10 best tools for managing startup equity shares: Top options compared
3 min
San Francisco native (yes, really). @uw and Lowell High alum. I like to nerd out on fintech, stock options and taxes.
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San Francisco native (yes, really). @uw and Lowell High alum. I like to nerd out on fintech, stock options and taxes.
If you’re looking for tools to manage startup share equity, you’ll likely be in one of a few scenarios:
In this article, we share the best tools out there to help you manage startup share equity, no matter which position you’re in. We’ll break these tools down into categories, so that you can easily find the support you need.
We’ll also introduce you to what we do at Secfi to help startup employees and executives understand their equity.
We can help you navigate the complexity of stock options, with our combination of planning tools and deep knowledge on equity. Plus, we also offer financing solutions which can enable you to exercise, without having to take on a massive financial burden up front.
In this article:
Want to make informed, confident decisions about your equity? Try our AI equity assistant, Maeve, for personalized equity and liquidity advice.
Finding the right tool to manage your startup equity will depend on who you are and what you want the software to achieve.
There are three key types of equity management tools, which do fundamentally different things. Rather than seeing them as competitors or directly equivalent tools, it makes more sense to use them as complementary platforms that help you achieve different goals:
1. Cap table management software. If you search for equity management platforms online, most of what you’ll see will be cap table software. This is a type of tool that helps companies and startups to visualize and manage company ownership, including shares, options, and convertible notes. Basically, they work as a real-time record of who owns what in the business.
Many companies choose dedicated cap table software rather than spreadsheets because it can make it easier to maintain accurate records, manage compliance requirements, and prepare for fundraising.
If you’re an employee looking for a tool to manage your own shares, this won’t be a relevant category of tool for you.
2. Personal finance and equity planning platforms. Personal finance platforms are built for individuals, including startup employees and executives, looking for a place to manage their own finances and options. These come in all shapes and sizes, from basic budgeting apps to equity-specific tools.
A word of warning: generic tools typically don’t have the specialist features you’ll need to manage your equity, forecast the costs and calculate the value of your options. Below, we share some of the dedicated tools for employees looking for support with their own equity planning.
3. Liquidity platforms. One of the biggest struggles you may face when exercising your options is that, to do so, they typically face an enormous upfront cost – including any taxation. That’s why some turn to liquidity platforms that offer non-recourse financing to cover the cost to exercise.
Similarly, you may want to sell some of your equity before your company reaches an exit. But to do this, you’ll need to be able to connect with reputable investors – and ensure that your company gives you the permission to sell them in the first place.
Secondary market platforms are useful tools to manage your equity sales pre-exit. They typically act as brokers between you and potential investors, and they help you manage the sale itself.
In the rest of this article, we break down some of the best software in these categories for managing startup equity.
But first, we want to introduce you to what we do at Secfi.
At Secfi, we don’t fit neatly into any of the three categories we just outlined. Instead, we do a combination of two categories: personal finance and equity planning, as well as liquidity platforms.
If you own startup equity, you'll likely face high-stakes decisions around exercising options, taxes, liquidity, and long-term wealth planning. We know these challenges first-hand – and our founders built Secfi to offer other employees the support they wished they’d received themselves.
In short, we combine equity planning tools, personalized guidance, and financing solutions into a single platform, to help employees understand and act on their stock compensation with more confidence.
If you’re a founder or finance leader looking for simple cap table administration software, Secfi probably isn’t the right fit. But we can help you if you’re:
If this is you, here are three reasons why you should work with us.
If you’re ready to start modelling your own equity options, try our AI equity assistant now.
Startup equity can be really hard to understand. Estimating the real value of your shares, forecasting taxes, and deciding when to exercise can be challenging — especially when those decisions come with significant costs and risks.
Rather than trawling through generic advice, you can use Maeve, Secfi’s AI equity assistant, instead. Unlike generic AI tools, Maeve can help you make sense of your equity, with personalized insights based on your real information and data.
You can upload your equity information to Maeve and analyze your strike prices, vesting schedules, share counts, and company valuations. Alternatively, Maeve integrates with Carta, so you can seamlessly import your equity data.
This way, Maeve makes it easy to:
For illustrative purposes only. Actual results may vary and there is no guarantee of any particular outcome.
All of this happens on one platform. It’s designed to help startup employees and executives make more informed financial decisions, without needing to become equity or tax experts.
Many startup employees want to exercise their options but can’t afford the upfront costs involved. You might be equity-rich on paper, but you might need the flexibility and funding to act on your options.
Unlike other liquidity solutions, Secfi provides financing that can help to cover:
This way, you can access capital so that you don’t have to fund the full cost of exercise out of pocket. It means that you can preserve ownership in the company that you believe in without needing to drain your personal savings or take on traditional debt.
