Carta alternatives in 2026: an honest map

Most “Carta alternatives” articles are affiliate pages with a scoring rubric invented to make one product win. This is not that. It is a map of who each alternative is actually for, written by people building in the category — which we disclose at the bottom rather than hiding.

One thing changed this month that every list published before September 2026 gets wrong: Pulley is shutting down on December 8, 2026 and Carta is taking its customers. The most-cited Carta alternative in the US is about to stop existing, and the market is more concentrated than the listicles say.

First: is the problem actually Carta?

Founders usually arrive at this search for one of three reasons, and they lead to different answers.

“It got expensive.” Real, and it sharpens at Series B and C, where stakeholder tiers and add-ons compound. But check what you are comparing: a cheaper subscription plus a $2,500 third-party 409A is not cheaper than a bundled plan. Price the next two years all-in before you move.

“We are not a US company.” The strongest reason to look elsewhere. Regional providers are better at local filings, local employee tax treatment and multi-entity structures than a US-first platform with an international module.

“We want out of the lock-in.” Then the question to ask every vendor — including the new one — is what a complete export looks like. The Pulley shutdown just demonstrated what happens when you have not asked.

The pricing problem, stated plainly

Carta does not publish a full price list. Neither does Ledgy. That is their right, but it has a consequence worth naming: the “Carta pricing 2026” pages that fill the search results are reconstructions, and they do not agree with each other.

While writing this we checked several. One quoted an entry plan at $280 a year. Another quoted Carta’s plans at $2,988 to $11,988 a month. A third put the median annual contract at about $14,725 and described a range of $3,000 to $75,000 depending on stage. These cannot all be describing the same product, and none of them is Carta.

The practical response is not to find a better aggregator. It is to ask for a written quote that states four things:

1. The all-in annual price at your current stakeholder count.
2. What happens to that price at the next stakeholder band.
3. Whether a 409A is included, and how many per year.
4. The renewal price, not just the first-year price.

Three of the alternatives below publish all of that on a public page. That is a real difference, and for a lot of founders it is the difference that decides this.

Published pricing, side by side

List prices as published by each vendor in late 2026, in USD unless stated otherwise.

Provider	Free tier	Entry paid tier	409A
Carta	Not published	Not published	Bundled at higher tiers
Ledgy	Not published	Not published	Quote
Cake Equity	$0, 5 stakeholders	$1,000/yr, +$1 per extra stakeholder	$1,500 add-on; Team plan includes two
Eqvista	$0, under 20 stakeholders	$2 per stakeholder/month	$990–$2,590/yr bundled by stage
Fidelity Private Shares	$0, 25 stakeholders, under $1M raised	Contact sales	Included from the Growth tier
Qapita	$0, 25 stakeholders, under $1M raised	$1,600/yr to 40 stakeholders	$1,500 add-on

The alternatives, and who each is for

Ledgy — Europe

The default European answer. Multi-entity and multi-country employee equity, local reporting, and integrations with the HR systems European companies actually run. If your cap table is in euros or pounds and your employees are spread across several countries, this is usually the first call.

Pricing is quote-only — there is no public price list, so treat the evaluation as a sales cycle rather than a signup. Ask specifically about entity count, because that is where multi-country groups get repriced.

Cake Equity — APAC and Australia

The regional counterpart for Australia and Asia-Pacific: local plan types, sensible small-company pricing, and an employee experience that does not assume a US filing calendar. It is also the clearest pricing page in the category — $0 for five stakeholders, $1,000 a year on Build with $1 per additional stakeholder, $2,750 a year on Team with $5 per additional stakeholder and two 409A valuations included, which Cake values at $3,000. Any annual plan can add a 409A for $1,500.

Worth noting for anyone leaving a platform mid-life: Cake advertises free basic migration on Team, and a managed migration “reconciled and signed off before go-live” on Pro.

Eqvista — cost-sensitive

The cheapest defensible system of record here. Free under 20 stakeholders, then $2 per stakeholder per month, with custom pricing above 50. The bundle is the part worth reading twice: a 409A plus the premium cap table, priced by stage — $990 a year pre-revenue, $1,290 friends-and-family, $1,990 seed, $2,590 Series A, custom from Series B. Ancillary work is priced openly too: ASC 718 from $500, QSBS attestation from $1,000, expedited 83(b) processing from $490.

Fewer bells than the leaders. The ledger is correct and the bill is small.

