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Alternatives

Expensify alternatives

Expensify is one of the best-known expense management tools, and its workflow starts with a photo: an employee snaps the receipt, SmartScan reads it with OCR, and the result becomes a line on an expense report. It has a large installed base, a familiar mobile app and its own card, so most finance hires have used it somewhere before.

Why people look

Why teams look for a Expensify alternative

The reasons that come up in evaluations. Whether they apply to you depends mostly on where your receipts come from.

My team forgets to photograph receipts, and I only find out when I'm trying to close the month.

When the store sends the receipt, the receipt comes with the payment and lands in Smartbills without anyone doing anything. Closing the month no longer hinges on who remembered.

OCR reads the total well enough, but the line detail I need for tax is hit and miss.

A merchant-issued receipt carries its lines as data. You can pick out the tax-recoverable items without a review queue or a confidence score to second-guess.

By the time an auditor asks for a receipt, the thermal slip in the file has faded to nothing.

Because the receipt was never paper, it stays legible and searchable for the whole retention period, and an auditor's request becomes a quick search instead of a trip to the filing cabinet.

The shortlist

6 alternatives to Expensify

The products teams shortlist against Expensify, each with what it's for. The order isn't a ranking, and the criteria are explained below.

  1. Ramp

    A corporate card program with spend management built around it. The comparison turns on what a card feed can and can't tell you.

    Best forChoose Ramp if you're consolidating US card spend onto one program and the rebate, the controls and the card itself are where you see the value.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  2. Brex

    Cards and business banking for US companies. This comparison is about the purchase document behind each card charge.

    Best forChoose Brex if you're a venture-backed or enterprise US company that wants cards, banking, treasury and spend controls from one vendor.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  3. Dext

    Dext collects the receipts and invoices your accounting practice is sent. Smartbills gets the receipt from the merchant at the moment you pay.

    Best forAccounting practices collecting documents from many clients at once, who need client reminders and publishing built in.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  4. SAP Concur

    The long-time enterprise T&E standard, set against Smartbills on setup time and on where the receipt comes from.

    Best forChoose SAP Concur if you run managed travel, have complex global policy across many entities, and have the internal resources to configure and maintain it.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  5. Navan

    Travel booking first, expenses second. This comparison is about the everyday spend that isn't a trip.

    Best forChoose Navan if your people travel constantly and you want booking, travel policy and expenses in a single flow for the traveller.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  6. Pleo

    European company cards that prompt for a receipt within seconds. The question here is whether anyone should still be photographing it.

    Best forChoose Pleo if you're a European team looking for the smoothest card-and-receipt loop, with deep local accounting integrations and local support.

    Compare it with Smartbills

Disclosure

And Smartbills, which is ours

Slipping our own product into a roundup without saying so is exactly what makes these pages worthless, so to be clear, this one is ours.

Smartbills

Best for: Teams that want each receipt to arrive from the merchant as itemized data. Month end isn't spent chasing paper nobody kept.

Smartbills vs Expensify

How this list was put together

These are the products that come up in the same evaluations as Expensify, drawn from what prospects actually shortlist against it and from the rest of its category. The order is editorial rather than a ranking, because we don't run benchmarks on products we don't operate, and a scored table written by a vendor about its competitors isn't evidence. Each entry links to a full comparison with claims specific enough to check.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What people ask us before they sign up.

The difference is the capture step. When the store sends the receipt, Smartbills receives the itemized receipt as data when the payment goes through, while Expensify starts from a photo that SmartScan reads. After that, approvals, coding and accounting sync work in broadly similar ways on both.

You photograph the receipt, as you do today, and Smartbills extracts the details from it. Network coverage makes things better where it exists, but you don't need it to use Smartbills.

Yes. Expensify exports reports and receipt images, and that archive stays yours. Smartbills doesn't need it imported. You can keep it purely as history.

No, though coverage is strongest in retail, hospitality and fuel, where most employee receipts come from. Office and online purchases are captured from emailed receipts and card feeds instead.

Yes, including single-use virtual cards for subscriptions and one-off suppliers. You can also keep your existing cards, because capture reads the card feed either way.

Get started

Comparing Expensify with something else?

Bring one month of your own receipts and card transactions. The number that settles it is the share of transactions that ended up with an itemized document attached, and you can measure that in one cycle.

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