Equity management
Equity management- Fund management
Fund management - Fund managementFund management
- Fund managementFund management
Your cap table is the one record every future transaction depends on. It decides what your co-founder owns, what your employees can exercise, what your investors receive in a liquidation, and what a buyer is actually buying. For most startups it begins life as a spreadsheet that one person updates from memory in the week after each round closes.
That works, right up until it doesn’t. The failure never arrives on a quiet Tuesday. It arrives in week two of diligence, when an associate asks for the board consent behind an option grant issued in 2023 and nobody can find it, or finds three versions with different share counts.
Cap table software exists to make that request boring. The right platform stores not just the numbers but the approvals, signatures and dates behind them, so the answer to "prove it" is a link rather than a fire drill. This guide covers the seven cap table management tools worth shortlisting in 2026, what each one actually costs, and the four questions that decide which one you should be running in three years not just this quarter.
How we ranked these cap table management platforms
Every price in this article was taken from the vendor’s own pricing page in August 2026, not from a resale or benchmarking site. Where a vendor does not publish a number, we say so instead of estimating one. Feature gating which plan a 409A or an ASC 718 report actually sits in was checked the same way, because that is where the real cost of cap table software hides.
A cap table software comparison is only useful if the prices are real. Here is what each vendor publishes, in its own words.
Cap table management software is the system of record for who owns what in your company, and what happened to that ownership over time.
That is broader than a table of share counts. A modern platform tracks every security you have issued: common stock, preferred stock, options, RSUs, warrants, SAFEs and convertible notes, alongside the vesting schedule, board approval, exercise event and signed document behind each one. It recalculates dilution when you raise, produces the reports your auditor asks for, and gives each stakeholder a login showing what they hold today.
The distinction that matters: a spreadsheet stores the current state of your ownership. Cap table software stores the chain of events that produced it. Only one of those survives diligence, because only one can answer the question an acquirer’s counsel will ask about a grant made four years and two finance leads ago.
The terms overlap and most vendors use them interchangeably. In practice, cap table tools focus on ownership records, issuance and modelling. Equity management platforms wrap those capabilities in employee plan administration, valuations, expense reporting and liquidity. Every serious platform in this comparison is really the second thing, Qapita included, which is why it sits in G2’s Equity Management category rather than a narrower one.
Cap table software for startups earns its cost in five specific moments. Each one has a price tag attached when it goes wrong.
A cap table spreadsheet has no validation. Nothing stops you from granting 40,000 options out of a pool with 32,000 left, backdating a vesting start to a date before the plan existed, or fat-fingering a share count in a hidden column that only surfaces at conversion. Cap table software enforces the arithmetic: the pool cannot go negative, the totals reconcile, and every entry carries an owner and a timestamp.
Diligence is not a request for your cap table. It is a request for evidence that your cap table is true. Investors want the signed agreements, the board consents, the 83(b) filings and the transfer approvals sitting behind each line. Companies that keep this in a platform answer in an afternoon. Companies that keep it in folders and inboxes spend three weeks rebuilding it, usually while trying to close a round.
Founders rarely misjudge the headline number in a term sheet. They misjudge what happens after it: the pool top-up that comes out of pre-money, the SAFEs converting at a cap set eighteen months ago, the pro-rata rights exercised by three existing investors. Scenario modelling shows the post-round table before you sign, not after and on Qapita it is in the free Spark plan, not gated behind a paid tier.
Your investors hold positions in dozens of companies and reconcile them at quarter end. When your records live in a platform they can log into, their finance team stops emailing yours. That sounds like a small thing until you count the hours it removes from a year.
Once you grant equity to US employees, your equity records feed your financial statements. Fair value at grant date, expense recognised over the vesting period, forfeitures, modifications, disclosures. Your auditor will trace a sample of grants back to source documents. Cap table management software that stores those documents alongside the numbers turns an audit into a query and a platform whose valuation team signs the 409A behind those numbers removes a handoff entirely.
Best for: Seed to pre-IPO companies that want one platform from first grant to first liquidity event, at a price they can read in advance.
Published pricing: Spark is free to 25 stakeholders and $1M raised. Surge is $1,600/year for 40 stakeholders, plus $40 per additional stakeholder per year. Growth is $3,000/year for 50 stakeholders, plus $60 per additional stakeholder per year, and includes your 409A valuation. Enterprise is quoted. A standalone 409A on the lower tiers is available too.
Pricing you can forecast. Qapita is the only platform in this comparison that publishes both a tier price and the marginal cost of the next stakeholder. Everyone else either stops publishing at the point your bill starts growing or does not publish at all. Renewal is a calculation rather than a negotiation.
