Brex vs Expensify

Brex is a US spend management company founded in 2017 by Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi and based in San Francisco. It combines corporate cards, expense management, reimbursements, bill pay, travel booking and business accounts in one platform, with the aim of replacing expense reports and manual card reconciliation.

Cards carry real-time controls: budgets per team, project or vendor, merchant restrictions and approval chains. AI matches receipts, flags policy issues and suggests accounting codes that sync to ERPs such as NetSuite, QuickBooks and Xero. The Essentials plan is free and covers cards, expenses and bill pay; Premium adds advanced policies, travel and approvals for a per-user fee; Enterprise supports multiple global entities, local cards in many countries and custom controls.

Brex fits venture-backed startups and mid-market or enterprise companies with US entities, especially those with employees or subsidiaries abroad. Eligibility rules apply, and in 2022 Brex stopped serving many small businesses without venture funding, so very small companies may not qualify. Ramp is the closest rival and is often preferred for its free automation and savings tools; Navan combines travel and expense; Airbase served mid-market finance teams before Paylocity bought it. In practice Brex and Ramp are close, and the decision often comes down to global needs, ERP integration and the offer you receive.

In January 2026 Capital One agreed to acquire Brex for about $5.15 billion, with Pedro Franceschi continuing to lead the business.

Expensify is an expense management app that turns receipts into expense reports, routes them for approval, reimburses employees and exports everything to accounting. David Barrett founded it in 2008, it is based in Portland, Oregon, and it has been listed on Nasdaq since 2021.

SmartScan reads receipts photographed on a phone, and the Expensify Card, a Visa commercial card, records transactions automatically. Approval rules, multi-level workflows, mileage and per diem tracking, travel booking and exports to QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite and Sage Intacct round out the product. The newer app is built around chat. Plans: Submit is free for individuals, Collect costs $5 per member per month, and Control costs $18 per member on an annual subscription or $36 per active member pay-per-use; the annual price falls by up to half when spend runs through the Expensify Card.

Expensify fits small and mid-size companies that reimburse out-of-pocket spend and want simple pricing at the low end. Control pricing gets complicated, annual subscription sizes can only shrink at renewal, and the interface changes have frustrated long-time users. Ramp and Brex bundle corporate cards and expense tools at no per-user fee in the US, while QuickBooks covers basic receipt capture for firms already in its ecosystem.

Control pay-per-use bills only active members, meaning people who create, approve or pay expenses in a month, while new Collect workspaces bill every member added. On annual Control, put spend on the Expensify Card: the discount scales with the share of approved USD expenses paid on it.