This article is for informational and research purposes only. We are not lawyers or registered investment advisers. Nothing here constitutes legal, financial, or securities advice. Platform fees, features, and policies change over time. Verify current terms directly with each platform before making any decisions. Before conducting any securities offering, consult a qualified securities attorney.

Choosing a platform for your Reg CF or Reg A+ raise is one of the most consequential early decisions in the entire process. The platform you choose affects how much control you have over the investor experience, whether you own your own data, how much you pay in fees, what compliance and transfer agent infrastructure is available to you, and whether your investors remain engaged long after the raise closes.

An important consideration when selecting your platform is this: some platforms are marketplaces where your offering competes for attention alongside dozens of others, and one platform gives you the infrastructure to own the entire investor experience yourself.

That distinction matters more than any other variable in platform selection. This article covers each major platform in depth, explains what makes each one different, and gives you a clear framework for choosing the right one for your raise.

The Market in 2025: What the Data Shows

Understanding the platform landscape starts with the numbers. In 2025, the equity crowdfunding market reached $924.8 million in total investment volume across Reg CF and Reg A+, a 58% increase year over year. The platform breakdown tells an important story:

• DealMaker facilitated $292 million in Reg A+ raises in 2025, representing more than 50% of all capital raised under Reg A+ that year, and has now helped companies raise over $2.3 billion in total across all raise types
• WeFunder led Reg CF platforms with $109 million raised in 2025
• StartEngine followed at $89 million in Reg CF in 2025
• Republic raised $20 million in Reg CF in 2025

DealMaker’s total capital facilitated across all raise types now exceeds $2.3 billion, making it North America’s largest retail capital-raising platform by total volume. That number reflects not just platform scale but a fundamentally different approach to what a capital-raising platform should be.

DealMaker: The Platform Built for Serious Raises

What It Is

DealMaker is an end-to-end, AI-driven, white-label capital raising platform headquartered in New York City. It is not a marketplace. It is infrastructure. Where other platforms host your offering on their platform alongside dozens of competing campaigns, DealMaker gives you the technology to run your own branded raise on your own domain, with full control over the investor experience from first click to final close.

That distinction is the foundation of everything else that makes DealMaker different. When you raise on WeFunder, StartEngine, or Republic, your investors are on their platform. They own the relationship. They own the data. You are a listing. When you raise on DealMaker, your investors are on your platform. You own the relationship. You own the data. And that ownership compounds over time across every raise you run.

DealMaker supports Reg CF, Reg A+, Reg D, and other offering types, making it the most versatile platform in the market for companies building a multi-raise capital strategy. Over 80% of DealMaker’s customers conduct multiple raises on the platform. That is not a coincidence. It is the result of a platform designed to support the entire capital-raising lifecycle, not just a single campaign.

The White Label Advantage

When a founder raises on a marketplace platform, they are sending their investors to someone else’s website. Those investors see other deals. They get marketed to by other companies. Their data lives in someone else’s system. The investor relationship that the founder worked to build belongs, at least partially, to the platform.

DealMaker’s white-label model eliminates that problem entirely. Your campaign lives on your domain with your branding. Investors who come to your raise stay in your ecosystem. They do not see competing deals. They do not get cross-marketed by the platform. And when the raise closes, you retain full access to every investor’s data: contact information, investment amount, communication history, and engagement metrics.

That data is one of the most valuable assets a company builds during a capital raise. It is the foundation for every future raise, every investor relations communication, and every remarketing effort. On a marketplace platform, access to that data is limited or nonexistent. On DealMaker, it is entirely yours.

The Best Checkout Experience in the Market

Conversion rates in equity crowdfunding are driven significantly by the quality of the investment checkout experience. A complicated, slow, or confusing checkout flow loses investors at the moment of commitment. DealMaker has invested heavily in building the most optimized investment checkout experience in the market.

The platform’s checkout flow is designed to minimize friction at every step, from investor accreditation and KYC processing to payment completion and subscription agreement execution. DealMaker’s Auto Review and Auto Accept features, launched in late 2025, automate compliance screening and counter-signing so that investor commitments convert to closed investments faster. For a Reg CF raise with hundreds of investors, the difference between a manual process and DealMaker’s automated close can mean weeks of accelerated working capital deployment.

Performance dashboards give issuers real-time visibility into marketing spend, funds raised, return on ad spend, funnel health, top acquisition channels, and investor demographics, all in one place, updated on a near real-time basis. This is the kind of data infrastructure that serious operators need to manage a raise the way they manage any other performance marketing campaign.