Unlike traditional loans, Secfi’s non-recourse financing structure is designed around your company’s value and prospect of future liquidity events, rather than personal assets. It means that you can reduce your personal risk while maintaining exposure to the potential upside.
You can also use our tools to sell shares on the secondary market. We act as brokers for sales to partners and buyers, meaning that you don’t have to do the work of sourcing and vetting potential investors.
We don’t only work with individual employees. If you’re an executive, you can roll out the Secfi platform to your whole company and educate your team about how to best manage their options.
As you may know already, exercising stock options can have significant tax and wealth implications. That’s particularly true at late-stage startups where your equity values may be substantial.
Even if you already use an equity management platform to track your shares and stock options, that doesn't necessarily tell you what action to take. Deciding when to exercise, how to manage taxes, or whether to seek liquidity can be much more complex. Secfi helps you navigate those decisions with a combination of planning tools, equity expertise, and personalized guidance.
We can help you to:
In reality, most financial advisors aren’t experts in startup equity ownership. But at Secfi, you can work with advisors who can provide advice tailored specifically to your equity compensation.
What’s more we can help you with long-term wealth management, with specialist advice for people working in tech or startups. You’ll get a dedicated advisor who can help you create a financial plan with a personalized roadmap to grow your wealth.
At Secfi, we work with individual employees and whole companies alike. Both can benefit from the way the platform makes it easy to manage and understand their startup equity.
For instance, one executive at Happy Money turned to Secfi after realizing that even senior startup employees can struggle to navigate the complexity and cost of exercising stock options.
After nearly a decade at the company, he faced a looming expiration deadline on his own equity. But exercising his options required more cash than he was comfortable committing while also planning major life milestones like buying a home.
Secfi helped him understand his equity position, model the tax implications, and access non-recourse financing that allowed him to exercise his options without paying upfront costs. And all of this was possible through a single platform.
But the experience highlighted a wider issue within the company: many employees lacked the knowledge and resources to make informed decisions about their equity compensation. That’s why Happy Money partnered with Secfi to provide company-wide education and financing support.
The initiative gave employees access to specialized guidance on stock options and a potentially lower-risk way to exercise their equity, helping them better understand and realize the value of the shares they had earned. It also helped to reinforce Happy Money’s transparent, employee-first culture, by empowering staff with financial knowledge and choice.
Read more: Why a Happy Money executive introduced Secfi to the whole company
Testimonials are specific to an individual Client’s experience and may not be representative of all Clients. Unless otherwise indicated, Clients offering a Testimonial do not receive compensation and their statement does not present a conflict of interest.
Carta is one of the most widely used cap table management platforms for startups.
Like the other tools in this category, it’s designed to help companies track ownership, issue equity, and manage stock option plans all from a single system. To this end, it’s designed to replace messy spreadsheets with a real-time cap table that automatically updates as companies raise funding and issue shares.
One of Carta’s biggest strengths is its scenario modelling for startups. Founders and finance teams can use this to model future fundraising rounds, dilution, and exit outcomes, to understand how ownership changes over time.
What’s more, the platform scales with startups from incorporation, early-stage startup through IPO. This can make it attractive to venture-backed companies that expect increasingly complex ownership structures.
Morgan Stanley Shareworks is an enterprise-grade equity management platform. Compared to the likes of Qapita, it’s better suited to late-stage private companies and large public companies with global equity programs.
It does much that you would expect from a cap table management platform, including SAFEs and convertible note tracking, employee equity grants, and 409A valuation support. But unlike other similar platforms, its strengths lie in its tools for companies who need support with global administration and workflows specific to public companies.
Like Carta, Shareworks is fundamentally a tool for employers to track options. This means it won’t support employees who are looking to make decisions about their own taxes, financing, or wealth management.
Qapita is best for growth-stage startups that are managing increasingly complex equity programs. As such, it helps companies move beyond basic cap table tracking, with tools for employee equity, governance, compliance, and shareholder management.
The platform is particularly strong for scaling companies that need broader shareholder and governance workflows, such as board approvals, investor reporting, and compliance management. For instance, it’s useful for startups preparing for later-stage growth or IPOs.
Unlike other platforms that are often more focused on employee engagement, Qapita is designed for startups that need scalable governance and workflow automation.
While Secfi combines equity planning, personalized guidance, and financing solutions in a single platform, there are also several other tools that can help startup employees understand and manage their equity. Here are some of the leading options.
Compound is a wealth management platform built for startup employees, founders, and high-earning professionals with complex finances.
The platform specialises in equity compensation support, helping users make smarter decisions around stock options, RSUs, and liquidity events. But it also provides support for tax planning and investment management.
