# Pave vs. Carta Total Compensation

> Pave and Carta Total Compensation can both help companies set salary and equity bands, but their most important difference sits beneath the interface. Pave builds market data from persistent connections to HR, recruiting and equity systems across a broad participant network, while Carta draws on a deep private-market dataset rooted in the cap tables managed on its platform. Carta now sells Total Compensation to companies whose cap tables are elsewhere, so access is no longer gated by a Carta cap-table subscription. The useful buying question is not which database is bigger, but which contributor base, update cadence and workflow best match the talent market a company is actually competing in.

## Achievements

- Pave reports persistent data collection from connected HR platforms and publishes refreshed benchmarks monthly.
- Pave reports a participant base of more than 9,000 companies on its current product site.
- Carta reports compensation benchmarks built from data across more than 50,000 private-market cap tables.
- Carta Total Compensation is available to companies that do not manage their cap table on Carta.
- Both products cover salary and equity benchmarking and provide tools for turning market data into compensation bands.

## Latest updates

- **2026-06** — Carta announced that Total Compensation benchmarks could be queried through its Carta Cap Table Plugin for Claude.
- **2026-06** — Carta's Q2 2026 release refreshed salary, total cash and equity benchmarks across job areas and peer groups.
- **2026-01** — Pave's methodology described Market Data coverage across more than 55 countries and more than 90 cities or metropolitan areas.

## Links

- Website: https://www.pave.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pave

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Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-15