FINRA-Licensed Broker-Dealer and Registered Transfer Agent: All in One Place

One of the most operationally significant advantages of DealMaker is that it operates as both a FINRA-licensed broker-dealer and a registered SEC transfer agent, with both functions fully integrated into the same platform. For founders, this means the compliance infrastructure, the payment processing, the securities administration, and the investor recordkeeping all live in one place, managed by one partner, on one platform.

On other platforms, these functions are often fragmented across multiple vendors. The platform handles the raise. A separate transfer agent maintains the shareholder records. A separate compliance firm handles ongoing obligations. Each handoff is a potential failure point and an additional cost center.

DealMaker’s integrated transfer agent service, branded as DealMaker Shareholder Services, handles share issuance and transfers, maintains official shareholder records, processes corporate actions, distributes dividends, and manages ongoing compliance. Shareholders get access to a self-service portal where they can view their investments, access documents, update their account information, and manage shareholder inquiries without requiring manual intervention from the issuer. For companies that emerge from a raise with thousands of individual investors on their cap table, this self-service infrastructure is not optional. It is essential.

DealMaker’s transfer agent services have attracted companies migrating from other platforms. Legion M, one of the largest equity crowdfunded communities with over 58,000 investors, migrated its entire shareholder base from a competing transfer agent to DealMaker in early 2025, citing the platform’s ability to handle the unique complexity of a large, multi-round crowdfunded investor base.

DealMaker Engage: Investor Relations and Remarketing Built In

Closing a raise is not the end of the investor relationship. It is the beginning. The companies that build the most successful long-term capital strategies treat their investor base as a community to be cultivated, not a transaction to be completed.

DealMaker Engage is the platform’s built-in investor relations, community management, and remarketing tool. It functions as a combined CRM, content management system, and investor communications platform, built directly into the same ecosystem as the raise itself. Issuers can segment their investor base, send targeted updates, share company news, tag and track investor engagement, and communicate with current and prospective investors without exporting data to a third-party tool.

The reinvestment mechanic built into Engage is particularly powerful. An integrated Invest Now feature allows existing investors to reinvest directly from within the investor portal, without navigating back through a separate campaign page. For companies planning multiple raises, this creates a remarketing engine that is already warmed up before the next raise opens. Existing investors who are already engaged, already informed, and already connected to an easy reinvestment path are the highest-converting audience for any subsequent campaign.

DealMaker’s platform also supports social media integration into the Engage investor newsfeed, allowing public updates to flow directly into the investor portal so that keeping investors informed does not require duplicating effort across separate channels. The goal is consistent investor engagement between raises, not just during them. That consistency is what turns a one-time investor into a repeat investor and a repeat investor into a genuine community member.

As one DealMaker issuer put it directly: the other platforms are like Amazon. You cannot contact your customers. On DealMaker, you can. That access to your own investor relationships is the most durable competitive advantage the platform provides.

Marketing Services and Investor Acquisition

Beyond the platform infrastructure, DealMaker offers marketing services designed to help issuers acquire investors through paid digital channels. These services cover paid media strategy across Google, Meta, and other platforms, creative development, campaign management, and performance tracking all connected to the same analytics infrastructure as the raise itself.

The acquisition of Rally On Media in 2025 added additional media and marketing capabilities to DealMaker’s service offering, reflecting the company’s belief that the most successful raises combine great platform infrastructure with great investor acquisition strategy. The two are not separate workstreams. They are the same campaign.

Who DealMaker Is Best For

• Growth-stage companies running Reg A+ raises of $5 million or more that want full control over the investor experience
• Companies with an existing audience or brand that want to keep investors in their own ecosystem rather than a third-party marketplace
• Founders who understand the long-term value of owning their investor data and want to build a compounding capital strategy across multiple raises
• Companies that want integrated broker-dealer, transfer agent, and investor relations infrastructure in a single platform
• Operators who want the best conversion-optimized checkout experience available and real-time analytics to manage the raise like a performance marketing campaign
• Companies with a long-term investor community strategy who need a remarketing and re-engagement tool that works between raises, not just during them

The one honest consideration: DealMaker’s white-label model means you are responsible for driving traffic to your own raise. There is no marketplace feed of browsing investors who might discover your campaign organically. The platform gives you world-class infrastructure. You bring the audience. For companies with a strong brand, an existing customer base, or a marketing partner who can build the audience, that is exactly the right trade. For companies that are hoping the platform itself will generate investor interest without any marketing investment, a marketplace platform may be a better starting point.