Compliance done in-house, not brokered. 409A valuations are produced by Qapita’s own valuation team and delivered in five business days, with audit support included. So are ESOP and RSU valuations, convertible note and warrant valuations, purchase price allocation and expense reporting under both US GAAP and IFRS. When an auditor questions an input, the people who built the model are on the platform you already pay for.
Built for companies that do not stay in one country. Cross-border equity is where US-built cap table tools stop. A UK subsidiary, an Indian entity, employees in Singapore and suddenly you are running a second system and reconciling it by hand at quarter end. Qapita handles multi-entity cap tables and multi-jurisdiction plan administration natively, across the US, India and Southeast Asia.
It carries you through liquidity. Tender offers and structured secondary programmes are run on the platform, not migrated away for. Most companies discover this requirement the year they need it, which is the worst year to change systems.
The customer evidence. In G2’s Equity Management category, Qapita is ranked best in customer satisfaction in both the Mid-Market and Enterprise segments and is the only platform in the category holding all four "Best" badges Usability, Relationship, Implementable and Results. It supports more than 3,000 companies globally and is backed by Charles Schwab.
Best for: US venture-track startups whose investors and counsel already work in Carta.
Published pricing: Carta Launch is free for companies under 25 stakeholders that have raised up to $1M. Above that, each package (Launch, Build, Grow, Scale) carries a per-stakeholder price with a minimum annual fee,none of which Carta publishes.
Where it falls short: the pricing opacity is not a minor complaint. Third-party sites currently report Carta’s entry-level paid price as anywhere from $280 to $2,988 a year. That spread is not a rounding error, it is what happens when there is no published number to check against. Budget for a sales call, and for a renewal you cannot model in advance.
Versus Qapita: the same free tier limits, then a fork. Qapita publishes every price above the free plan including the per-stakeholder rate; Carta publishes none of them. Choose Carta for the network, Qapita for the forecast and note that only one of those two things gets more expensive as you grow.
Best for: seed-stage US founders who want a fast, well-designed cap table and a price they can read.
Published pricing: Startup is $1,200/year with the first 25 stakeholders included. Growth is $3,500/year with 40 stakeholders and 409A valuations. Enterprise is quoted.
Where it falls short: stock-based compensation reporting under ASC 718 sits behind Enterprise, the least optional report in your finance calendar, two tiers above where most Series A companies start. International share schemes are not a strength.
Versus Qapita: Pulley’s Growth plan is $3,500 for 40 stakeholders; Qapita’s Growth is $3,000 for 50, with the 409A included in both. Above the tier, Qapita publishes the overage rate and Pulley does not. Add a foreign entity and the comparison stops being close.
Best for: UK and EU companies whose plans centre on EMI, CSOP, VSOP or BSPCE.
Published pricing: Launch is free up to 50 stakeholders. Scale starts at €3,000/year and includes 50+ stakeholders, data room, unlimited collaborators and full transaction history. Enterprise is quoted.
European share schemes are not US options with different labels. They carry their own approval mechanics, valuation requirements and tax filings, and platforms built for Delaware C-corps treat them as edge cases. Ledgy treats them as the main case, with EU data residency that European boards increasingly ask about directly.
Where it falls short: Ledgy does not run 409A valuations in-house, it works through valuation partners. For a US-incorporated company that is a structural gap, not a roadmap item.
Versus Qapita: both are built for companies that operate across borders, but from opposite ends. If your centre of gravity is the US with operations elsewhere, Qapita covers the US compliance stack in-house and the international structures too.
Best for: late-stage private companies inside twelve months of a listing, and public companies.
Published pricing: none. Quote only.
Shareworks, acquired from Solium in 2019, now part of Morgan Stanley at Work, is the incumbent at the top of the market for a structural reason: it sits on brokerage infrastructure. Tender offers, global tax withholding across 170+ countries, US GAAP and IFRS reporting and the mechanics of moving a stock plan onto public markets are native rather than bolted on.
Where it falls short: it is not a startup product and does not pretend to be. No self-serve tier, no published price, and an administration model that assumes you already have an equity team.
Versus Qapita: the mistake companies make here is switching too early, on the assumption that liquidity requires enterprise infrastructure. It does not. Qapita runs tender offers and structured secondary programmes for private companies, so the move to a Shareworks-class platform belongs at the listing, not two years before it.
Best for: bootstrapped and budget-constrained companies that still need real records.
Published pricing: free to 20 shareholders. Above that, $2 per shareholder per month, pro-rated. 409A valuation plans start at $990/year and include unlimited valuation updates within the subscription year, plus free cap table migration.
The economics are hard to argue with. Seventy-five shareholders on the Premium plan costs about $1,800 a year, and ASC 718 filings, 83(b) elections, board resolutions and waterfall modelling sit inside that plan rather than above it.
