Carta Reviews

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

- 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

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Carta

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

The ease with which data can be entered

Cons

Reports for Audit purposes can be painful

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

I do not like anything about this software.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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).

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

The pages were easy to navigate and well laid out.

Cons

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!

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

- 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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.