Top 7 Expensify alternatives for expense management in 2025
Top 7 Expensify alternatives for expense management in 2025
Introduction
Expensify is a platform for tracking expenses and managing reimbursements. And while it can be effective for smaller companies, there are better Expensify alternatives for startups and fast-growing companies.
Sole proprietors and small business owners use Expensify to upload receipts and split bills between multiple people. They can also create chat rooms on the app to message other users, rather than using email or paying for a communication platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams — a feature that’s novel but not exactly needed by most companies. For example, a local restaurant with a handful of employees might use Expensify to scan receipts and invoices from food distributors. With Expensify, their documents are digitized, helping them track their costs and keep records for tax write-offs. And the owner can message the back-of-house manager on Expensify when a reimbursement request is missing a receipt.
Expensify isn’t a viable option for scaling companies who need to manage large volumes of transactions, control spend at scale, and improve their financial processes. And it does not serve larger mid-market or enterprise companies — Expensify will not support organizations with 1,000 or more employees, even on its most expensive plan.
Fortunately, there are Expensify competitors with better functionality and pricing for companies of all sizes.
Why you may need to consider a Expensify alternative
While Expensify can be sufficient for small businesses or sole proprietors, growing companies have been frustrated with its functionality, user experience, and customer support.
Here’s why you might need to consider Expensify alternatives.
Pricing structure
Expensify offers basic expense tracking and bill splitting for free with its “New Expensify” plan. The plan is made specifically for “freelancers, independent contractors, and small business owners,” according to Expensify CEO David Barrett.
The core features that companies need come with additional charges. Expensify’s Collect plan — with features like bill pay, expense approvals, and integrations — starts at $5/month per user.
The Control plan, which is limited to companies with up to 1,000 employees, starts at $9/month per user. This package includes administrator-enforced controls, basic budgeting capabilities, and ERP and HRIS integrations.
Expensify’s per-seat pricing seems reasonable at first glance. But the true costs can add up quickly.
For starters, Expensify’s plans only start at $5 or $9/month per user. Those prices are only available by locking into Expensify’s yearly contract and spending on Expensify Card.
In reality, many companies have to pay around $36 per user every month — “depending on your plan and the way you choose to pay,” per Expensify’s website.
Beyond the complicated pricing structure, Expensify tends to get really expensive when you factor in all of the other fees you’ll incur for things like international reimbursements. Expensify lacks true multi-currency support, and the platform’s payments are USD-based, leaving global companies saddled with hefty foreign exchange (FX) fees.
As your transaction volume increases, so does the cost of the service. Cost-conscious companies may want to look to Expensify competitors with transparent pricing and better scalability for growing organizations.
User interface complexity
A clunky interface isn’t just inconvenient — it’s a waste of time and money. This complexity can lead to decreased productivity, as employees spend more time figuring out how to use the system rather than efficiently submitting and managing expenses.
Expensify's user interface may be adequate for independent consultants. But it can become a hindrance as your expense management needs evolve. The platform's design hasn't evolved much over the years, leading to a clunky user experience. Users often report difficulties in finding specific features or understanding how to perform more advanced tasks. An expense management system should automate tedious tasks, increasing productivity for employees and managers. A poor UX will negate those benefits. When it’s a struggle to complete basic tasks like submitting expense reports, entering details, or categorizing expenses, it creates a ripple effect of inefficiency throughout the organization.
A frustrating user experience doesn't just slow down individual tasks; it can lead to widespread avoidance of the system altogether. Employees may delay or neglect expense reporting tasks, creating backlogs and inaccuracies in financial reporting.
A well-designed, intuitive system ensures adoption, so all expenses are properly tracked and accounted for. This increased engagement leads to better compliance with company policies, as employees are more likely to follow procedures when they're easy to understand and implement.
More importantly, a quality UX gives you clear visibility into company spending, allowing for more accurate and timely financial decisions. You need an expense management platform that makes it easy to run customizable reports and track all of your spend in one dashboard.
Companies looking for a smooth, intuitive user experience may want to seek Expensify alternatives with intuitive drag-and-drop capabilities and a top-rated mobile app.
Limited integrations
While Expensify does offer some integrations at an added cost, the depth and flexibility of these integrations can be limited. And Expensify might not integrate with all of your existing ERP, HRIS, and messaging platforms.
For example, Expensify’s NetSuite integration doesn’t enable you to automatically sync your credit card transactions with NetSuite. Expensify users either have to create a journal entry or establish a single vendor for the expense report.
Shallow integrations lead to data silos and manual workarounds that increase the potential for errors. Weak ERP integrations can result in discrepancies between expense data and general ledger entries, complicating reconciliation processes and potentially slow your month-end close.
Poor integrations with HRIS platforms are also a costly timesuck. On average, HR managers lose 14 hours a week on manual processes, including the process of onboarding new employees. Meanwhile, manual errors in the offboarding process can lead to security risks and unauthorized spend. For scaling businesses, the ability to easily connect expense management with other critical business platforms isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a must have. As you grow and adopt specialized software, your expense management solution has to sync properly to ensure operational efficiency and accuracy.
Companies seeking to optimize their financial operations should consider Expensify competitors that offer deep, flexible integrations with a wide range of business-critical platforms. This helps to ensure that expense management doesn’t exist in isolation — and that you won’t outgrow your expense management software solution.
Customer support
Users have found Expensify’s customer support to be less-than-helpful. The platform relies heavily on email support, which can lead to frustratingly long response times.
Expensify claims that users will get “responses in minutes” after emailing its Concierge team. In practice, you might receive an email confirming receipt in minutes — i.e. “Thank you for your email. A member of our support staff will get back to you as soon as possible.” But it could be a while before you get a real reply.
Expensify does not have a customer service phone number, so there’s no way to call an Expensify support specialist. You can initiate a Concierge chat on the Expensify mobile app, but many issues require multiple follow-ups or escalations to resolve.
In many cases, users are left to comb through Expensify’s help center articles for answers, or post questions on the website’s message board.
Companies like Expensify have scaled back on customer support in order to cut costs. Some expense management platforms require users to submit support requests in a portal, which can leave you waiting hours or even days before hearing back.
If you want reliable help when you need it, you should probably consider Expensify alternatives that offer 24/7 customer support via live chat or phone.
Take a close look at pricing, UX, integrations, and customer support when deciding on an expense management platform. By considering those factors and exploring the alternatives below, you can find the right Expensify alternative for your current and future needs.
1. Brex
Brex is the ideal Expensify alternative with expense management, global corporate cards, reimbursements, travel booking, automated bill pay, and banking services in one integrated system. Powered by AI, Brex enables companies to improve their financial operations, automate tedious processes, and gain real-time insights into their spending.
Unlike companies like Expensify, Brex serves companies at every stage of growth, from startup to enterprise. Brex is built to scale, so you can start with the full suite of features or choose products a la carte.
Key features:
- Consolidated spend management: Brex offers corporate cards, expense management, business banking, bill pay, and travel in one solution. This allows your company to manage all of its spend in a single dashboard, eliminating the need for multiple systems and reducing the potential for data silos. With Brex, businesses gain a holistic view of their finances, making it easier to track, control, and optimize spending across the organization.
- Auto-enforced spend controls: With Brex, you can set proactive, auto-enforced spend controls at the category, merchant, and transaction level. Embedded expense policies prevent out-of-policy transactions before they occur, keeping everyone on budget automatically. Unlike platforms that rely on after-the-fact review, Brex's approach ensures compliance in real-time, reducing the risk of audits and policy violations.
- Global payment capabilities: Brex enables you to issue cards in local currencies, create localized spend limits, and close the books across entities. Brex supports spending in over 40+ currencies — more than Expensify or any other Expensify alternative — via physical and virtual credit cards as well as wires and ACH. Beyond that, Brex corporate cards are accepted in 210 countries/territories and can be issued 20+ currencies. With Brex, you can avoid costly FX fees as you scale globally.
- AI-powered expense automation: Brex leverages AI to automate much of the expense management process. Brex automatically categorizes expenses, auto-generates receipts for thousands of merchants, and pre-populates memos to save hours and reduce errors. Brex's AI can also flag exceptions and anomalies, allowing managers to review expenses by exception rather than line-by-line.
- 24/7 customer support: Brex provides round-the-clock customer support via live chat, email, phone, and even WhatsApp. Brex’s world-class support ensures that users can get help whenever they need it, regardless of their time zone or the complexity of their issue.
- Integrated banking solution: Brex's banking solution enables you to save, spend, and take every dollar further with industry-leading yield, zero hidden fees, and up to $6 million in FDIC insurance. The banking solution also enables faster international payments when used in conjunction with Brex's bill pay feature, streamlining financial operations for global businesses.
- Direct integrations: Brex offers two-way integrations with 1,000s of accounting software, ERPs, and HRIS platforms. Notably, Brex was named NetSuite's 2023 Partner of the Year for its robust NetSuite integration. By connecting directly with the tools businesses already use, Brex helps create a more efficient and accurate financial ecosystem.