StartEngine: The High-Volume Platform With a Secondary Market

What It Is

StartEngine is one of the most established equity crowdfunding platforms in the U.S., founded in 2014 and headquartered in Los Angeles. It raised $89 million in Reg CF volume in 2025 and serves both Reg CF and Reg A+ raises. The platform has processed hundreds of millions of dollars in total investment volume since its founding and has built one of the largest retail investor bases in the equity crowdfunding market.

StartEngine’s investor base tends toward companies at a more mature stage than WeFunder’s, which is reflected in the platform’s higher median raise amount. In a comparative analysis of platform performance, 50% of companies on StartEngine raised $200,000 or more, roughly twice the median raise seen on WeFunder and Republic. The upper quartile raise on StartEngine exceeded $540,000, indicating a meaningful proportion of campaigns raising well above the median.

The Secondary Market: StartEngine’s Defining Differentiator

Liquidity has historically been one of the most significant friction points in equity crowdfunding. Investors who commit capital to a private company through a Reg CF or Reg A+ offering face an indefinite holding period. There is no guaranteed path to liquidity short of an acquisition, an IPO, or a buyback by the issuer. For retail investors considering larger commitments, that lack of liquidity is a real objection.

StartEngine’s secondary market is the most developed attempt in the Reg CF space to address this problem. The secondary market allows investors in certain StartEngine offerings to list their shares for sale to other investors on the platform after the campaign closes, providing a degree of tradability that no other major Reg CF platform currently offers at the same scale.

For issuers, the secondary market is a selling point that can meaningfully reduce investor hesitation at the point of commitment. Being able to tell prospective investors that there is a potential path to liquidity through the StartEngine secondary market, even if that path is not guaranteed, addresses one of the most common objections in the retail investor decision process.

There are important caveats. Secondary market liquidity on StartEngine is not guaranteed. Trading volume varies significantly across issuers, and many shares listed on the secondary market do not find buyers quickly or at all. Investors should understand that the secondary market provides a potential liquidity option, not a reliable one. But as a differentiator for issuers looking to reduce investor friction, it is genuine and meaningful.

StartEngine’s secondary market is particularly valuable for Reg A+ raises, where individual investment amounts tend to be larger and investor concerns about holding period are proportionally greater. If your Reg A+ offering is likely to attract investors making commitments of $5,000 or more, the secondary market conversation is worth having.

Platform Tools and Campaign Experience

StartEngine emphasizes founder autonomy in campaign execution. The platform provides a modular campaign builder with customizable landing pages, embeddable investment widgets, and API access for technical teams that want deeper integration. Optional premium packages provide access to advanced analytics, secondary market promotion, and additional marketing support.

For founders with in-house marketing and communications capability, StartEngine’s toolset supports a largely self-directed campaign experience. For founders who need more structured guidance and hands-on support, the platform’s optional consultation packages fill some of that gap, though the experience is less curated than WeFunder’s fellowship model or Republic’s mandatory review process.

StartEngine also benefits from the strategic involvement of Kevin O’Leary, the investor and entrepreneur known from Shark Tank, who serves as a strategic adviser to the platform. That association has generated significant media visibility for StartEngine and contributes to its brand recognition among retail investors who are familiar with O’Leary’s involvement in the startup investment space.

Fees

StartEngine charges a success fee on funds raised plus a payment processing fee. For Reg A+ raises, fee structures differ from Reg CF and may include equity components in addition to cash fees. Fee terms are subject to negotiation and change over time. Verify current terms directly with StartEngine before committing to any raise on the platform.

Who StartEngine Is Best For

• Companies raising $500,000 or more that want access to a large, experienced retail investor base with a demonstrated history of writing meaningful checks
• Issuers for whom investor liquidity is a meaningful consideration and who want to offer the secondary market as a selling point to prospective investors
• Founders with in-house marketing and communications capability who want a self-directed campaign experience with strong platform tools and API access
• Companies in green energy, sustainability, and consumer technology sectors that have historically performed well on the platform
• Companies running Reg A+ raises who want the secondary market option available to larger investors

WeFunder: The Community Round Platform

What It Is

WeFunder is the largest Reg CF platform by number of active campaigns and led Reg CF volume in 2025 with $109 million raised. It was founded in 2012 and has positioned itself as the home of the community round: a raise where customers, fans, and community members become investors alongside traditional retail participants.

WeFunder’s investor base skews toward mission-aligned retail investors who are motivated by belief in a company or founder as much as financial return expectations. The platform has a social dimension built in: investors can comment publicly on campaigns, share raises with their networks, and interact with founders in a way that generates organic word-of-mouth momentum when a campaign is performing well. This social layer is one of WeFunder’s genuine differentiators from a community-building perspective.

