Carta vs. Pulley (2026): a detailed comparison that helps you choose

• Carta Launch is free if you have fewer than 25 stakeholders and have raised less than $1M. Both conditions matter, so a seed round can take you out of the free plan even if your team hasn't grown.
• It's a real cap table product, not just a trial. You can manage SAFEs, track fundraising benchmarks, and handle electronic issuance.
• 409A isn't included, so before you give out your first option grants you require a paid tier to get a 409A.
• Documents and certificates are generated directly in Carta.

• Pricing starts at $1,200/year from your first stakeholder, which is unusual for a product aimed at early-stage founders.
• In return, you get concierge onboarding with an equity specialist.
• It's designed for founders managing equity themselves: guided issuance flows, step-by-step prompts, tips, and alerts. Spreadsheet mode is there for bulk work.
• In practice, if a pre-seed team isn't willing to spend $1,200, they'll probably keep managing equity in a spreadsheet for another six months.

The free Launch tier covers the essentials: cap table management, SAFE financings, and fundraising benchmarks drawn from Carta's own dataset, which remains the strongest benchmark data in the category. Priced-round modelling and deal pro formas start at Build, board meetings and consents at Grow, and exit and waterfall modelling at Scale.

Issue an ISO, NSO, RSU, RSA, or SAR, get it signed, track vesting, and eventually process the exercise, without the record ever leaving the platform. Employees can see their own grants and model an exercise themselves, which takes most of the routine questions off your plate. 409A valuations and 83(b) support come in at the Grow tier.

It goes well beyond the cap table, with compensation benchmarking, QSBS attestation, liquidity, equity advisory, and fund administration. However, none of these are included in the core tiers. All five are sold separately on top of your plan. Total Compensation has also recently been unbundled from the equity plans entirely.

The breadth is real, but so is the tiering. Capabilities unlock as you move up the plans, which means the thing you need at a particular milestone can often sit behind the next tier. And at the higher tiers, you may end up paying for a bundle even if you only need one or two capabilities. The clearest example is reporting for your first audit: it sits at the top of the ladder. If you're on Build or Grow when your auditor asks for stock-based compensation reporting, you're having a conversation with a sales rep rather than simply turning on a setting.

• Templated SAFE, option, and RSA agreements from the entry plan; custom agreements on Growth.
• Strong dilution and fundraise modelling, including Excel pro forma exports for counsel, pre-money SAFE conversion, pro-rata, and YC participation support.
• Interactive offer letters make equity easier for candidates to understand.
• The only one of the two with meaningful token equity support: token cap tables, distributions, and valuations.
• Less suited to phantom units, complex multi-entity structures, and heavier plan administration.

• Not included in Launch, so your first option grants require an upgrade.
• Audit support is available at higher tiers.
• Carta doesn't sell standalone valuations to non-customers, making the 409A another reason to stay on the platform rather than a standalone service.
• The process is heavily automated, making it fast and consistent, but there are fewer touchpoints with a named specialist for methodology questions.

• Five business day turnaround, with accelerated valuations available.
• A dedicated 409A specialist rather than relying entirely on an automated process.
• Audit support included.
• A standalone 409A from an outside firm typically costs into the low thousands, so the valuation itself accounts for a meaningful part of the Growth plan fee.

• Paid plans get an implementation team and premier support.
• Below that, the intended path is self-service through Carta Classroom, documentation, and the community forum.
• That works as a deliberate model, but can be difficult for a first-time founder who doesn't yet know what questions to ask.
• G2 criticism repeatedly points to delayed responsiveness, particularly around renewal.

• Published average response time of under five minutes.
• Support staff have founder and legal backgrounds rather than following a purely scripted model.
• Support extends to stakeholders, counsel, and auditors, so your lawyer can ask Pulley directly instead of routing everything through you.
• Support quality is one of the most consistent themes in Pulley's positive reviews.

• Launch: Free for companies with fewer than 25 stakeholders and under $1M raised.
• Build, Grow, and Scale: No published pricing. Each requires a conversation with sales.

What companies actually pay is much less predictable. Vendr, which brokers software contracts, has handled 679 Carta deals. Across 405 of those, the median buyer paid $15,400/year, with actual spend ranging from $2,942 to $55,495. By stage, that works out to roughly $3,000–$8,000 for seed companies with fewer than 50 stakeholders, $10,000–$25,000 at Series A–C with 100–300 stakeholders, and $30,000–$75,000+ at later stages.

The bill is built from three moving parts: a platform fee based on your stage, per-stakeholder charges, and add-on modules. Vendr records overage charges of $20–$50 per additional stakeholder, onboarding and migration fees of $1,000–$5,000, and annual price increases of 5–10% written into contracts.

409A is another cost on top. It isn't included in the platform fee. Vendr puts the cost at $2,000–$5,000 per valuation, which can mean $4,000–$10,000+ in a year if a funding round triggers a second valuation.