- Top-rated mobile app: Brex's mobile app, rated 4.9 on the Apple App Store, offers full functionality on the go. The app's intuitive design makes it easy for users to manage expenses, book travel, and access support from their mobile devices.
Why people prefer Brex over Expensify
Companies often choose Brex over Expensify for a scalable solution that provides AI-powered expense automation, proactive spend controls, and total spend visibility.
By auto-generating receipts, pre-populating expense details, and flagging anomalies for manager review, Brex significantly reduces the manual work involved in expense management. Expensify may offer features that sound similar, but their outdated technology leads to issues. For example, their SmartScan feature can miss key details like the date of the transaction, requiring the employee to enter info manually, or correct it after they submit the expense report.
Unlike Expensify, Brex has multi-currency support and local billing capabilities to help companies save on FX fees and avoid tricky intercompany transactions. Plus, the global reimbursement is far smoother with Brex.
“The thing we like the most about Brex is reimbursements — our US and international employees get reimbursed in their local currency in days. It’s so much faster than Expensify,” said Scott Guenther, Finance Lead at 0x.
Pricing
Brex offers flexible pricing options to accommodate businesses at different stages of growth. The free Brex Essentials plan provides a comprehensive suite of features, including global corporate cards, business banking, bill pay, integrated spend management, reimbursements, accounting automation, and real-time spend reporting.
For businesses requiring more advanced features, Brex Premium is available at $12/month per user. This tier unlocks enhanced customization for expense policies, additional procurement features, and expanded travel functionality, making it a popular choice for midsize companies.
Large enterprises with complex global operations can benefit from the Brex Enterprise plan. This top-tier offering includes local-currency cards and billing in over 50 countries, unlimited policy customization, and advanced compliance tools.
Across all plans, Brex maintains a transparent per-seat pricing model with no annual fees, providing clarity and predictability in costs as your business scales.
2. Airbase
Airbase offers corporate cards, expense management, and accounts payable capabilities in one platform. Founded in 2017 and based in San Francisco, it provides basic spend control features and integrates with common accounting software.
Key features:
- Physical and virtual corporate cards with some controls
- Automated, multi-level approval workflows
- Accounts payable automation
- Real-time reporting and general ledger sync
- Easily retrievable audit trails
Why people prefer Airbase over Concur
Companies prefer Airbase over Expensify for accounts payable (AP) features. While Expensify focuses primarily on tracking expenses, Airbase offers AP essentials like purchase order (PO) matching. Still, Brex offers much better AP automation than Airbase or any of the other Expensify competitors.
Users also say that Airbase has better customer support than Expensify. While Airbase uses a ticket system for inquiries, their specialists tend to reply to emails faster than Expensify’s concierge.
Pricing:
Airbase has three pricing tiers: Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. But Airbase bases its pricing on a company's annual transaction volume and employee count.
The Standard plan caters to businesses with up to 200 employees, while the Premium tier extends support for organizations with up to 500 employees. The Enterprise plan, designed for larger companies, caps out at 10,000 employees.
Airbase's pricing model lacks transparency, as the company does not publicly disclose its rates. Businesses must provide detailed information about their operations just to get a quote, making it challenging to compare costs upfront.
4. Fyle
Fyle offers cloud-based software for small businesses that need additional expense management tools to go with their legacy business credit cards. The platform offers features such as receipt scanning, automatic expense categorization, and integration with popular accounting software. Fyle also has a mobile app, allowing users to manage expenses on-the-go.
Key features
- Instant text alerts for spend
- Receipt tracking via SMS
- Integrates with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express credit cards
- Expense report automation with receipt scanning
Why people prefer Fyle over Expensify
Users may find Fyle’s receipt scanning functionality to be better than Expensify’s. Expensify’s SmartScan technology can struggle to identify the receipt’s merchant, date, and amount. And, in 2020, it was discovered that Expensify was secretly farming out receipt transcription to overseas freelancers and passing it off as “SmartScan.”
Still, Fyle is mostly for small businesses who need additional expense management tools for their legacy business cards.
Pricing
Fyle offers three plans: Growth (5 or more users), Business (10 or more users), and Enterprise (for 250+ employees).
5. Coupa
Coupa focuses heavily on procurement and accounts payable, with features for spend analysis, supplier management, and contract lifecycle management. Coupa also provides some expense management capabilities, including travel and expense tools. Unlike Expensify competitors like Brex, Coupa does not offer a native corporate card, instead relying on third-party card integrations for expense tracking.
