Carta Reviews & Product Details

Capdesk makes managing your cap table and issuing share options effortless, such a time saver. The platform also makes the share options less opaque for the team and Capdesk's secondaries feature has the potential to be a game changer. Great service in getting set up and ongoing.

Great platform, yet to come across anything to dislike

Cap table management Share option issuance Employee compensation

Incredibly simple platform to manage option grants and board approvals.

We use Carta as our online board book. The investor update and minute documentation is still nascent but getting better all the time. Would love to see them partner with a minute transcription service.

Simple cap table management and centralized documentation for board management. We also use Carta to manage our annual 409a valuation. While I have not quantified the exact time, it easily saves a part-time FTE. We would have a tough time going back to manual tracking.

This is easily one of the best SaaS products that I have ever purchased. Not only does it do exactly what you need it to do but it has a tremendous ability to report and provide details and insights on our cap table. It is consistently one of the most reliable tools that I have. The level of detail and ability to customize plans and reports are unparalleled. This was something that I had to manage through spreadsheets in previous roles which was a nightmare. I trust Carta implicitly. The CSM experience here us also unparalleled. Every question is answered with speed an detail. The customer support is unreal. We have regular check ins and our reps are able to position new ideas and options that we can use for our use cases.

I would love to have payroll integrations. My biggest issue is around on-boarding and offboarding. All of this in manual. If there was a proper payroll integration I could manage all of this in real time.

We are using Carta to manage our cap table. We have managed to streamline our reporting and create custom reports that allow us to model equity burn and report to investors very quickly and with accuracy. Many of our investors also use Carta to do their data collection which makes life very easy as they can pull cap table data in real time through that integration. We are evaluating 409a services.

User interface, ease of use. Secondary functionality.

Reporting could be better. New chat isn’t nearly as good. It seems you’ve reduced your service hours or levels.

Cap table management and conducting secondaries.

Intuitive interface. Ability to roll back cap table in time. Always an accurate source of truth that our legal team can help manage. Can handle several special capitalization scenarios we've encountered. We use Carta for 409A valuations as well.

Seems like they have a number of features that you have to purchase above and beyond a base subscription (e.g., liquidation modeling)

No longer have to worry about passing spreadsheets back and forth with our legal counsel. We have a single source of truth that's always current.

Super easy to keep track of employee stock option grants, vesting, exercise, etc. Annual 409A valuation report included in the annual fee. One central database for all your investor and investment information.

As a Canadian based company, as of this writing, we cannot make use of the full financing functionality of issuing securities and collecting funds via the Carta platform. Data room folder updates and file manipulation is limited. (i.e. no drag and drop capabilities. Need to delete and reload files if you want to move them to different folders.)

Cap Table is updated in real-time. Can use Carta to perform waterfall what-if analysis. Can use Carta to communicate directly with investors. No longer need to maintain a separate investor database or Excel list with current communication information. Can create a financing data room for prospective investors to conduct due diligence, all the while tracking access and requesting NDA signature (if needed).

That I can easily understand my cap table & model scenarios for future fundraising, taking care of all the details like employee vesting schedules & note conversions. It makes it simple to communicate to investors their ownership stakes and simple to share with potential investors what their investment would achieve. Setup (after needing our law firm to do the work) was pretty easy to use. I'd like to find more ways to use it to manage corp dev strategic aspects of my business

UI is still non-intuitive in many cases, requiring me to hunt through menus & try things. 409a process feels cumbersome & expensive, it would be great to automate this & make it cheaper. I feel the cash management and accounting integration weren't that useful, and the dashboard didn't really tell me anything too valuable

scenario modeling has been really useful, so has being able to give employees visibility into their holdings. Simple to share cap table data with investors, avoids having to manually manage employee ownership and vesting schedules, and calculate pro-format via my law firm

The quick personal support from real humans has always been effective for me. They did the right thing allowing for different profiles under the same login so I can manage my own shares, and then separately manage the company's cap table. I found the ISO workflow very easy to deal with. The e-signature integration is well done, and the various prebuilt downloads are just about always exactly what I need.

I don't really have complaints.. it seems they are working on a "data room" thing that will help me more. Maybe be more pro-active about things that need renewal like 409a? Perhaps a way to link up to a calendar and pre-plan due dates for things. Unless I just missed, add a quick way to see fully-diluted and undiluted versions of table?

ISO / cap management and associated docs and workflow, and 409a generation. Being to share this information and access with the board has been very helpful, and streamlining the 409a process has been a major timesaver.

