Carta alternatives: an honest buyer’s guide

First, check whether Carta is actually wrong for you

Most people searching for Carta alternatives are not unhappy with the software. They are unhappy with a renewal quote, or they have discovered that a US-first platform handles their national share scheme awkwardly, or they are pre-seed and cannot justify a platform yet. Those are three different problems with three different answers, and only one of them is solved by switching vendor.

If you are a Delaware C-corp that has raised institutional venture capital, the honest position is that Carta is probably still your best buy. Its real advantage is not a feature. It is that everyone around your cap table — your lead investor, your counsel, your auditor, the associate doing diligence at 11pm — has used it before. That familiarity is worth real money at a financing, and it is the thing a cheaper tool cannot sell you.

The reasons to genuinely look elsewhere are narrower than the search volume suggests: your jurisdiction is not the United States, your scope is much smaller than a platform, your token compensation is the actual problem, or your bill has grown past what the job is worth to you. If none of those apply, renegotiate rather than migrate. Moving a cap table is not free, and a botched migration is a diligence problem you will pay for later.

The market at a glance

Twelve products, sorted by the buyer they were designed for rather than by any ranking. There is no scoring here and no review stars, because a score across products built for different countries and different company stages would be a fiction. Glide is in the table because leaving your own product out of your own survey is its own kind of dishonesty — it is listed last and its caveat is the bluntest one in the column.

The alternatives, one at a time

Carta — the default, and why that matters

Carta manages the cap table of record for private companies, and sells 409A valuations, equity plan administration, stock-based compensation reporting and fund administration around it. Its scale is the product: investors and law firms know it, so a round closes with fewer emails about who owns what.

Two honest caveats. First, pricing scales with stakeholders, so a company that hires thirty people and keeps ex-employees on the register will see the bill move. Second, in January 2024 Carta announced it was exiting the secondary trading business after a customer publicly accused it of using cap table data to build its secondaries order book; Carta attributed the incident to an employee acting outside policy and its CEO wrote publicly that the company would exit the business to remove the conflict. That episode is a meaningful share of why this search term exists, and a buyer is entitled to weigh it.

Best for: US Delaware C-corps that have raised venture capital and want the option nobody has to defend in a board meeting.

Pulley — the closest like-for-like

Pulley does the same core job for the same kind of company, positioned as the founder-friendly alternative. Its distinguishing strength is round modelling: seeing what a term sheet does to your ownership before you sign it, on a cap table full of SAFEs and convertible notes. It publishes its pricing, which in this category is unusual enough to be a feature.

The trade-off is ecosystem gravity. Carta has more of it. In practice that means a small number of investors and firms will have processes built around Carta, and you will occasionally export a file rather than share a link. Whether that costs you anything depends entirely on who is on your cap table.

Best for: pre-Series A US founders who run their own modelling and want a published price. Read the head-to-head at /compare/pulley.

Ledgy — the Europe-first option

Ledgy was founded in Zurich and built around European company law from the start, which is a genuinely different thing from a US product with a Europe page. It handles the plan types European companies actually run — UK EMI and CSOP, French BSPCE, German VSOP, growth shares, RSUs — plus multi-jurisdiction reporting and employee-facing equity portals, with HRIS integrations so joiners and leavers do not get re-keyed by hand.

If your team sits in four countries and your pain is country-specific reporting rather than modelling, this is the product designed for that pain. Confirm scope on US-specific workflows if you are also a Delaware C-corp, since that is not its centre of gravity.

Best for: European headquarters with employees across several jurisdictions. See /compare/ledgy.

AngelList — cap table next to the capital

AngelList's centre of gravity is fund infrastructure: syndicates, SPVs, rolling funds and fund administration. The startup-side stack, including incorporation and cap table management, sits alongside it and is priced accordingly. If your investors are already raising vehicles on AngelList, having the cap table in the same place removes a reconciliation step that is more annoying than it sounds.

The honest limit is scope. A cap table that ships as one component of a fund-first platform is not going to out-administer a product whose entire company is organised around equity plans. For a seed-stage company that is usually fine. For a Series B with option holders in six countries it usually is not.

Best for: companies formed and funded inside the AngelList ecosystem, and fund managers. See /compare/angellist.

Fidelity Private Shares — the institutional answer

Fidelity Private Shares is the former Shoobx, acquired by Fidelity Investments in January 2023 and folded into its Stock Plan Services business. What that lineage buys you is equity management combined with document and financing workflow automation, backed by an institution that already administers public-company stock plans at scale.

The reason to consider it is continuity: if you expect to need public-company stock plan administration eventually, starting inside an organisation that does that is a coherent bet. The reason to hesitate is that institutional products come with institutional sales motions, which some early-stage teams find heavier than they want.

Best for: US private companies that want a large institution behind the registry and a path to later-stage plan administration.

Eqvista — the value end

Eqvista competes on price and leads with valuation work: cap table management bundled with company and 409A valuations. It is aimed at private companies and SMEs rather than at the venture default, and it is a reasonable answer to the specific complaint "I have eleven shareholders and I am being quoted like a Series B".

Cheaper platforms trade breadth for price. That is only a problem if the missing breadth is breadth you need, so write down the three things you actually have to do this year and check those, not the feature grid.