Volume and Competition for Attention

WeFunder hosted approximately 280 rated deals in 2024 according to Kingscrowd analysis, the highest volume of any platform. That volume is both an advantage and a challenge. The advantage is a large, active investor base with significant browsing traffic. The challenge is that your campaign competes for that attention alongside a large number of simultaneously active raises.

On WeFunder, a compelling campaign page and a strong pre-launch audience are especially important because the feed is crowded. Campaigns that open with momentum, meaning a base of early committed investors from the founder’s own network who invest in the first days of the raise, consistently outperform campaigns that open cold and rely on platform discovery. The platform rewards campaigns that arrive with energy, not campaigns that are hoping the platform generates it.

Support and Onboarding

WeFunder offers a founder support program that pairs companies with advisers who provide feedback on campaign materials, pitch content, and outreach strategy. The platform’s dashboard integrates compliance tracking, referral tools, and campaign analytics in a single interface. For founders running their first public raise, the guided onboarding experience is a meaningful advantage over more self-directed platforms.

WeFunder has historically offered fee waiver arrangements for certain qualifying raises. The platform charges a success fee on funds raised plus a payment processing and escrow fee. Verify current fee structures directly with WeFunder before committing, as these terms are subject to change and are sometimes negotiated individually.

The Marketplace Trade-Off

WeFunder is a marketplace. Your investors are on WeFunder’s platform. Their data is in WeFunder’s system. The ongoing relationship is mediated by WeFunder. Your campaign page competes for attention with every other offering on the platform at any given time. For companies that are building a long-term direct investor community strategy, this is a meaningful limitation. For companies that are raising once, at an early stage, and want access to a large built-in investor audience, it is a reasonable starting point.

Who WeFunder Is Best For

• Early-stage companies with an engaged community and a compelling story who want access to a large investor feed with built-in browsing traffic
• Consumer-facing companies and mission-driven businesses where the social sharing and community features of the platform amplify campaign momentum
• Founders running their first public raise who want hands-on support and a guided onboarding experience
• Companies raising under $1 million who want a straightforward path to market without the white-label infrastructure investment that DealMaker requires

Republic: The Curated Quality Platform

What It Is

Republic is the most selective of the major Reg CF platforms. It accepts fewer companies than WeFunder and StartEngine, and its curation process is more rigorous. The result is a platform whose deals consistently rank highest in third-party quality assessments. Over a 30-month data period analyzed by Kingscrowd, Republic produced approximately 39% of all top-rated deals across the major platforms, the highest proportion of any single platform despite having significantly fewer total listings.

Republic’s investor base is more globally dispersed than its competitors and includes both non-accredited retail investors and accredited investors who participate in co-investment rounds alongside venture funds. The platform has a meaningful international investor presence that distinguishes it from WeFunder and StartEngine, whose investor bases are more concentrated in the U.S.

The Curation Signal

Being accepted onto Republic carries an implicit quality signal that is different from what any other major platform provides. Republic reviewed your company, evaluated it against its standards, and chose to list it. For investors on the platform, that curation carries weight. It signals that a credible third party has assessed the opportunity and found it worth presenting to their investor base.

For founders, that signal has real value in certain contexts. If your investor profile skews toward more sophisticated retail investors or accredited individuals who are making considered investment decisions rather than impulse commitments, the Republic credibility signal can accelerate the decision-making process.

Education-First Onboarding

Republic’s onboarding process is more education-focused and structured than its competitors. Founders go through mandatory review processes for legal documents and campaign materials before the offering goes live. Interactive tutorials on term sheets, mandatory walkthroughs of legal documents, and live office hours with experienced operators are part of the preparation process.

This lengthens the preparation timeline relative to WeFunder and StartEngine. But it reduces the risk of compliance errors, campaign presentation problems, and investor confusion about the terms of the offering. For founders who want a more guided experience and are willing to invest the additional preparation time, Republic’s process produces consistently polished campaign presentations.

Fees

Republic charges a platform fee on funds raised plus a payment processing fee, and a nominal upfront due diligence fee that is refunded upon a successful close. Verify current terms directly with Republic before committing to a raise on the platform.