The easy-to-use and intuitive interface as well as the wide variety of reporting functionality. Also, it seems like Carta really listens to customer feedback and continues to implement new features that really add value.

I really can't think of anything I don't like.

We do our whole equity management in Carta, i.e. stakeholder management, cap table management, 409a valuations, stock option expense accounting, etc.

Management of stock certificates, cap table management and options management.

Some investors had issues accepting stock certificates although that was uncommon

Centralized cap table data saved me time with spreadsheets. I didn’t have coat or management complications in managing stock certificates which saved me time. Confidence that I had data correct.

I love Carta because it makes the stock option exercise process for employees seamless. It is all done through the Carta portal. No physical cash or documents are required, it is all done electronically. Drafting new employee stock options is a breeze too. You can bulk import new option grants by filling out an import template that you can download from the Carta website. Carta's 3921 reporting feature is also incredible. I used to use another website to generate the 3921s for my employees but now Carta has a feature that generates all employee 3921s with the touch of a button.

I think Carta's exercise approval page could use some work. Right now, you cannot decline an exercise request without reaching out to Carta support. Carta support is very responsive so it is not a major problem at all, but it would be nice if the Carta admins can decline exercise requests without getting Carta support involved. I noticed that they added the ability for Carta admins to decline exercise requests for a short time. They removed the feature fairly quickly and I assume it is because they are still trying to work out some issues with it. Hopefully they will launch it again soon.

We used to track employee stock option exercises via a spreadsheet and it was prone to so many formula and other cell errors so we were in constant fear that out stock option accounting was always wrong. With Carta, everything is integrated so if an employee exercises a stock option, I know that it will automatically be reflected on our Cap table and there is nothing to worry about.

The people who work at Carta - from our account manager to the customer support - are really what sets it apart. Yes, they have the best software. Yes, their software is the most user friendly we have seen. Yes, they have scale and more than half of our 70+ portfolio companies were already using them. But, it's really the quality of the people there that has made everything from our onboarding to daily usage feel 10x easier than we could have ever expected.

We've been using Carta for a year and have yet to come across an issue we want fixed or a feature we want added. They are always one step ahead of us!

We use Carta for our entire fund admin. We are a $100m fund and Carta has been the perfect solution for us.

Carta has simplified the process for issuing and tracking options, handling the complex task of calculating stock option compensation expense for financial reporting purposes, and obtaining affordable 409a valuations.

There is really nothing that we dislike. We have been a customer for over 4 years and have seen continued improvements/enhancements in the function and features of the software.

Tracking stock options, calculating stock option expense, and obtaining affordable 409a valuations. Carta has solved all of these problems for us at an affordable rate.

It is easy to see how many options are granted and how many of them are vested. I haven't exercised any options yet but there are also stats on this as well.

It has a two-factor login option but requires entering the pin every 15 days.

I could not track how many options were vested with my current company. It is good to be aware on this.

Straightforward UI in front of a complex process

pricing is not as competitive as others, but the value is still there.

Managing multiple investments in a single environment and experience

Very easy to use, staff very helpful. It helped us in investor monitoring

I had no problems with the product, very easy to use

Investor updates, equity management

Carta is easy to adopt and user-friendly. I appreciate the simplicity of the vesting schedule and the exercise simulator that allows me to make the right decision on exercise timing.

1. It supports only US regulation. For startup setup in Cayman, Carta cannot issue shares. 2. The shareholders' emails are shown in the captable by default and cannot be removed.

Manage the ESOP easily, with 24/7 access to captable, 409A form and vesting schedlue.

Carta's user experience is excellent. I have multiple accounts and have never in 6 years needed to reach out to support or had any issues.

I have not had any issues using the platform.

Keeping equity simple, easily accessible and trackable.

We've been a carta customer for years and, most recently, wanted to lean on Carta to help us understand expense accounting for options grants. The team assessed our needs and provided scalable recommendations that allow us to shed manual worksheets!

The integrations with Gusto isn't perfect and still requires me to double check.

Cap table management and employee stock options grants.

The Cap Table, Round Modelling and HMRC exports save a lot of time when needing to file/share info with 3rd parties. The dashboards give a clear view of ownership both fully diluted and undiluted. The process of issuing option grants is easy and the ability to send an email update to all shareholders instead of emailing is also a great time saver.

The integration with Docusign has woeful support. We ended up having to disconnect it because we were stuck between Capdesk and Docusign when it wouldn't work and so now we pay for each envelope despite having our own Docusign account which is annoying.

Having to manually track the cap table, and execute share option agreements.