Ramp vs Brex (Expense Management) Comparison 2023

Jul 2023

Expense Management Overview

Ramp

The spend management platform for mid-size teams (customizable virtual cards, budgeting, auto-reconciling, and expense reimbursement).

Our Unfiltered Thoughts

Ramp is one of the clear leaders in the spend/expense management, budgeting space, and accounting automation space with a slightly different focus than that of Divvy. (Oh and it's totally free 👀)

They have a great UI/UX, tons of reporting/insights features, and a super clean and fast search functionality to find exactly what you're looking for:

One bit that I noticed when using Ramp is that they are a bit more focused on SMS interactions instead of having a fully-featured mobile app (unlike that of Divvy for example), Ramp only has an iOS app and it's mainly just for taking photos of receipts and matching transactions.

This might be a positive for those who have employees that aren't as tech-savvy, and you just need them to text a receipt in for it to tie to the expense management side of things (something that Divvy doesn't allow for).

The rewards are pretty standard with others in the space, getting somewhere around 1–1.5% on all categories, with a bit more in certain categories (higher % when making payments weekly—less if made bi-weekly or monthly).

They do although have slightly higher requirements than that of Divvy. You need to have somewhere around $70k sitting in your business bank account at the time of applying in order to be approved, which might be tough for businesses that don't really need to be sitting on cash in the bank.

All-in-all, they are focused a bit more broadly than that of Divvy, moving more into the accounting automation side of things and integrating with a few more accounting tools natively. They really have an impressive suite of tools.

Native Integrations

Custom Integrations

Brex

A spend management (virtual credit card) platform for venture-backed startups and large teams. They also have a barebones checking account product called Brex Cash.

Our Unfiltered Thoughts

Brex has run into a bit of an odd situation in recent years—while focusing on growth, they apparently took on too many small-mid size businesses, which led to them axing accounts of many of their customers out of nowhere. They are now only allowing venture-backed startups onto their platform, or mid-size businesses doing at-least $400k/mo in revenue ($4.8m/yr).

We actually had a Brex account for many years when first evaluating it (checking in on how it evolved over the years), and recently, we were actually one of the many that were pulled into the axing account mess (luckily we ultimately decided on Divvy after initial evaluation of Brex, and have been happily using Divvy for 5+ years now). That said, when trying to log back into my account to add some screenshots to this post, I was met with a redirection loop and the following message from support upon reaching out:

(we had an account a few years back... and then didn't—got this message when trying to regain access) 😅

While they have a "banking" component, it's more of just a simple checking account, and their banking features are not as robust as that of a full-fledged business-focused bank like Mercury.

All-in-all, they seem to be relying quite heavily on their YC network, getting most YC companies to use them by offering as many perks to them as possible. When actually comparing Brex against the competitors though when it comes to automatic reconciling of your expenses in your accounting software, and just overall UI/UX, there's a lot to be desired—Divvy and Ramp are far superior in many of those areas.