

Nachteile

- Mobile application is lacking some features that the web app has (i.e. documentation repo).
- Sometime difficult to understand the workflow required to accomplish a task. There are multiple ways to do the same thing, which can leave the user feeling a bit lost at times.

Vorteile

Uncluttered user interface. Very obvious where to click & navigate. It's nice to track my overall equity and individual grants. The best feature is the ability to simply forecast overall share allotments across varying vesting schedules.

Nachteile

There isn't a robust feature set beyond the basics to track your equity, but I'm not sure how much more I would need for that.

Vorteile

Software is very pretty. Our rep is available consistently for phone calls to discuss onboarding.

Nachteile

If you have any non-standard options, Carta is probably not for you. We have been onboarding for months now, and our account rep has done almost nothing. We gave him the information we had, but he doesn't seem to grasp the spreadsheets so we've basically had to do the uploading ourselves. Now that we are almost ready for go-live, I still can't find information in the system that I am looking for. Additionally, the software doesn't make up agreements (for example, if you loaded up a template). You just upload your agreements into the system after they are made on another platform. So basically it's a hosted skin for shares reporting? Not sure, and not happy.

Vorteile

I love being able to go in and see how many shares I have, how many have vested, and when the next shares will vest. It has a portfolio section as well that shows how many shares will vest and on what day those shares vest. Overall, it is a very simple program for the user and (from what I have heard) very easy to set everything up on as a company.

Nachteile

I hope that one day Carta will get into other markets to allow you to invest in other private companies. I feel like they have a great platform and would be good at adding a feature like this.

Vorteile

I really like using Carta to manage our stock options for employees. I find it simple to use both for administrators as well as employees who are creating accounts and reviewing options.

Nachteile

Sometimes I find the reports are tedious to complete because there are many options to select. Sometimes it does take some time to make multiple changes.

Vorteile

I've used Carta through multiple companies and I love how it takes complex legal language and breaks it down for you to simply understand and visualize in its predictive outcomes.

Nachteile

I don't have any negative input. The software does exactly what I'd hope it would.

Vorteile

Love this to track options, RSUs and shares. Support is also helpful and does its best to answer questions.

Nachteile

The commissions on sales are a bit over the norm for a retail brokerage-type program. Especially bad if you have small lot sizes

Vorteile

Carta is very convenient if you want your employees (and ex employees) to be able to track their vesting over time.

Nachteile

We've had issues with several aspects of Carta:-onboarding - we were not set up with the right vesting schedule and several employees that were terminated in our system are now showing as continuously vesting-customer support - when these issues were brought to Carta (and in our eyes, fairly urgent) it was extremely slow to get a response. Our issue took several weeks to resolve - even though employees had access to the system and could see incorrect shares.-functionality - I would love the ability to input more information on our equity program for employees, but the system is not as customizable as we'd like.

Vorteile

app for iOS and a web portal with Two Factor Authentication required before anything can be used. Gives an extra layer of assurance that only the intended user is accessing sensitive financial information.

Nachteile

The password requirements are kind of funny, starts off by saying "Your password needs to be at least good and 9 characters long.", then changes the message as more characters are typed. The definition of "good" is eventually revealed.

Vorteile

I love having an up-to-date Cap Table at all times and being able to model exit and funding round scenarios quickly. Integrated stock ledger and 409A valuations are a plus, too. I plan to implement investor and board communication into the platform this year.

Nachteile

I wish the scenario modeling provided optionality around convertible notes. But the file outputs allowed me to manipulate the data once in excel very easily. And they were presentation ready.

Vorteile

Our company gives employees stock options and we use Carta to organize/distribute/view your stock options. It is pretty helpful and easy to use. You can check out each stock option separately so you know exactly when you received each amount and when it vests and such

Nachteile

I don't have anything I don't like about it, I guess I just wish I knew what else the website can do, I only really know about accepting/viewing my stock options.

Vorteile

I like how for every piece of information, Carta has detailed explanations for it. It's great for new people who are not familiar with how option grants work.
Interface is clean, and I like the different animations when you sign or purchase grants.
Also like the monthly email about the vesting progress.

Nachteile

Don't really have any problems with the software. I am just a user of the tool with very limited permissions. There is not much I can do on the site.

