6 Zoho Expense alternatives in 2024

Zoho Expense is a popular travel and expense management service—but companies can quickly outgrow its small-business orientation once cost control becomes a greater need. Basic features, such as corporate card reconciliation, cash advances, multilevel approval, and a basic audit trail report, require customers to pay for a standard plan. Zoho Expense also gets poor user feedback on reporting.  

Overall, Zoho Expense receives decent reviews, scoring an overall 4.5 out of 5 stars, based on a poll of 1,177 verified users by software review site G2, as of June 2024. But most of the alternatives we found have even better ratings. 

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These include:

• Ramp
• Navan (formerly TripActions)
• Expensify
• Brex
• Bill
• Airbase

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To determine our top choices, we examined ratings from business review site G2, collected feedback from past users, and thoroughly analyzed their respective features. Read on to see how these alternatives stack up against Zoho Expense.

Best overall Zoho Expense alternative: Ramp

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Ramp is an all-in-one platform that allows you to streamline your expense management and travel bookings. More than 25,000 businesses have already saved over $1 billion with Ramp’s savings insights, automation, and software pricing intelligence. While we might seem biased, don’t just take our word for it—nearly 2,000 reviews of verified users on G2 have yielded Ramp’s 4.8-star rating.

Key benefits

• Save an average of 5% annually: Ramp’s corporate cards are designed to help you save time and money with built-in expense management controls.
• Manage all your expenses from one place: Get full visibility on all your spending on one intuitive platform, from paying invoices to managing expense reimbursements. And say goodbye to expense reports, with automated receipt collection and mobile receipt capture.‍
• Automate the entire procure-to-pay process: eliminate approval bottlenecks and prevent out-of-policy spending before it happens.
• Spend within approved limits: Cap expenses on any physical or virtual card with category controls and spend maximums to empower your teams to spend responsibly and within budget.‍
• Efficiently manage travel spend: set market-sensitive spending caps, implement smart workflows that involve the appropriate approvers, and offer incentives for employees to seek out the most cost-effective options.
• Maintain rapport between managers and staff: Ramp sends reminders for missing items, requests repayments, and auto-locks cards for non-compliant employees.
• Use industry-leading finance AI: code expenses, audit transactions for compliance, and benchmark software costs.

Why customers choose Ramp instead of Zoho Expense

Ramp beats Zoho Expense in every criteria tracked by G2, including meeting customer requirements, ease of use, setup and administration, quality of support, being a good partner, and the direction of the product’s development. Specifically, Ramp offers:

• Better controls. Customers who chose Ramp did so when their cards and spend management needs grew beyond Zoho Expense’s small-business focus.‍
• Cleaner books and accounts. Ramp’s robust accounting integrations with QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, and Xero helped customers record and match transactions with speed and accuracy. 
• ‍Ability to keep saving as you scale for sustainable growth. Ramp will keep finding savings for you using its always-on AI to find suspicious or duplicate transactions, duplicate invoices, lower prices, and out-of-policy spending.

Pricing

Ramp helps you control spend, automate payments, and rapidly close your books—all for free. When you’re ready, Ramp Plus is $15 per person a month for more control and customization.

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Navan (formerly TripActions)

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Navan (formerly TripActions) is a travel and expense management platform for small businesses. It beats Zoho Expense in all but one of the criteria tracked by G2. It received a 4.7-star rating from over 7,600 verified users polled by G2. 

Key benefits

• Allows employees to book and manage travel spend and gives companies guardrails for their travel programs.
• Provides employees with a simple way to pay for business-related costs and gives companies real-time visibility into all spending.
• Connects any corporate or business card to Navan’s automated expense management system.
• Rewards employees for reducing the company’s travel costs.

Why customers choose Navan instead of Zoho Expense

G2 reviewers said that Navan is easier to use, set up, and administer. They also prefer doing business with Navan overall, especially citing the quality of its product support.

Pricing

Navan has a free plan offering travel, corporate cards, and expense management for companies with up to 100 employees. It is free for the first 50 monthly active users, with a fee for live travel agent support. It has a professional plan for those with larger needs, and fees are negotiated individually.

Expensify

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Expensify is a payments and expense management app offering corporate cards, expense tracking, next-day reimbursement, invoicing, bill pay, payroll, and travel booking.