Key features
- Procurement solutions
- Contract lifecycle management
- Supply chain design and management
- Third-party card integrations for expense tracking
- Forecasting and supply management
Why people prefer Coupa over Expensify
Coupa is not necessarily known for its UX, but finance teams generally prefer Coupa’s backend UI to Expensify’s. Coupa also offers AP automation — like PO matching — which Expensify lacks.
Pricing
Coupa's pricing structure begins with a basic free tier but quickly escalates in cost. Their most comprehensive package, which includes QuickBooks integration, is priced at $4,800 annually.
Coupa also charges an additional $499 per year for "Premium Support," which provides only 6 hours of web conferencing support.
Brex, on the other hand, offers QuickBooks and 1,000s of other integrations as part of its free plan, making it a more cost-effective Expensify alternative. And, with Brex, there’s no added cost for its 24/7 customer support.
6. Zoho Expense
Zoho Expense offers basic expense management functionality for small to medium-sized businesses. It provides a mobile app for receipt capture and basic expense categorization, allowing users to track and manage their business expenses on the go. While affordable and user-friendly, Zoho Expense lacks the advanced features and scalability that rapidly growing businesses need.
Key features
- Travel management software
- Basic expense categorization
- Integrations with the Zoho ecosystem
- In-platform chat for communication across teams
Why people prefer Zoho Expense over Expensify
Users have found Zoho Expense's AI-enabled automations to be more advanced than Expensify, particularly when it comes to fraud detection. Zoho Expense offers better auditing capabilities than Expensify, helping businesses spot potential issues and prepare for tax season more effectively.
Still, Zoho mostly relies on basic rule-based categorization. AI-powered solutions like Brex leverage AI to learn from your inputs and automatically categorize expenses to save time and ensure data accuracy.
Pricing
Zoho Expense offers a tiered pricing structure with four plans: Standard, Professional, Premium, and Custom. Each tier caters to different business needs, from basic billing operations to the ability to send consolidated invoices.
7. Payhawk
Payhawk is a London-based financial software company offering expense management, payments, and corporate cards. It offers both physical and virtual cards, plus expense management features like receipt capture, automatic categorization, and policy compliance checks. The platform also provides integrations with accounting software and ERP systems.
Key features
- Accounts payable software with PO matching
- Business accounts
- Corporate cards in 7 currencies
- Expense management tools
Why people prefer Payhawk over Expensify
While both Payhawk and Expensify offer virtual cards, Payhawk's built-in spend controls and real-time transaction visibility may be preferred by companies looking for tighter expense management. Additionally, Payhawk's integration capabilities with various accounting software and ERP systems could be attractive to businesses aiming to create a more connected financial tech stack.
Still, Brex’s AI-powered spend platform — complete with global corporate cards, expense management, travel booking, bill pay, and banking services — outshines Payhawk and other Expensify competitors. Brex also provides advanced features like auto-enforced spend controls at the category, merchant, and transaction level and supports spending in over 40 currencies.
Pricing
Payhawk’s pricing is subject to negotiation and dependent on factors like company size, and transaction volume. Payhawk’s basic plan includes Visa credit cards with spend controls. The “All-in-one spend” package includes AP software and approval workflows. For other features like HR integrations, companies must negotiate a rate for its “Enterprise” edition.
So, what is the best Expensify alternative?
Expensify may be suitable for small businesses who need basic business expense tracking and reimbursement management. But Brex is the best Expensify alternative for companies who need full visibility and control over spend, AI-powered automation, and a platform that scales globally.
Unlike Expensify, Brex offers a scalable solution that allows companies to start with essential services and add more advanced features as they grow. For startups, Brex offers high-limit corporate cards and expense management with no personal guarantee. As companies scale, they can leverage Brex's advanced expense automation, travel booking, and global payment capabilities.
Brex significantly reduces manual work for companies of all sizes with its AI-powered expense automation. Brex auto-generates receipts and uses AI to automatically fill in key details, saving time and mitigating the risk of costly human errors — a big step up from Expensify’s unreliable SmartScan technology.
You don’t have to settle for Expensify’s clunky UI or subpar customer support. With Brex, you can improve your financial operations, automate tedious processes, and gain real-time insights to drive better decisions with one easy-to-use platform. And, even though Brex customers rarely run into issues, Brex support is ready to help 24/7.
Get a demo to see how Brex can help you future-proof your company with a truly integrated spend management solution.
See what Brex can do for you.
Learn how our spend platform can increase the strategic impact of your finance team and future-proof your company.
See what Brex can do for you.
Learn how our spend platform can increase the strategic impact of your finance team and future-proof your company.