Vorteile

I'm not a finance expert, nor a lawyer. That's why I like Carta so much for managing my employee stock benefits. It keeps all the records and information in a single place that I can access easily, along with helpful guides and tutorials for what everything means.

I also really like the interactive vesting schedule/option exercise calculator. They are both quite helpful in visualizing stock benefits.

Nachteile

I don't really have a complaint about Carta other than I wish it integrated with other employee benefits platforms, like Justworks. Obviously Carta is much more specialized than Justworks, and there are probably legal/security reasons it is separate, but it would be cool to have everything in one place.

Vorteile

Carta is a very cool cap table management software with various functionality answering the majority of the needs of a startup for this kind of software. The UX is very nice and easy to use.

Nachteile

One of the downside of Carta is its CS. As long as everything is working it's perfect but when you need their CS you will have to wait a long time before your problem is resolved

Vorteile

Carta is fairly easy to navigate, as the administrator I can answer questions employees may have as far as vesting and their options.

Nachteile

Some of the reports are not easily identifiable, you have to select the options you want when running the report.

Vorteile

Never knew such platforms existed until we started using one. It's a nice, easy to use platform, allowing us information about everything ESOP's and the related terms for us within the organization.

Nachteile

It would have been great had there been more information on how to actually navigate through the platform.

Vorteile

Easy to navigate and helped me create a better understanding of where I was with my equity

Nachteile

Trouble adding banks that aren't big names, but was able to overcome

Vorteile

The UI is very slick. Easy to navigate. I'm sure when Carta is relevant to me, it will be easy to use.

Nachteile

Don't really know how I'm supposed to interact with it. Not sure if that's my company's fault or Carta's customer success team... All I know is one day I'll have RSU's in there and it will become more relevant.

Vorteile

As a user, it made managing, accepting, and understanding equity stakes easy—and the UI was very intuitive.

Nachteile

Some features were still under construction. While they looked exciting, it was frustrating to think I could use them, then not have access.

Vorteile

I love having everything in one place, and easy to use, purchase and organize all of my grants and vested stock.

Nachteile

I wish that I could use some sort of market value prediction tool, as well as have deductions from my paycheck taken out to be used for stock.

Vorteile

Nothing - over complex and awful UX and customer support

Nachteile

The setup is beyond painful. The support staff are incredibly arrogant and everything about your business has to fit around Carta. You can't even stop the annual subscription without following the 'Carta off boarding process' which is just as hard as onboarding and is simply designed to help their finance team...classic lack of customer focus. Truly painful in every way.
Seriously avoid unless you are a huge company and you feel like wasting enormous amounts of time

Vorteile

Carta allows you to store all your financial investment documents.

Nachteile

The interface and experience are terrible. It is clunky and not intuitive. It is very expensive and the customer support is not as attentive as they should be. There is no easy ability to forecast and project.

Vorteile

Carta made the implementation easy and the ongoing maintenance has been a breeze. I really like that not only does Carta manage my cap table but that 409A valuations are included in my plan so when we're ready to kick that off I just have to press a button.

Nachteile

I have found it a bit difficult to add new users, debt issuances etc. and my customer service rep has generally pushed me toward recordings of user Q&A sessions rather than answer my questions.

Vorteile

I love their communications skills aka the emails they send out when I've vested shares.

Nachteile

I have no qualms or issues with Carta at this time.

Vorteile

The portal provides easy access to employees to manage their ESOPs. It gives you the complete vesting schedule. The admin can just keep adding more ESOPs as needed to employees. the portal also allows to exercise options among other features. A easy to use from an employee perspective with complete security

Nachteile

Nothing a such as a user. As of now my experience has been positive only.

Vorteile

Very easy to set up and to use
I can track my stock options very easily and see when I can exercise.

Nachteile

No cons that I can think of, it's pretty basic but works very well.

Vorteile

No hassle, very easy to use. It has a clean layout and makes it easy to view all your paperwork. It sends me an email each time more stock options vest.

Nachteile

I haven't hand any issues with it so far. My only complaint is that it's a very specific tool for what amounts to legal document management and those documents could be shared and managed another way. But it works well and has a clear goal, so it's fine.