Glide vs Carta

What Carta is

Carta is an equity management platform for private companies and the funds that back them: the cap table of record, 409A valuations, equity plan administration and stock-based compensation reporting, plus fund administration for VC and PE firms. It has the widest adoption among US venture-backed startups, which means investors, law firms and auditors already know how to work with it.

What Carta is genuinely good at

• The default. Your investors, your lawyers and your auditors have almost certainly used it before, which removes friction at diligence and at every round
• Breadth: cap table, 409A valuations, equity plan administration, stock-based compensation reporting and fund administration under one contract
• Scales from seed through late stage without a migration
• A large, genuinely useful education library that a lot of the industry learned equity from

Who Carta is for

• US Delaware C-corps that have raised institutional venture capital
• Companies that want cap table, 409A valuations and ASC 718 reporting from one vendor
• Boards and investors who want a registry their counsel already recognises
• Fund managers who need fund administration next to portfolio holdings

Choose Carta over Glide if

• You are a US venture-backed startup and want the option nobody has to defend in a board meeting
• You want your 409A valuation from the same vendor that holds your cap table
• You are raising and want diligence to be boring
• You need fund administration and portfolio data in the same place

Trade-offs worth checking yourself

These are trade-offs, not defects, and scope in this market changes. Confirm anything that would change your decision directly with Carta.

• Pricing scales with the number of stakeholders on your cap table, so the bill grows as you hire and as ex-employees keep vested options
• Breadth means paying for a platform when some companies only need a registry — a cheaper specialist can be a better fit at the low end
• In January 2024 Carta announced it was exiting the secondary trading business after a customer publicly accused it of using cap table data to source its secondaries order book. Carta attributed the incident to an employee acting outside policy. Whatever your read, the episode is why a share of the "carta alternatives" search volume exists
• Built around US structures first. If your equity plan is a UK EMI scheme, a French BSPCE or an Indian ESOP, check how well the workflows fit before signing
• If you issue a token as well as equity, confirm current scope directly with any vendor — this part of the market changes fast enough that no comparison page should assert it

Side by side

What Glide does today

Glide is a stablecoin business account that added a cap table, Glide Equity, in August 2026. It covers the register and the workflow around it; it does not cover valuations, fund administration, national plan types or tokens, and it is the newest product in this comparison by a wide margin.

• Glide Equity: a cap table of record for shares, options, RSUs, SAFEs and convertible notes, on an exact whole-share ledger
• Set up from scratch or migrate from Carta by uploading your Carta export files
• Email invitations, an accept-your-equity flow with e-signature, and holder logins that show a holder their own position only
• Data rooms, document storage, recorded valuations and rounds, and a full audit trail
• Stablecoin treasury: hold and move USDC on Solana and EVM chains
• On-chain multisig vaults — Safe on EVM, Squads on Solana — with M-of-N approvals
• Multi-rail payouts (ACH, SEPA, FPS, PIX, wire) alongside on-chain settlement
• Cards, payroll and contractor payments from the same balance
• Free equity calculators — dilution, vesting, SAFE conversion, waterfall, token unlocks

Other options worth a look