OptionsAhoy alternatives: equity planning tools and services compared

A rule before any comparison: products compare when they share an objective. OptionsAhoy's objective is planning: computing what to do with your equity before you commit to anything. So this page compares planning products, whoever sells them. Companies whose main business is something else (financing an exercise, pooling shares for diversification, managing wealth at large) appear here only for their planning tools; their other products have different objectives and belong in their own comparisons. That is not a knock on those products: a plan and the products that execute it combine naturally, and you could well use both. Get the best plan you can here, then finance the exercise, buy the hedge, or hire the manager wherever the terms are best.

The table below is the planning landscape, one row per kind of planning; the last column is the OptionsAhoy answer on that row.

One objective per comparison. Here, it is planning: the best plan makes every other product cheaper to choose.

If your problem is the plan: exercise planning tools

This is OptionsAhoy's home ground, so the comparison is direct. The table lists every notable planning tool and calculator and what each one computes; everything was last verified on August 13, 2026.

A single-year estimator is enough for a sanity check, and several are good at it. It is not a plan. The expensive mistakes in equity comp are multi-year mistakes: exercising everything at once when splitting across years would have saved six figures, stranding AMT credit you never recover, ignoring the state layer entirely.

The plan also prices every decision that follows it: the schedule plus the funding plan give the year-by-year cash need, and the Beta computes it inside your whole portfolio and tax situation, so the answer reflects everything you hold rather than one grant in isolation.

If you want the planning done for you: wealth managers

Planning as a service is the same objective delivered by humans, so it belongs in the comparison; the question is who does the work and what that costs. (What else these firms sell, from investment management to estate work, is outside this page's scope.)

An advisor wins when your situation is bigger than your equity (multiple income streams, estate, charitable planning), or when you know you will not execute a plan without someone accountable for it; a good advisor's value is mostly follow-through. The free tools win when what you want is the equity answer: an advisor engaged for a full relationship is an expensive way to learn which lots to sell, and many advisors use planning software of their own to compute exactly that. When what you want is the whole portfolio optimized, not answers one question at a time, that is the Beta's job: the same head-to-head, without the fee. The combination is legitimate too: bring your computed plan to the first meeting and the conversation starts from the math.

If your problem is concentration: planning the exit

Concentration planning is deciding how much of one stock to keep, and how to unwind the rest: sell on what schedule, hedge at what cost, in what order of lots. Products that implement a diversification decision (exchange funds, direct indexing, collars) have a different objective and their own trade-offs; we compare those in dedicated deep dives on exchange funds and collars. The planning itself is what this table covers; note how thin the self-serve column is: elsewhere, concentration planning typically comes bundled with an advisory relationship or advisor software.

If you advise clients: advisor software

Same objective, different buyer: these tools do equity planning for a book of clients, so the comparison is about practice features as much as math. If you are an equity holder, this category matters as context: when an advisor shows you an equity analysis, software like this often produced it.