In this paper we study some equivariant systems on the plane. We first give some criteria for the outer or inner stability of compound cycles of these systems. Then we investigate the number of limit cycles which appear near a compound cycle of a Hamiltonian equivariant system under equivariant perturbations. In the last part of the paper we present an application of our general theory to show that a Z3 equivariant system can have 13 limit cycles.