Karbon
Practice management software for accounting firms, built for growth
By Karbon · HQ San Francisco, US · 4.7/5 Value-Position score (estimate)
Positioning guardrails
Best for
- Accounting and bookkeeping firms with 5–500 staff that want email, workflow, time, billing and a client portal in one system
- Growing practices standardising recurring engagements, period close and client onboarding
- Multi-office firms needing visibility of who is working on what, for which client
- Firms already using QuickBooks, Xero, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace
Ideal size: 5–500 people · Established firm with defined engagement processes
Not for
- Sole practitioners who want a low-cost, single-purpose tool
- Non-accounting professional services firms such as legal, consulting or agencies
- Firms that need native tax return preparation rather than practice management
- Businesses requiring on-premise or air-gapped deployment
Value metrics scorecard
Time-to-Value
2–6 weeks with onboarding
~30 days to first production value
Total Cost of Ownership
$53,400/yr
Starts at $708 · Per user, per month; billed monthly or annually at a lower annual rate. Three tiers: Team, Business and Enterprise (custom).
Implementation Friction
3/5
Engineering + admin effort required
Value-Position score
out of 5 · model estimate
Full cost breakdown
Mandatory implementation fee
None
Seat tiers
Monthly billing only for teams of 4+; annual billing suits any team size. Contact limits: 1,000 on Team, unlimited on Business and Enterprise.
Add-on costs
- Email Insights reporting: paid add-on on Business and Enterprise
- Custom Reporting: paid add-on on Business and Enterprise
- Team Training and Advanced Team Training: paid add-on
- Quarterly Training with Expert Q&A session: paid add-on
- Dedicated Customer Success Manager: paid add-on on Business, included on Enterprise
- Karbon eSignature credits: $100 for 100 credits up to $2,000 for 4,000 credits
- Payment processing: 2.6% + $0.30 standard cards, 3.9% + $0.30 Amex, 1% + $0.30 ACH (max $5.00)
- Guided implementation packages led by a dedicated expert (price not published)
Company & support
Who is behind Karbon, and how your team gets help once it is live.
Company
- Founded
- Not recorded
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, US
How you get support
- PhoneAll plans
- EmailAll plans
- Live chatNot listed
- Support portal / ticketsNot listed
- Community forumAll plans
- Help centre / docsAll plans
- Dedicated account managerEnterprise only
- In person / on-siteNot listed
- Hours
- 24/7
- Response time
- Not stated
Phone support is stated as available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; the pricing page lists 24/7 support, 99.9% uptime and email support, with a dedicated customer success manager as an add-on or Enterprise feature.
“Not listed” means the vendor’s public pages don’t mention that channel, not that it is unavailable. Ask about it during evaluation.
Market position
Where Karbon sits against its closest alternatives. Pick any two of cost, speed, friction and buyer score, and up to 9 companies to compare.
Quadrant view
Typical annual cost × Time-to-value
The lines cross at the median of the solutions shown, so about half sit on each side of each line. A dashed ring marks an outlier pinned to the edge; hover for its value.
Companies on the chart 6 / 10
- Karbon
- PeopleForce
- Productive
- Scoro
- Tempo Timesheets
- Float
Add or change companies
Up to 10 companies including Karbon. Listed closest first.
Stack fit signal
Compatibility with standard B2B ecosystems.
No supported MCP path today, so it cannot be driven from an AI client.
AI & MCP readiness
What Karbon ships in AI, and what it asks of your ecosystem.
AI features shipped
Karbon AI runs on Azure OpenAI and is included at no extra cost on paid plans. Documented capabilities cover email summarisation and drafting, client and work summaries, smart suggestions for assignment and time entry, and early-access Kai AI coworker and agentic workflows. No per-action AI audit or export is documented in the sources reviewed.
Your data & models
- Trains on your data
- Never trains on your data
- Runs on
- OpenAI
- AI pricing
- Included in the plan
In your ecosystem
- AI connection
- Not supported
- Model key
- Vendor's key
- AI usage audit
- Not recorded
Compliance attestations
* IAPP AIGP certifies individuals, not products. It means named staff hold the credential — not that the platform does.
Bottom line
Karbon is cloud practice management software for accounting and bookkeeping firms, uniting email triage, workflow templates, client management, time and budgets, billing, payments, eSignature and a client portal in one platform with an open API. Karbon reports 40,000+ accounting professionals in 34 countries and an average saving of 19.9 hours per employee per week. Karbon AI, built on Azure OpenAI, adds email summaries, drafting, smart suggestions and early-access agentic workflows at no additional cost.
Frequently asked questions
How is Karbon priced?
Karbon is charged per user across three plans. The Team plan is $59 per user per month paid annually, or $79 paid monthly. The Business plan is $89 per user per month paid annually, or $99 paid monthly. Enterprise is custom priced. Monthly subscriptions require a team of at least four users. Optional items such as Email Insights, Custom Reporting, premium training, eSignature credit bundles and payment processing fees are billed separately.
How long does implementation take and what support is included?
Karbon offers implementation services ranging from group onboarding to guided implementation packages led by a dedicated expert, and data import options run from self-service to fully managed depending on plan. Support is available by email and by phone in the US, Australia and the UK, and the pricing page states all plans include 24/7 support, 99.9% uptime and regular updates. A dedicated customer success manager is an add-on on Business and included on Enterprise.
Is Karbon AI included, and will our data be used to train AI models?
Karbon AI is currently available to all Karbon customers at no additional cost, and the company says it will communicate in advance if AI pricing is introduced. It is built on the Azure OpenAI Service. Karbon states that firm data stays within Karbon, is never shared externally, and is not used to train AI models, with data kept in-region. Karbon AI is on by default but account administrators can disable it in firm settings.
What integrations does Karbon offer?
Karbon lists a large ecosystem directory covering email (Microsoft 365 and Gmail), cloud accounting (QuickBooks Online Accountant, Xero), document storage (Google Drive), CRM (HubSpot), messaging (Slack, WhatsApp) and many tax, payroll and client onboarding tools. Karbon also publishes an open API at api.karbonhq.com with documentation, webhooks, and support for Java, JavaScript, C#, PHP, Python and Ruby.
Does Karbon replace our tax preparation software?
No. Karbon is practice management: workflow, email, client management, time, billing, payments, eSignature and portals. Return preparation is handled through integrations such as Intuit ProConnect, Tallyfor, Juno, Robo1040, Tax1099 and Filed, so firms keep their existing tax compliance stack and connect it to Karbon.
What security and compliance certifications does Karbon hold?
Karbon's security page states the web application is SOC 2 Type II certified after an annual audit, and says the company has completed a self-assessment for GDPR compliance. An ISMS aligned with ISO 27001 is implemented but Karbon states it is not yet independently certified. Data is encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256, multi-factor authentication is supported, and payment processing is handled by Stripe.