Carta Total Comp alternative: what its equity and salary benchmarks cost, and who fits under 200 employees

Carta started as the cap-table platform venture-backed startups use to manage equity. Total Comp is the compensation product it built on top of that data. Because tens of thousands of private companies run their equity on Carta, it can turn that into real-time salary and equity benchmarks, then let you sort them by peer group: industry, role, level, funding stage, company size and location.

Carta reports the benchmarks are built from data across more than 50,000 private-market cap tables and over one million employees, covering 40 plus countries and all US regions, refreshed quarterly and smoothed with machine learning so the market bands track recent hiring. The piece that no salary-only tool matches is equity: Total Comp benchmarks option grants and notional equity value, and its New Hire Equity Forecast pulls your cap table in to size how many shares a role should get.

Figures above come from Carta's own product pages as of July 2026. That equity depth is real, and it is exactly why a startup granting options should take Carta seriously.

Carta does not publish a Total Comp list price. Since 2024 it is sold separately from Carta's cap-table plans and quoted per company, so there is no public number to compare against and no self-serve checkout. Any specific figure you find online is a third-party estimate or a single contract, not a price Carta stands behind, so we are not going to invent one.

What we can describe is the shape of the deal, and the shape is what usually decides it for a small US company:

For comparison, our pricing is on the pricing page with no call required: $99, $299 or $799 a month, or $79, $239 and $639 a month billed yearly. If the whole question is what a benchmark subscription actually runs, we broke the category down in what compensation software costs.

A comparison that only lists a competitor's flaws is useless. Here is where Carta beats us outright, and where we would tell you to go buy it.

• You grant equity and need to size option grants. This is the single biggest reason to choose Carta. Benchmarking option grants and notional equity value against real cap-table data is something a salary-only tool simply does not do.
• You are a venture-backed technology startup. The peer set is startups by funding stage, so your comparables are companies that actually look like you, not the whole US labor market averaged together.
• Your cap table already lives on Carta. The New Hire Equity Forecast reads your cap table directly, so grant sizing and dilution modeling happen where your equity is already managed.
• You want cash and equity in one view. For a startup total-rewards conversation, seeing base, target cash and equity for a role together is genuinely useful, and Carta is built around exactly that.
• You hire across many countries. Coverage spans 40 plus countries, which matters for a startup with a distributed or international team in a way a US-only tool cannot help with.

The gap is not data quality. It is that Total Comp is built around a venture-backed startup that grants equity, and most US companies under 200 people are not that. Three things break in practice.

Half the product is equity you do not grant. A nonprofit, an agency, a professional-services firm or a manufacturer pays people in cash, not options. The equity benchmarking that makes Carta special is dead weight if there is no cap table to model, and you are still paying for it.

The peer set is startup-heavy. Carta's comparables are private companies on its platform, which skews toward venture-backed tech. If you run a 60-person distributor in Ohio, a benchmark drawn mostly from Series B software startups is not the labor market you actually hire against, and it can pull your bands in the wrong direction.

It is not built around posted-range compliance. When a state pay transparency law makes you put a range in the job ad, you want a broad-market cash number with a method you can defend to an auditor or a candidate. A startup-centric benchmark with license terms is a harder thing to drop into a public posting than a figure built on federal wage data.

You give up equity benchmarking entirely. Wagelist does not size option grants, model dilution or value equity, so if any part of your offer is stock, Carta does something we deliberately do not. You also give up the venture-stage peer set and the international coverage, and you trade a mature platform for one in early access that says so on every page.

What you get back is a cash band you can build this afternoon from public federal wage data, a published price you can read without a call, and a methodology you can put in front of a candidate or a regulator. If your compensation question is "what should we pay this US role in cash, and can I defend the number in a posting", that trade is usually worth making. Our salary bands page shows what comes out the other side, and how to create salary bands walks the method step by step. If equity is the job, our Pave comparison covers the other startup-focused option.