Carta vs. Quickbase vs. Socialtext (discontinued)

Hands down the best functionality that Carta has, in my opinion, is the stock option issuance/maintenance functionality. As someone who has had to maintain the option ledger and stock ledger manually in my past life, Carta offers the easy button. It allows the admin to not be required to track down individual emails and keep track of those over time. When a company needs to get in touch with all shareholders it is invaluable to know that Carta can easily do that with just the click of a few buttons.

Quickbase has proven that if it's in a spreadsheet, it really should be in Quickbase. One of my more recent achievements with the program was redesigning our current process for notifying management of something irregular. The old process had all the notification infrastructure built behind the scenes with only a handful of people knowing and understanding the process. The new process was able to clean up the behind-the-scenes and also provide an increased level of intuitiveness by allowing complete visibility and customization of notification recipients. This allows the initial notification to reach a select number of management individuals who can then decide whether or not it needs to be escalated, all while allowing the operations personnel to get back to work immediately. The biggest issue I've found with the program is the limitation of the user - I find that the biggest roadblock in my way is myself, as I am confident the program has the ability to accomplish what I need, but am I skilled enough to create it? This has helped me become very proficient in only one year of use and become more active in community engagement surrounding the program.

Incentivized

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

• Streamlined and efficient UI.
• Automatic calculation of all necessary accounting computations and footnote disclosures, properly support for external audit purposes.
• A central source of truth for both internal (like accounting and legal) and external (outside counsel) stakeholders in the equity process.

Incentivized

• Rapidly bring new ideas to life
• Great authentication and authorization system out of the box
• Connects with many major third-party services (via Pipelines)
• Reporting and Dashboards are awesome
• Excellent emails notification system to keep us in the loop when data changes
• Intuitive UI for building forms and reports
• Nice playground to test new ideas

Incentivized

• Ease of the use of application
• Application does not freeze while attaching data files or pictures
• Unlimited data storage

• Training on getting more from the platform.
• Could be more clear on setting up notifications upfront.
• Concept is new to a lot of folks, could more proactively educate users on managing equity.

Incentivized

• Pipelines - being able to share them or have permissions based viewing capabilities
• Table size limits are small for really large apps. While I agree that there needs to be a cap on the size, it would be nice to adjust it up when needed.

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

We are growing our user base and getting more out of this system. Quick Base will continue to grow with our company as more of our users become super users and are capable of developing new features and solutions. We're getting more and more interested from departments that are hearing of our successes.

Incentivized

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different system

Because it is simple to use, I have never experienced any issues or bugs while using it and I have not heard anyone else having issues with it either. It simply works.

Incentivized

Quick Base has done everything we have asked it to do and then some. Our original goal was to have one system for CRM that encompassed both the sales process and the customer management. We have gone w-a-y beyond that with analytics, project management, system bug logging, and historical effort reporting.

Incentivized

I gave it a 10, but it should be a 9.99. They do a nice job of keeping the application running. The application can drag a bit when you have thousands of users accessing the application concurrently. We experienced this with large scale implementations.

Some of our tables that hold over a million records are starting to perform poorly, with some summaries taking over 20 seconds to load. This may be an indication that it is best to archive old data when reaching large volumes like this.

Incentivized

Every time I have sent a message to Carta's support team, they've responded within 2 business days. The support team is very helpful and always has answered my questions competently and professionally. Many of my questions have also been answered through their extensive support articles. Carta makes available a lot of information that has helped reduce te administrative work of answering questions for our employees as they are able to get most of the information they need through Carta's website.

Incentivized

If you utilize the community, the support is amazing. Unfortunately, I find their actual support system a bit underwhelming. They don't seem to have a great process for interacting directly with an issue and often sweep significant issues under the rug by categorizing them as "Enhancement" ideas or legacy items.

It is very easy to get training from their University portal and still if we don't know their, then we can ask their support too.

Quick Base already is having a separate portal of providing training to customers and it is very easy to use and updates as per the new features added in to the application

I was not directly involved with the initial account implementation, only a bystander. For the app I directly implemented for my department only, I wish I had know to create an app diagram first. I don't remember if that was suggested. I think that would be a great help tip tool when a new app is created, to have a page with a check list of what is needed or how to get started. If you are a regular app builder, then you can bypass it or have the ability to turn it off in the app settings.

Carta is a more focused tool on future investment opportunities and the use/reception of company shares as a benefit of employment. These other HCM tools are great for things like PTO, insurance, pay stubs, taxes, and more. They are just missing the shares usually and that is where Carta comes in and saves the day.

Incentivized

I picked Quickbase before investigating the low-code no-code market because I was so impressed. I did a pricing exercise a couple years ago because Quickbase was drastically increasing the cost and decreasing our allotments/features. We could have saved a lot of money by going with another comparable solution. However, those companies didn't have the longevity and all of the features and functions that Quickbase had.

Incentivized

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

While the purpose of this product is to provide flexibility and scalability to and organization, it is not as easy to roll out on the enterprise level. The support from Quick Base is not on a level that it makes the process easy and fluid. Be prepared to spend more time on this product than you might want to.

Incentivized

• Stock Option Expense Calculations are GAAP compliant reducing potental for misstatements during audit.
• Our CEO and CFO are easily able to view the current status of our equity pool whenever they need information for a fundraising.
• ROI is significant as everything is incredibly efficient and doesn't require any administrative paperwork.

Incentivized

• Quickbase has saved us so much time by reducing the clicks you need to get from one place to another. It takes the average colleague 5 or 6 clicks to get to another tool they need to do their job whereas it takes me 1 or 2 clicks to get to that same tool by using a personal Quickbase dashboard that has all the tools I need all on one page. This is a huge timesaver, especially when desk sharing where you have to get quickly to the info you want to share.
• Quickbase has helped us streamline workflows and close gaps by having to ask for info only 1 time. Since users can't save a form until they've provided all the info you need on your end to complete a task, it saves a tremendous amount of time for everyone. No more replying to emails 2 or 3 times until you get the info you need.

Incentivized

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions