Carbon accounting platforms: an honest map of the market

Carbon accounting platforms measure and report corporate greenhouse gas emissions, but they differ sharply in sales motion, data model and who does the work. The market splits into three shapes: enterprise suites, consultant-led tools, and ledger-first software.

The three shapes of carbon accounting platform
Shape	Examples	Strengths	Trade-offs
Enterprise suite	Persefoni, Watershed, Sweep	Depth, integrations, decarbonization programs	Quote-based pricing, sales-led access, long implementation; built for companies with data teams
Consultant-led	Greenly, Normative, boutique firms	Human help with a first inventory	The hours are the product, so it scales like a consultancy; methodology depth varies
Ledger-first software	Carbonaccounting.ai (early access)	Runs on your AP data before you talk to anyone; published pricing; evidence per line	Young product; platform features beyond classification are planned, not shipped

None of the incumbents publishes pricing; every comparison site that prints their dollar figures is guessing. We publish ours on the pricing page and let you run the core classification on your own data below, before any email address changes hands. A deeper look at the named vendors is on the Persefoni alternatives page, and the vendor landscape overview lives in our carbon accounting companies post.

Five questions that separate platforms fast

01 Can you see the product working on your data before a sales call?
02 Is pricing published, or discovered at the end of a procurement cycle?
03 Does every figure resolve to a source line and a factor, or to a black box?
04 When the method or factor set changes, is last year's number still reproducible?
05 Who does the classification work: your team, their consultants, or reviewed AI?

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01 Amazon Web Services Cloud infrastructure, annual $184,000 S3 20,240 kg

02 Con Edison Electricity, 82,400 kWh metered $14,600 S2 31,312 kg

03 Delta Air Lines Team offsite + client flights $32,500 S3 24,375 kg

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02 Related

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