Where it falls short: the product is functional rather than polished, multi-entity and cross-border support is limited, and there is no liquidity capability.
Versus Qapita: Eqvista is cheaper today. The question is what the gap buys. Qapita’s free tier runs to 25 stakeholders, its paid tiers include migration support and a named per-stakeholder rate, and the platform still fits when you have three entities and a tender offer to run. Cheapest and least likely to need replacing are rarely the same product.
Best for: global companies that want to outsource equity administration entirely.
Published pricing: a free self-serve cap table plan supporting up to 100 stakeholders, with a Premium tier listed at $3 per user per month for unlimited stakeholders. Full-service administration is quoted separately.
Formerly Global Shares and acquired by J.P. Morgan in 2022, Workplace Solutions handles complex equity compensation and cap table management across jurisdictions, backed by an institutional balance sheet. The free tier to 100 stakeholders is the most generous in this comparison by some distance.
Where it falls short: reviewers consistently describe the admin experience as an enterprise banking tool which is capable but heavy with the participant mobile app drawing the most criticism.
Versus Qapita: both cover global structures and outsourced administration. The difference is who the platform is designed for. Qapita is built for the founders, finance leads and HR teams who administer equity daily; Workplace Solutions is built for equity teams inside large organisations, and the usability scores reflect it.
Feature grids in this category are close to useless. Every platform here tracks shares, options and vesting. The differences that cost real money show up in four places, and only four.
Score the seven platforms against those four questions and the field thins out fast.
Every comparison article in this category leads with a starting price. Almost none of them mention that the prices are not comparable, because the unit being priced is defined differently by each vendor.
Pulley counts an angel investor writing $50,000 or less as half a stakeholder. Eqvista prices per shareholder, monthly. Carta charges per stakeholder against a minimum annual fee it does not disclose. Qapita publishes a flat tier plus a named per-stakeholder rate. Same word, four different meters.
The number that predicts your bill is not the entry price. It is the marginal cost of stakeholder number 51, the one added by a seed round you have not closed yet. Here is what the same 75-stakeholder cap table costs on each vendor’s published entry-level paid plan.
Every security type on one table: common, preferred with its liquidation terms, options, RSUs, warrants, SAFEs and notes. Multiple share classes and multiple entities without a second system.
Model a priced round, a pool top-up and a converting SAFE stack together rather than one at a time and see founder ownership at each step. Waterfall analysis matters the moment you have preferred stock with a liquidation preference.
Instruments tracked pre-conversion with their caps, discounts and MFN terms, and a conversion engine that reproduces what your counsel calculates.
Grant issuance, vesting schedules with cliffs and accelerations, electronic acceptance, exercise and surrender workflows, and a portal your employees can navigate. This is where cap table tools become equity management platforms, and where G2 reviewers’ rate Qapita best in class for usability.
Role-based investor access to their own position, transaction history and documents, without a quarterly email exchange between two finance teams.
Immutable, timestamped, attributed. Historical positions reconstructable as of any date. If the platform lets an administrator silently edit last year’s numbers, it is not audit-ready regardless of what the feature list says.
409A valuations, ASC 718 or IFRS 2 expense reporting, 83(b) tracking, Form 3921, Rule 701. Confirm which pricing tier each one sits in before you sign, not during your first audit and prefer a vendor that produces the valuation itself rather than referring you out.
Granular permissions, because your cap table contains compensation data. An employee should see their own grant. A prospective investor should see a data room, not the full stakeholder ledger.
The subscription is rarely the largest number. The 409A, the expense report and the eventual migration usually are. Compare total cost at the stage you will be in two years, not the one you are in today.
The tool that fits 20 stakeholders and one entity is not automatically the tool that fits 200 stakeholders across three countries. Ask what happens at 10x, and at the price for 10x.
Buyers evaluate the cap table interface and inherit the compliance tiering. Confirm exactly which plan holds ASC 718 or IFRS 2 reporting, and whether the vendor produces your 409A or refers it out.
If your investors cannot self-serve, your finance team absorbs the difference forever. Test the investor view during the trial, not just the admin view.
A platform that only records history leaves you modelling the future in a spreadsheet, which reintroduces the exact error surface you bought software to remove.
Every vendor lets you export a CSV. A CSV is a snapshot, not a history: it carries share counts, but rarely the vesting schedules, board consents, signed documents and transaction chain behind them. Ask what your data looks like on the way out before you commit to the way in.
Pre-seed with under 25 stakeholders: use a free tier and spend the money elsewhere but pick the free tier whose next step is published. Post-Series A: you need 409A, expense reporting and board workflows on the same platform, not integrated across three.