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Expensify beats Zoho Expense in some criteria, such as ease of use and quality of support, but falls short of it in others, such as being a good partner and ease of setup. Expensify gets 4.5 out of 5 stars based on a poll of nearly 5,150 verified users. 

Key benefits

• Can easily pull in receipts from all credit card statements.
• Automatically assigns categories/accounts based on past entries and credit card statements.
• Provides various methods to capture receipts digitally and can automatically parse receipts to create expense report entries. Methods may include mobile photos, desktop drag and drop, etc.
• Reimburses employees directly to their bank account or can integrate with the payroll system.

Why customers choose Expensify instead of Zoho Expense

A reviewer on G2 reported that Expensify’s SmartScan function is effective and speeds up their processes better than Zoho Expense’s approach. Expensify also has better ongoing product support.

Pricing

• Free package includes: Expensify card, reimbursement of expenses, invoice sending, bill payment.
• The next tier, Collect for Groups, is $5 per person per month and includes: unlimited SmartScans, auto-categorization of expenses, and auto-export to accounting software.
• The next tier, Control for Groups, is $9 per person per month and includes: everything in Collect, plus: corporate card management and powerful reconciliation functionality.

Brex

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Brex integrates corporate cards, expense management, reimbursements, travel, and bill pay in one system. It outpaces Zoho Expense in all G2 domains except for product development direction and received a 4.7-star rating from about 1,250 verified users.

Key benefits

• Expense policies that can be customized for different use cases, departments, and locations
• Ability to block or require approval before employees spend on specific categories and merchants
• Automatic receipt collection and expense coding 
• AI-powered automation for in-policy expense approvals and exception detection
• ERP integrations and smart GL mapping to automate accounting

Why customers choose Brex instead of Zoho Expense

Brex customers appreciate its fast customer service and user-friendly platform. Onboarding is fast and easy. Overall, Brex is also easier to oversee and use. 

Pricing

The free essentials package for startups and early-stage companies includes global corporate cards, business account and bill pay, integrated expense management, and Brex AI expense assistant. 

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More advanced packages with advanced features (custom expense policies and approvals, in-app travel booking and management, live budgets, etc.) are available for negotiated prices. 

BILL

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BILL Spend & Expense (formerly Divvy) is an expense management solution that combines free software with corporate cards to provide real-time visibility and customizable control. It outpaces Zoho Expense in all the criteria tracked by G2 and received a 4.5-star rating from a poll of over 1,330 verified users.

Key benefits

• Automatic receipt matching for transactions
• Automatic categorization of expenses with card, merchant, budget, and user rules
• Real-time tracking of expenses 
• Fraud prevention with the help of virtual cards, budgets, and dispute resolution  
• Integations with top accounting software to speed up month-end

Why customers choose BILL instead of Zoho Expense

G2 reviewers found BILL Spend & Expense easier to onboard and use than Zoho Expense. Reviewers also preferred using BILL in part because of its accounts payable product that makes it easy to process payments, track invoices, and manage approvals.  

Pricing

BILL Spend and Expense is free, while its Accounts Payable product requires a monthly fee ranging from $45 to $55 per user. 

Airbase

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Airbase is a mid-market spend management platform for businesses with 100-5,000 employees. It beat Zoho Expense in five of the six G2 criteria and tied it for a sixth. A poll of over 1,500 verified users gave it a rating of 4.8 stars out of 5.

Key benefits

• Integrates into the most popular general ledgers including NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and more.
• From initial requests to payment and reconciliation, Airbase allows employees to buy what they need while keeping all necessary stakeholders in the loop. 
• Support for multi-subsidiaries, multi-currency, and purchase orders. 
• Flexible intake forms and approval workflows ensure full stakeholder oversight across multiple buying scenarios.

Why customers choose Airbase instead of Zoho Expense

Customers cited its easy interface, and valuable efficiency tools, like the ability to forward emails and have them categorized correctly.

Pricing

Three tiers, all negotiated.

Choose flexibility for your expense management needs

We hope this research helps you choose the ideal expense management, cards, and travel management solution for your business. We think Ramp is the clear leader in this field, and it is the choice that will seamlessly scale with your business as it grows. That means Ramp is the all-in-one solution that will serve your business for years to come.

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Discover how Ramp can help you manage all these operations and more—get started with Ramp today.