Fidelity Private Shares — bank-backed, early stage

Free up to 25 stakeholders and under $1M raised, and the free tier is unusually complete: cap table management, equity plan generation, a data room, board consents, scenario modelling, standard reporting, 83(b) generation, a Rule 701 exemption check and electronic securities. Startup, Growth and Scale are quoted; 409A valuations, ASC 718 and HRIS and payroll integrations arrive at Growth.

In a year when a $50M-funded competitor shut down, “who owns this vendor” became a legitimate evaluation criterion, and this is the answer for founders who weight it heavily.

Qapita — global teams

Built for companies with stakeholders across many jurisdictions. Pricing is published and banded by stakeholder count: free to 25 stakeholders and under $1M raised, $1,600 a year to 40 stakeholders and $40 per stakeholder per year beyond that, $3,000 a year to 50 stakeholders and $60 per stakeholder beyond that. A 409A is a $1,500 add-on. It also publishes rates for human help — analyst support at $125 an hour, employee town halls at $500 an hour.

And the one that is leaving

Pulley belonged on this list until September 2026. It raised more than $50 million over seven years, competed directly with Carta on price and product, and is now shutting down on December 8 with Carta running the migrations. If you are on it, start here — the opt-in deadline for the Carta offer is November 30, 2026, which is earlier than most people have registered.

What Carta is actually good at

A map that only lists exits is not a map. Three things keep Carta the default for US companies, and none of them is inertia:

The 409A is in the box. For a company that needs a valuation every twelve months and after every priced round, a bundled valuation removes a vendor, a procurement cycle and a two-week wait. Priced separately, third-party 409As commonly run $2,000–$5,000; the alternatives above that publish an add-on price charge $1,500.

Investors already have accounts. Your cap table is not only your document. If every fund on your table already administers its positions in the same place, sending them somewhere else creates small frictions at exactly the wrong moments — a signature round, a secondary, a diligence request.

It handles the later stages. Tender offers, multi-class waterfalls, ASC 718 reporting at audit scale, fund administration on the other side of the table. Most of the alternatives here are excellent up to Series A and thinner after it.

If those three describe you, the honest advice is to negotiate rather than migrate. Ask for the renewal price in writing, ask what the next stakeholder band costs, and use a competing quote as leverage — the quotes are free, and the alternatives publish enough pricing to make the comparison concrete.

The switching costs nobody quotes you

Subscription price is the smallest number in a migration. The ones that actually cost you:

• Reconciliation time. Someone competent has to verify shares outstanding, fully diluted count, pool size and pool remaining against source documents, then spot-check individual grants. Budget a day for a simple table, several for a messy one.
• Legal review. If the import surfaces a grant that was never board-approved or a SAFE that was modelled wrongly, you are paying counsel to fix a real problem — which is a good outcome, but an unbudgeted one.
• Employee communication. Every option holder gets a new login, and the first thing they do is check their numbers. Wrong numbers on day one cost more trust than the migration saves in fees.
• The second migration. The most expensive outcome is moving twice. Choosing on price alone at seed, then moving again at Series B because the platform cannot handle a waterfall, costs more than either subscription.

Weigh those against the annual saving before deciding. A $1,100 difference in list price is a rounding error next to two days of a finance lead’s time.

The criterion nobody had on their list last year

Durability. It is not a feature you can demo, and until this month most founders treated it as a given. Two questions now belong in every evaluation:

Who owns this company, and how is it funded? A venture-backed challenger burning to win a category is a different risk profile from a bank subsidiary or a profitable regional player — not worse, but different, and the difference shows up exactly when you least want to migrate.

What does a complete export look like? Ask for the answer in writing, before you sign: which objects are included (holders, grants, vesting schedules, documents), in what format, and whether you can run it yourself without asking support. Pulley’s customers are discovering the answer to that question under a deadline. You can get it for free, at signup.

If you decide to move

The mechanics are the same wherever you are going, and the import is not the hard part. Export the holder ledger, every grant with its full vesting schedule, all 409A reports, board consents, SAFEs and 83(b) elections. Then reconcile four numbers against your own files before you trust the new system: shares outstanding, fully diluted count, pool size and pool remaining.

Our migration checklist was written for Pulley’s deadline, but the procedure is provider-agnostic — and the self-audit is the thing to run once the import lands, because a migration is the moment errors that have been sitting quietly for years finally surface.

---

Where we fit, honestly: ESOP.fyi is an AI-native cap table, ESOP and liquidity platform opening its first cohort in Q4 2026. We are not on the list above because we are not yet shipping to customers, and putting ourselves on it would make this article the thing we said it was not. If you want to hear when doors open, join the waitlist — one email, nothing else.