SAFEs and notes outstanding? Test the conversion engine before anything else. A clean equity-only table is easy for any tool in this comparison to hold.
Multiple share classes, warrants, phantom stock, SARs or performance-vesting grants each rule out a subset of the market. List yours before the first demo.
One US entity is the easy case, and every platform here handles it. A UK subsidiary, an Indian entity or employees in Singapore narrows the field to two or three, the single biggest differentiator on this list, and the reason Qapita ranks first in this comparison.
US GAAP, IFRS, or both? Audited today or within 18 months? The answer determines which pricing tier you actually need, which is often not the one you were quoted.
Set it against a two-year horizon including the 409A and the overage rate, not the first-year sticker. And favour vendors that publish their numbers, predictability is a feature you only appreciate at renewal.
Switching is more common than vendors like to admit and less dangerous than founders fear, as long as you understand what is being moved. A migration is not an import of your current positions. It is a rebuild of your transaction history: every issuance, transfer, cancellation and conversion, in order, so the new platform can reproduce any past date rather than just today’s.
Practical guidance: move between rounds, never during one. Expect one to two weeks including validation. Insist on parallel reconciliation the old and new tables should agree on fully diluted shares, per-stakeholder holdings and pool balance before you switch off the old account. And ask who does the work. On Qapita, onboarding and migration support is included from the Surge plan upward rather than sold as a professional services line item, which is where switching costs usually hide.
Category rankings can be assembled from whichever slice of data flatters a vendor most, so here is the specific claim: in G2’s Equity Management category, Qapita is ranked best in customer satisfaction in both the Mid-Market and Enterprise segments and is the only platform in the category to hold all four "Best" badges: Best Usability, Best Relationship, Best Implementable and Best Results.
Those four measure different things, which is why holding all four is rare. Usability is whether administrators can operate the platform. Implementable is whether onboarding actually finishes. Relationship is whether customers consider the vendor a good partner and would recommend it. Results is whether the platform delivered what buyers expected. Winning one is a product outcome. Winning all four is an operating outcome and equity is an operating problem long before it is a software problem.
That distinction reflects how this work is really done. The platform handles the records; the hard parts a plan design that survives an audit, a valuation your auditor accepts, a cross-border grant that does not create a tax problem for an employee, a tender offer that clears, need people who have done it before. Qapita supports more than 3,000 companies globally across the US, India and Southeast Asia, is backed by Charles Schwab, delivers 409A valuations in five business days with audit support included, and publishes its prices so the renewal conversation holds no surprises.
That is the case for ranking it first in any serious cap table software comparison: not the longest feature list, but the only platform on this list that publishes what it charges, produces its own compliance work, holds more than one country, and carries you to liquidity without a migration.
Software that records who owns what in your company and what happened to that ownership over time: shares, options, RSUs, warrants, SAFEs and notes, with the vesting schedules, approvals and signed documents behind each one.
Qapita. It is the only platform that publishes its per-stakeholder rate, produces 409A valuations and expense reporting in-house, supports multi-entity cross-border structures, and runs tender offers so it still fits at Series C.
Because diligence asks for evidence, not a spreadsheet. Errors in a spreadsheet cap table surface at the worst possible moment, mid-round or mid-audit and cost legal fees to unwind.
Free at the smallest sizes. Qapita Spark is free to 25 stakeholders, Surge is $1,600/year and Growth is $3,000/year with the 409A included. Want standalone 409A if it is not in your plan, Qapita’s provides that too.
Cap table software tracks ownership records and modelling. Equity management software adds employee plan administration, valuations, expense reporting and liquidity. Most platforms sold as cap table tools today are really equity management platforms, Qapita included.
Yes. Grant issuance, vesting with cliffs, electronic acceptance, exercises, surrenders and an employee portal are standard. Qapita includes equity plan management in its free Spark plan, and exercise and surrender workflows from Surge.
The good platforms do tracking caps, discounts and MFN terms pre-conversion, then converting them into a priced round. Test the conversion against your counsel’s model before you buy. Qapita’s funding round modelling is free on Spark, so you can run that test without paying first.
Before your first priced round, or the first time you grant equity to an employee, whichever comes first. Migration cost rises with every transaction you add, and Qapita Spark covers the first 25 stakeholders for free.
Yes. A proper migration rebuilds your transaction history rather than importing a snapshot, so historical positions stay reconstructable by date. Qapita includes onboarding and migration support for its users. A dedicated specialist takes care of the migration, and you just need to verify the final captable.
One to two weeks for most companies, including reconciliation. Move between funding rounds, never during one.
Qapita. It is the closest full-lifecycle alternative cap table, 409A, plan administration, expense reporting and liquidity on one platform and the only one on this list that publishes every price above the free tier, including the per-stakeholder rate.