Who Republic Is Best For

• Tech-focused or mission-driven companies that meet a higher bar for due diligence and want the credibility signal of a selective platform
• Companies whose ideal investor profile is more sophisticated and is likely to make larger individual commitments based on careful evaluation rather than community enthusiasm
• Issuers raising from a mix of retail and accredited investors who want a platform that serves both audiences well with co-investment round mechanics
• Founders with a longer preparation timeline who can accommodate Republic’s structured onboarding and benefit from the education-first approach to campaign preparation
• Companies with international investor audiences who want access to Republic’s globally dispersed investor base

Head-to-Head: The Key Differences at a Glance

Feature	DealMaker	StartEngine	WeFunder	Republic
Platform model	White-label, own domain	Marketplace	Marketplace	Marketplace
You own investor data	Yes, fully	Limited	Limited	Limited
Reg A+ specialized	Yes, dominant in market	Yes, supported	Limited	Limited
Integrated transfer agent	Yes	No	No	No
FINRA broker-dealer	Yes, integrated	Yes, integrated	Yes, integrated	Yes, integrated
Investor remarketing tool	Yes, DealMaker Engage	No	No	No
Secondary market	No	Yes	No	No
Built-in investor traffic	No, you drive traffic	Yes	Yes, largest volume	Yes, curated
Curation and selectivity	Application required	Moderate	Low to moderate	High
Best raise size	$5M and above	$500K and above	Early stage to $2M	Any, quality focused
Total 2025 volume	$292M Reg A+	$89M Reg CF	$109M Reg CF	$20M Reg CF

The Framework for Choosing

Here is the honest framework for making this decision.

If you are running a serious Reg A+ raise, or a Reg CF raise where you have an existing audience and want to own the investor experience from end to end, DealMaker is the right platform. The integrated broker-dealer, transfer agent, investor relations, and remarketing infrastructure it provides is not available from any other single platform. The white-label model means you build equity in your own investor community with every raise, not in someone else’s marketplace. The checkout experience, the compliance automation, and the data infrastructure are built for operators who take the raise seriously and plan to return for future rounds.

If investor liquidity is a meaningful concern for your target investor profile and you want to offer a secondary market as a selling point, StartEngine is the only platform that provides that option at scale. For larger Reg CF raises or Reg A+ campaigns where individual investment amounts are significant, the secondary market conversation is a real differentiator worth having with prospective investors.

If you are earlier stage, raising under $1 million, and looking for a marketplace with built-in investor traffic and a guided onboarding experience, WeFunder is the most accessible starting point. The community features and social mechanics are genuine assets for consumer-facing companies with an enthusiastic audience.

If you want the credibility signal of a curated platform and your investor profile skews toward more sophisticated retail investors making considered, larger commitments, Republic is worth the additional preparation time its onboarding requires.

The Platform Is One Variable. The Strategy Is Everything.

Platform selection matters. But it is one variable in a raise that has many. The companies that consistently outperform on every platform are the ones that arrive with a clear story, a built audience, a marketing plan, and an investor communications strategy that runs from pre-launch through close and beyond.

No platform delivers investors to you. You bring investors to the platform. The platform provides the infrastructure, the compliance framework, and the investor interface. The campaign, the messaging, and the communications strategy are yours to build.

That is where the raise is won. And it is where the work begins before you ever choose a platform.

At Momentum, we work with companies building serious direct-to- investor capital raises. The platform decision is one of the first conversations we have with every client, because it shapes everything that follows. For the companies we work with, the ones raising significant capital with a long-term investor community strategy, DealMaker’s infrastructure is the right foundation. The work we do on top of that foundation, the story, the communications strategy, the marketing campaign, and the investor relations infrastructure, is what turns a qualified offering into a successful raise.

The Bottom Line

The platform decision is more consequential than most founders realize when they start researching their raise. It determines who owns your investor data, what your investor experience looks like, what compliance and transfer agent infrastructure you have access to, and whether your raise builds a community you can return to or a transaction that ends at close.

DealMaker has built the most complete end-to-end infrastructure for serious direct-to-investor capital raising in the market. The numbers support it: over $2.3 billion in total capital raised, more than 50% of all Reg A+ capital in 2025, and over 80% of customers returning for multiple raises. That last number is the most telling. The companies that use it once tend to use it again. Because the platform they build the first time is still theirs when they come back for the second raise.

StartEngine brings a genuine secondary market liquidity option that no other platform matches. WeFunder brings the largest Reg CF investor community and the strongest social mechanics for early-stage consumer raises. Republic brings curation, credibility, and a sophisticated investor base for companies that meet its standards.

Each platform has a legitimate role in the market. The question is which one matches what you are actually trying to build.

Platform data cited in this article is drawn from publicly available third-party analyses including Kingscrowd research published in 2024 and 2025 and publicly available company announcements. Platform fees, features, and policies change frequently. Verify all current terms directly with each platform. For SEC registration status of funding portals and broker-dealers, see FINRA BrokerCheck and the SEC’s list of registered funding portals at sec.gov. This article is intended for informational purposes only. We are not attorneys. Consult qualified legal counsel before conducting any securities offering.