While it’s primarily a digital platform, Compound also provides access to financial advisors, so that you can talk to a real person to get a clearer view of your overall financial picture. The guidance and advice is personalized, so it goes beyond traditional investing to help you manage your long-term wealth in a way that works for you.
Granted is an equity education platform for financial advisors or for companies looking to provide an education program for their employees.
The platform breaks down complicated topics like stock options, vesting schedules, dilution, and negotiation strategies into practical, easy-to-understand guidance. That makes it best suited to startup employees, early hires, and job candidates who are evaluating equity offers for the first time.
As such, rather than focusing on wealth management or financing, Granted stands out for its educational approach.
Vested is primarily an option exercise financing platform that helps startup employees access the capital they need to exercise stock options before key deadlines, such as after leaving a company or ahead of an IPO.
Alongside its financing products, Vested offers equity planning tools and educational resources to help employees better understand their stock compensation and the decisions that come with it.
What makes Vested stand out is Vestiment, its investment product that allows employees to access liquidity and exercise stock options without taking on the full upfront cost themselves. Combined with its planning tools and educational resources, this gives employees an alternative way to participate in the potential upside of their equity while reducing some of the financial barriers that often come with exercising options.
While we've already covered Secfi's broader approach to equity planning and financing, liquidity is also an important part of managing startup equity. If you're exploring ways to access cash from your shares before an IPO or acquisition, here are some of the leading platforms and providers to consider.
Forge Global is one of the biggest names in the private market space, helping startup employees, founders, and early investors buy and sell shares in high-growth companies before they go public. The platform gives shareholders a way to access liquidity earlier, while also opening the door for accredited investors to invest in sought-after private companies.
It’s not just a platform for secondary market transactions, though. Forge also provides market data, pricing insights, and liquidity solutions for private businesses managing shareholder activity.
Hiive is a fast-growing secondary marketplace built to make private share trading feel more transparent, efficient, and accessible. It’s particularly well suited to startup employees at venture-backed companies who want a simpler, faster way to sell shares without navigating the complexity of the traditional private market.
Hiive stands out primarily for its easy-to-use and modern marketplace experience, offering live pricing visibility and a more streamlined process than many traditional broker-led transactions.
EquityZen is another private market investment platform that helps startup employees and early investors sell shares in late-stage private companies while giving accredited investors access to pre-IPO opportunities.
The platform is best suited to startup employees seeking liquidity before a public exit, as well as investors looking to gain exposure to high-growth private companies. And like Hiive, its focus is on accessibility and simplicity, helping users navigate traditionally complex private market transactions with a more guided, user-friendly experience.
In this guide, we’ve shared some of the top software tools for managing startup equity. But as you’ve seen, the best options will primarily depend on what you want to achieve.
If you’re looking for a platform to help you manage and finance your own options, try Secfi. Unlike other tools, we combine equity planning, personalized advice, and financing solutions all in one place.
And you can get started completely for free – whether you’re interested in solutions for your own finances or you want to roll out a platform to your entire company.
The best software for managing startup equity depends on what you're trying to achieve.
If you're managing equity on behalf of a company, cap table platforms like Carta and Shareworks can help you administer share ownership, option grants, fundraising, and compliance.
If you're managing your own equity as an employee or executive, you may need tools that help you understand your stock options, model tax implications, evaluate liquidity opportunities, and make exercise decisions. Platforms like Secfi are designed to support those equity planning and liquidity needs.
Equity management tools help startups track ownership, manage cap tables, issue stock options, and stay compliant as the company grows. They can also improve transparency for employees and investors by providing a clear record of equity ownership and grants.
While these platforms help companies administer equity, they don't always help employees understand what their equity means in practice. Solutions like Secfi can complement an equity management platform by helping employees evaluate the financial and tax implications of their equity decisions through tools such as Maeve, Secfi's AI equity assistant, equity calculators, educational resources, and personalized guidance.
Employees need an equity management tool that makes it easier to understand what their shares or stock options are worth, how vesting works, and the costs or taxes involved in exercising equity. These capabilities may be available in your company's cap table management tool, but in many cases they’re insufficient in answering all the questions an employee may have or in allowing them to model out multiple scenarios of taxes, exercise cost or potential exits.
Platforms like Secfi also provide education, planning tools, and financing solutions to help employees make more informed financial decisions.
The tool shown here uses artificial intelligence and is for illustrative purposes only and not necessarily indicative of future results and there is no guarantee that similar results can be achieved. The information provided by the tool is not professional advice and is not intended by Secfi, Inc., its affiliates, and Secfi representatives, to be deemed as investment, legal, tax or other professional advice or recommendations of any kind, or to form the basis of any decision to do or to refrain from doing anything. Secfi does not review the accuracy or completeness of the information provided to us within the tool.
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