Mercury Bank vs Rippling

Mercury is the best business banking platform for US companies. We've tried every business bank out there over the years, and Mercury is truly the best banking solution, regardless of whether you're a small business, startup or large enterprise.

The UI/UX is top-tier. Treasury accounts are built in. You can spin up additional checking accounts in seconds. Invoicing and bill pay actually feel smooth. It just works.

Allocating funds is handled with simple automations, so we're never thinking about setting aside cash for payroll or taxes.

And what you won't get with any other business is a free Mercury Personal account so your money can flow between business and personal accounts quickly and seamlessly. And guess what? Any of your employees can get a free Mercury Personal account too (usually $240/yr).

Mercury has turned us (and many others) into people who say, "I love my bank" and actually mean it.

• No monthly fees or minimums
• Excellent UI/UX
• Powerful sub-account automation
• Fast, simple invoicing and bill pay
• Strong integrations

• No physical branches
• No physical checkbooks
• Customer support is not instant

We all remember the days of spending an afternoon in a stuffy bank with folders full of paperwork just to open a business account. With Mercury, you can open an account online in only a few minutes, for free. There are no monthly fees or minimum balance requirements, and no fees on USD payments or transfers, so even if your business is just getting off the ground, Mercury's tools and features are accessible.

If you're someone who uses the "envelope method," you'll love Mercury's sub-accounts. Once your primary account is created, you can set up as many additional checking or savings accounts as you'd like.

Having this option shifts money management from reactive to automatic. Instead of budgeting in spreadsheets or creating reminders to set aside funds for taxes, use Mercury to create separate accounts for things like payroll and taxes, then let automatic transfer rules do the rest. It's simple, but it completely changes the way you think about cash management.

I actually enjoy creating invoices in Mercury, and I'm not exaggerating. It just has a simple, clutter free interface, that isn't distracting or doesn't make me jump though hoops just to get the task done.

Time to pay a vendor? Literally drag and drop the bill into your dashboard or forward it to your bill pay inbox, and Mercury automatically populates and scans it. Then, in just a few clicks, you can take care of sending the payment, categorizing the expense, and even setting up recurring payments. Invoices are similarly smooth and will have you on your way to getting paid in minutes

Mercury is not a traditional bank, but all checking and savings deposits are safe, sound, and FDIC-insured up to $5M through partner banks and sweep networks. Plus, your idle cash can earn interest instead of sitting at near-zero in a traditional bank.

Unlike a lot of the other high-yield investment options, Mercury Treasury makes transfers actually fast, even same-day.

We've been Mercury personal account users for a while now, and even paid their $240 annual fee for a while because we just wanted the same Mercury banking experience for personal use too.

But now, any Mercury business account user can get a free personal account, which is a huge bonus. Remember those quick, intuitive features and tools we mentioned earlier? You can use those to simplify your personal finances, too. Plus, with everything under one roof, transfers between your business and personal accounts are almost instant.

• Free: $0/mo. Best for startups and small businesses that need a powerful free business bank account (We're on this tier).
• Plus: $35/mo (or $29.90/mo billed annually). Best for growing businesses that want advanced invoicing, ACH debit collection, expense reimbursements for larger teams, and enhanced accounting automations.
• Pro: $350/mo (or $299/mo billed annually). Best for businesses with complex operations that need a relationship manager, unlimited invoicing via API, ACH debit with $0 transaction fees, and support for large teams.

Disclaimer: Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC. Deposit insurance covers the failure of an insured bank.

Rippling is an all-in-one platform that combines HR, payroll, IT, and finance tools in one system. That sounds useful in theory, but if you're a small or mid-sized business, it's way more than you need. Rippling is more of an enterprise operations system than a lightweight expense management tool.

Rippling Spend, their expense and corporate card product, started inside the broader Rippling ecosystem. For a while, companies could only use it if they were already using Rippling for HR and payroll. Now it's sold more like a standalone product, but it still works best when it’s tied back to Rippling's HR system.

Its main advantage is that spending controls can connect directly to employee data. So for example, when someone joins, changes roles, or leaves, things like card limits, permissions, and approval flows can update automatically. But if you’re not using Rippling for HR, a lot of that advantage goes away. At that point, you're left with an expense tool that is pricier and more complicated than it needs to be.

For companies already fully committed to Rippling, the spend tools might make sense. For most SMBs just looking for corporate cards or expense tracking, we wouldn’t recommend it. There are free options that do the job without trying to pull you into a much bigger system.

• All employee and spending data lives in one system
• Automatic spend controls based on role, team, or department
• Global reimbursements and multi-currency support
• Useful if you are already deep in the Rippling ecosystem

• Pricing per employee adds up fast
• Way too complex if you only need expense management
• A lot of the automation depends on using Rippling HR
• Feels like it's constantly trying to pull you into the full Rippling suite
• Better options exist if you just want cards, reimbursements, or spend controls

This is Rippling's main pitch: everything related to employees, from HR records to payroll to company spending, lives in one system. That can be useful for larger companies that actually want one platform running all of that. But for smaller businesses looking just for expense management, it mostly just makes Rippling feel bloated and hard to justify.

Like any other expense management platform, Rippling lets companies issue physical or virtual corporate cards to employees and set spending controls around how those cards are used.

That’s fine, and yes, it helps reduce some manual review after the fact. But this is not some standout feature. Other spend management tools like Ramp or BILL Spend & Expense offer similar controls, and in many cases, they do it in a simpler way. We wouldn’t treat this as a reason to choose Rippling.

Employees can upload receipts and submit expenses directly in Rippling, and the platform matches them to transactions and routes them through approval workflows based on company policy.

Again, this is useful, but standard. It covers the basics you'd expect from an expense management tool, but it doesn’t really separate Rippling from the pack. If anything, the bigger issue is that the broader platform can make simple expense workflows feel more complicated than they should.

Speaking of complicated, Rippling is one of the less user friendly expense management platforms on the market, especially compared to Ramp. Your employees will not love using it, which often means poor adoption.

If your team is spread across multiple countries, Rippling can handle cross-border reimbursements and multi-currency expenses. Employees can submit expenses in their local currency, while finance teams still get reporting in their home currency.

This is one of the more practical parts of the product, and for international teams, it can be genuinely useful. That said, if global spend is a top priority, a more focused tool like Airwallex would be a better pick if this is really important to you.

Rippling uses modular pricing, so companies only pay for the specific products they want to use.

• Expense Management: Starts around $14 per employee/month. Best for companies that want automated expense tracking, reimbursements, and policy enforcement.
• Corporate Cards: Around $8 per employee/month add-on. Best for teams that want employee cards with built-in spending controls.
• Global Spend: Custom pricing. Best for companies with international teams that need reimbursements and reporting across multiple currencies.

To get the most out of Rippling, they really push you to use their HR and payroll products, which increases the total cost.