Best for: cost-sensitive companies with genuinely simple cap tables, and companies whose immediate need is a defensible valuation. See /compare/eqvista.

Cake Equity — Australia, New Zealand and the UK

Cake Equity is Australian-founded and serves startups across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and beyond, with employee share scheme administration as the centre of the product and a freemium entry point for very small cap tables. For a company whose main equity job is standing up an ESOP under local rules, a regional specialist removes a category of edge cases that a US-first platform will make you handle manually.

Best for: AU and NZ startups running employee share schemes, and UK companies that want a lighter product than a full platform.

Vestd — UK only, deliberately

Vestd is a UK share scheme platform built around HMRC-recognised schemes, most obviously EMI: valuation, HMRC notification, scheme setup and ongoing administration, with a Companies House integration. It is FCA-regulated and it does not pretend to be a global platform.

If you are a UK SME and the entire job is "run an EMI scheme properly", a UK specialist will beat a global generalist on the parts that actually go wrong — eligibility, valuation agreement, notification deadlines. If you later raise from US funds and redomicile, you will migrate. That is a real cost, and it is usually still the right sequence.

Best for: UK SMEs whose equity work is an HMRC-recognised scheme.

Astrella — registry lineage from a transfer agent

Astrella is EQ (Equiniti) — a transfer agent — offering cap table management with ownership tracking recorded on a private blockchain, aimed at private companies that want registrar-grade record keeping and shareholder analytics rather than a founder-facing modelling tool.

The question to ask yourself is whether you want registrar services or software. If you have a large or dispersed shareholder base and the pain is shareholder communication and record integrity, the transfer-agent lineage is the differentiator. If you are eight people and two SAFEs, it is not.

Best for: companies with dispersed shareholder registers who want a registrar relationship attached.

Qapita — India and Southeast Asia

Qapita is headquartered in Singapore with a large India presence, and covers cap table and ESOP management under Indian and Southeast Asian rules; it acquired the India-based ESOP administration business ESOP Direct, which is a fair signal of where its depth is.

For an Indian or Singaporean incorporation, ESOP administration is where the compliance work lives, and a platform built for those rules will save you more than a cheaper generic tool costs. If you expect to flip to a Delaware holding structure, ask how that transition is handled before you start.

Best for: India and Southeast Asia incorporations running ESOPs.

Toku — token compensation, which is a different product

Toku administers token-based compensation: token grants, vesting and distribution, plus the employment and tax compliance around paying people in tokens across many jurisdictions, and stablecoin payroll alongside it. It is not an equity cap table and does not try to be — it expects your share register to live elsewhere.

This matters because a lot of crypto-native companies arrive at "Carta alternatives" with the wrong question. If your share register is fine and your actual problem is that thirty contributors have token grants tracked in a spreadsheet with no withholding story, no cap table platform solves that. Toku is the mature option for that specific problem, and it ships today.

Best for: companies with a live token granting it to employees or contributors. See /compare/toku.

How to choose, in the order the questions actually bind

The question almost nobody asks: can you leave?

A cap table is the record of who owns your company. It is the single worst dataset to have trapped in a vendor you have outgrown, and migration pain is a real reason companies stay on platforms they have stopped liking.

There is an industry answer to this. The Open Cap Table Coalition — a non-profit whose members include US securities law firms and equity platform providers — publishes the Open Cap Format, an open JSON standard for cap table data designed so that a cap table can move between providers, law firms and investors without a bespoke reconciliation each time. Asking a vendor whether it can export OCF is a fast, concrete way to test how portable your data really is.

Where Glide fits, and where it does not

Glide is a stablecoin business account: USDC treasury, on-chain multisig vaults using Safe on EVM chains and Squads on Solana, cards, payroll and contractor payouts across eleven rails including ACH, SEPA, FPS and PIX. None of that is cap table management, and none of it replaces anything on this page.

In August 2026 Glide also shipped a cap table, Glide Equity. It holds shares, options, RSUs, SAFEs and convertible notes on an exact whole-share ledger, sets up from scratch or imports from your Carta export files, and adds email invitations, an accept-your-equity flow with e-signature, data rooms, document storage, recorded valuations and rounds, and an audit trail. Holders log in and see their own position; admins see the whole register. That is a real product and it is the reason this page is now vendor content.

It is also weeks old, and the honest framing of that is not modesty. A cap table is the record of who owns your company, checked by people whose job is to find errors in it. The products above have been through years of financings, audits and diligence; Glide Equity has not. It has no published pricing, no customers to name and no certifications. It does not perform 409A valuations — it records one you obtained elsewhere. It does not administer funds, does not file forms or produce ASC 718 reports, does not carry UK EMI or French BSPCE or German VSOP plan types, and despite the company it keeps, it does not hold token positions. If any of those is your job, buy from the list above.

The case for it is narrow and specific: you want the share register in the same place as the account the company actually banks from, you are early enough that a migration costs an afternoon, and you would rather be an early customer of something small than a late one of something large. That is a real preference and some people hold it. It is not the same as a recommendation, and this page is not going to dress it up as one.

Free either way is the calculator set: dilution, vesting, SAFE conversion, exit waterfall, founder equity split and token unlocks. No account, no vendor attached. Use them to model a decision, then record it wherever you decide.