Startup: $1,200/year flat, up to 25 stakeholders. Cap table, SAFE issuance, fundraise modeling, concierge onboarding.

Growth: $3,500/year, up to 40 stakeholders. Adds 409A valuations, electronic exercises, board approvals, HRIS integration, Form 3921.

Angel investors writing cheques under $50,000 count as half a stakeholder.

Above 40 stakeholders: Enterprise, with no published figure. ASC 718, custom reporting, and managed equity administration all live there.

Here's the gap worth noticing. Vendr's brokered Pulley contracts show a median of $7,548/year, with most falling between $3,946 and $8,883. That's roughly double the published Growth price, which tells you where companies actually end up once stakeholder count grows past 40, even though the website stops at $3,500.

No published overage rate. Vendr records that exceeding a tier threshold triggers either overage charges or a forced tier upgrade, plus onboarding and migration fees of $500–$2,500 and bundled 409A at $1,500–$5,000 per valuation.

Pulley deserves credit for publishing more than Carta does. The limitation is that it publishes the part covering the first two years and goes quiet on the part covering the next five.

• 4.3/5 across roughly 230 G2 reviews.
• Scores 8.3/10 on being a good business partner versus a category average of 9.2.
• Reviewers credit breadth, investor familiarity, and reliability.
• Recurring criticism: rising costs, onboarding friction, support responsiveness around renewal, and difficulty getting data out.

• 4.7/5 across roughly 132 G2 reviews.
• Founders specifically praise the scenario-modelling experience when stress-testing dilution before signing a term sheet.
• About 87% of Pulley's G2 reviewers are small businesses. That's a strong signal for early-stage companies, but tells you less about how it performs at Series B.
• The recurring limitation is scale: you may eventually need capabilities that sit behind an Enterprise conversation.

• Qapita Spark is free for companies under 25 stakeholders and under $1M raised, a permanent tier, not a trial.
• Includes cap table management, electronic issuance, individual stakeholder logins, equity plans, automatic SAFE tracking, funding round modelling, a data room, and DocuSign.
• From Surge upward, white-glove migration is included, with the team handling discovery, data migration, validation, and go-live.
• You own your share certificates, and your equity history exports cleanly.
• At the entry level, it's roughly on par with Carta while removing Pulley's $1,200 barrier to getting started properly.

• Live, version-controlled cap table across rounds, hires, SAFEs, secondaries, and conversions.
• Stock plan administration across ESOPs, RSUs, PSUs, options, phantom stock, and SARs.
• Scenario modelling for funding rounds, option pool expansions, and convertible note conversions.
• 83(b) document generation, board consents, Form 3921, and Rule 701 support.
• ASC 718 and IFRS reporting, plus ASC 820-compliant portfolio valuations.
• Tender offers and structured liquidity programmes.
• Multi-entity support lets companies operating across jurisdictions keep grants in one register rather than maintaining separate books and reconciling them every quarter.

• Included from the Growth plan at $3,000/year.
• Five business day turnaround through an in-house valuation team.
• Signed by real specialists (CFA) who can defend the methodology to your auditor.
• Available as a standalone service, so the valuation isn't being used to keep you on the platform.
• Audit-ready reporting ties back to the same grant record as the cap table.

• Onboarding and migration assistance are included from the $1,600 Surge plan upward.
• Customer support is the most frequently mentioned strength in Qapita's G2 reviews.
• Advisory support covers equity plan design, incentive structuring, and valuation, useful when you're a founder who doesn't necessarily know what questions to ask yet.
• Founders migrating from Carta describe being guided through discovery, migration, validation, and go-live rather than simply being handed documentation.

• Spark: Free up to 25 stakeholders and under $1M raised.
• Surge: $1,600/year up to 40 stakeholders, then +$40 per additional stakeholder. Adds reporting, email support, and onboarding/migration assistance.
• Growth: $3,000/year up to 50 stakeholders, then +$60 per additional stakeholder. Adds 409A valuation reports, board consents, 83(b), and Form 3921.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing: adds GAAP/ASC 718 and IFRS reporting, custom administrator roles, SSO, and dedicated phone support.
• The key difference is predictability: Qapita publishes the overage rate, so you have a clearer idea of what happens as your stakeholder count grows.

• 4.6/5 across roughly 310–320 G2 reviews.
• Ranked highest in customer satisfaction on the G2 Equity Management Grid in both Enterprise and Mid-Market.
• Ahead of Carta on every listed G2 dimension: meets requirements 8.9 vs. 8.7, usability 9.1 vs. 8.6, and ease of setup 8.8 vs. 7.9.
• Dashboard rated 90%, with reviewers describing it as usable without significant platform familiarity.
• G2's summary of why reviewers choose Qapita over Carta and Pulley comes down to three things: user-friendly interface, strong customer support, and competitive pricing.