This is one of our top picks in the category so we recommend it over others (you're on the right page), read below to learn why we love and recommend it! ⤵
This is one of the better tools in its category, see below if this tool is right for you! ⤵
Rippling's target customer is large enterprises who want to use one tool for payroll, HR, IT, finance, and spend management. For smaller companies (sub 200 employees), there are other stand-alone solutions that might suit your needs better (like Gusto for Payroll or BILL Spend & Expense/Ramp for spend management).
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what they do well, and what they could do better. ⤵
Rippling lets you easily manage your employees’ payroll, benefits, expenses, corporate cards, bill pay, & more—in one place. The majority of our coverage is focused on their Rippling Spend product.
Companies usually come to Rippling when they are looking for payroll. They then end up moving to HR, Cloud IT Cloud, and Finance Cloud.
They are the definition of an all-in-one tool for this category, in that they are trying to replace Gusto for Payroll, and Ramp/BILL Spend & Expense for expense management.
Founded in 2016, Rippling aims to be an all-in-one platform that eliminates the friction of running a business, particularly in employee management. In 2022, they introduced ‘Spend,’ their spend management product, to complement their existing Human Captial Management (HCM), Payroll, and IT offerings. The addition aims to help companies track all corporate spending 'down to the decimal,' further enhancing Rippling’s unified business experience.
At its core, spend management refers to the systems and processes organizations use to process, pay, and audit employee-initiated expenses. It has always been a critical part of running a business, but it wasn’t until the late ‘90s and early 2000s that these processes could be automated and streamlined with dedicated software solutions.
While almost every business could benefit from having a spend management solution in place, not every solution is the right fit for every company—and Rippling is no exception. We believe Rippling Spend is best suited for a specific market niche:
Rippling Spend comes with a myriad of features and functionalities, including:
We’ll cover each at a high level, helping you understand their value propositions and any potential shortcomings.
One quick thing to note: Rippling has recently removed the requirement of needing to subscribe to Rippling Payroll in order to use Corporate Cards, making the Rippling Spend product more standalone. So if you're seeing this requirement listed elsewhere, they've since removed it.
Ok, now that that’s out of the way, let’s move forward.
Like BILL Spend & Expense and Ramp, Rippling Spend:
Apart from Rippling Spend’s unique “group” functionality (which we’ll touch on later), these credit card features are pretty standard in the space. While it’s nice to see Rippling offering them, they don't significantly differentiate the product or set them apart in any way.
So, where does Rippling Spend stand out? In its automated workflows and logic. Because of its natural integration with Rippling’s HR and payroll solutions (HCM and Payroll), paying for all three gives you access to spend management features that competitors can’t match—because they focus solely on expense management. We’ll cover these features in the "Expense Management" section.
But before we go, here are a few final notes about Rippling Corporate Cards:
This section, as you might expect, focuses on managing expenses and enhancing visibility, and it's where Rippling Spend primarily differentiates itself.
Rippling Spend integrates seamlessly with HCM and Payroll, where employee attributes such as role, title, department, level, geographic location, and tenure are recorded. This integration allows Rippling Spend to leverage this data in its features.
Two of those features are “Card Groups” and “Policies.” Here’s a quick one-sentence overview of each:
With Card Groups and Policies in place, users can streamline their expense management processes.
For instance, imagine you hire a marketing manager. In Rippling’s HCM/Payroll solutions, this user will be assigned attributes like level (management), department (marketing), and work location (San Jose), and be added to a group – let’s call it Group A.
Based on the these attributes and the defined group (Group A), if the necessary “Policy” is built out in Spend, the employee can automatically receive a physical card with specific restrictions, such as:
If that employee’s group changes – say, they’re promoted to Sr. Marketing Manager or relocate to Miami – their policies will automatically update to reflect their new status and location.
That’s… pretty sleek. This integration is not just about convenience; it saves valuable time and reduces administrative burden. By automating policy enforcement and expense routing, Rippling Spend minimizes manual reconciliation work and ensures spending stays within approved parameters. This means fewer errors, faster approvals, and a clearer view of company spending.
Additionally, because employee attributes are synced with Rippling Spend, role-based permissions are automatically updated, ensuring every employee can access only what they need without manual adjustments.
So, to summarize, Rippling Spend differentiates themselves in two key ways:
Beyond these advanced features (which again, are available if you pay for Rippling’s other software solutions), Rippling Spend also includes standard features such as real-time statements and transactions, text-to-upload receipts, and duplicate expense detection. While essential, these features are commonly found in most spend management solutions and do not uniquely distinguish Rippling Spend.
If you have employees across the globe, you’ll be happy to hear that Rippling emphasizes supporting companies like yours. To best convey how, it’s worth going through a quick sample workflow:
Imagine Tobias, an employee based in Greece, attends a marketing conference in Zurich, Switzerland. He stays at a local hotel for two nights (paid for with his Corporate Card), buys a few meals during the conference (paid for with his personal credit card), and uploads pictures of the German-written receipts to Rippling.
Rippling simplifies the expense management process and keeps your global ledger in order by:
Pretty neat, right? We think so, as this streamlined approach helps reduce the number of manual steps typically required for reconciling and tracking international expenses, making the process less confusing and more efficient.
If you’re like most companies, you probably receive invoices from vendors on a regular basis – for software subscriptions, legal fees, or that newest batch of branded t-shirts. Whatever it is, Managing and paying these bills on time is crucial, and Rippling’s Bill Pay feature aims to streamline this process.
At its core, Bill Pay is a tool designed to manage and automate accounts payable and vendor management. Invoices are received by the platform, where Rippling captures and extracts the relevant details. Using customizable rules and the HCM-based employee attributes we discussed earlier, Rippling routes the bills to the appropriate user(s) for approval.
This sounds great, and for the right users, it is… but again, in order to fully leverage these features, you need to use multiple Rippling products. So if you only use Rippling Spend, you may miss out on some of the strongest value propositions offered by this functionality.
Beyond these rules that may or may not be accessible to you, Bill Pay offers many of the same functionalities as its competitors, like:
Rippling is also looking to replace your time tracking software like Harvest and Toggl although when comparing it to the best time tracking software on the market, it has a lot to be desired. What they are specifically going after is the time tracking that rolls into Payroll.
While this is something that Gusto and QBO can both do, it's just not recommended as time tracking should be a function of billing/project management more than solely for payroll. Although if you feel the reverse, one of these 3 tools might be what you're looking for!
The nice thing is that that you can set up some parameters like employees can only start tracking their time if they are within a pre-set geo location, ensuring that they are indeed in the office.
They also let you go quite granular in terms of time policies, you can set them up for breaks, overtime, etc.
You're brought through an onboarding process, where you'll mark in any direct reports, which will automatically determine all of the policies for those employees.
This rolls into anything from the HR side.
They even allow you to purchase computers through them to simplify the process. It will come with all of the applications pre-installed software-wise, they will actually set up those licenses for you, e.g. Asana, Expensify, etc.
They've even gotten to the extent of building their own password manager, to compete with Dashlane, having more control over password management. They call it RPass—this is how they can have more onboarding control of giving new. So you can use something like Dashlane with Ripple, you just lose the integration of it spinning up a new account.
When comparing Rippling to Gusto, they are a bit more expensive, but more flexible regarding the pricing.
As always, at the end of the fiscal quarter, many companies like this are willing to give discounts if you book in at the end of a quarter (can expect like a 30% discount). You'll be sitting in around ~$30/mo per person + $70/mo base.
You can view their SMB pricing without speaking to a representative (they hide it quite a bit).
If you pay for the subscription, there is no cost per (like running payroll), it's all inclusive.
While competitors BILL S&E and Ramp are free to use, Rippling is not. Rippling offers its services on a per-employee, per-month pricing model, and Rippling Spend would be an additional feature that you can choose to include as part of their broader Rippling subscription. Pricing details are generally customized based on the size of your company and specific features they need.
That said, they do have a $5K/mo spend minimum, and require you to spend 70% of your allocated credit in order to claim the maximum cashback rewards (falling back to 1% if you don't hit the limit).
So if you're likely to spend less than $5K/mo, you're likely too small for Rippling (and probably Ramp as well), so we'd recommend you go with BILL Spend & Expense instead.
We have seen them be a bit more flexible with the pricing of Rippling Spend if you're a larger team, in-fact they've even been open to totally dropping the price of Rippling Spend to $0 if your team is large enough and spending enough per month (as they can make up the cost difference in the interchange fees along with you potentially adding some of their other paid Rippling products).
If you’re already within Rippling’s ecosystem or want an all-in-one tool—Payroll, HCM, or IT products—or if you fall within their core target market (enterprise-level tech and professional services companies with complex spend management needs and a substantial budget), then maybe.
But if you're not already a Rippling customer, then you'd be better off using something like BILL Spend and Expense or Ramp.
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We've tracked and verified the above companies are using this software in their team's stack.
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