BILL (Divvy) vs Brex vs Ramp vs Expensify

Soooo you've finally decided it's time to set up an expense management solution. Now to choose which one 🤔

We've personally used Divvy (BILL Spend & Expense), Ramp, Brex, and Expensify and I'm excited to share my thoughts on all the options to help you make the decision on which may be best for your team. Lets go!

Tried them all, who won?

My journey started with Expensify (The OG) in Feb 2018. Even though was only 5–6 years ago, expense management looked very different when compared with what's available today.

I set up a filter in my email to recognize invoices and auto-forward them over to Expensify. From there, Expensify would auto-classify the expense and add the receipt and expense into QuickBooks Online (QBO).This was a huge time saver for me, and for a few years I was happily paying an annual subscription fee for the service.

I found Divvy through a vendor who asked if they could pay an invoice with a credit card (I had required ACH up until that point), explaining that they had all of their budgeting set up through Divvy (and they had budgetary approval through Divvy for our services already). I was intrigued—and then he gave me a deep-dive overview of their Divvy account, talking about how much he loved it. In looking further into it after that, I learned that Divvy was another expense management solution which allows users to set up virtual credit cards (for each vendor), assign the QBO expense category, and custom limits, along with over-encompassing budgets for each card.

Not only that, but I could set up the same email forwarding filter like I had previously, so not only was the expense added perfectly to QBO, but the receipt got perfectly matched as well. Ever wonder what an auto-reconciling QBO account feels like? Yeah, that's what I had (well, and still have).

Oh! And all of this was totally free—yeah, I didn't believe it initially either...

‍So yes—I made the exception to accept the CC payment (they got some reward points), oh, and we both got $200, because they referred me to Divvy—and that was my last day with Expensify. There's many more reasons I'm a fan (more on this below).

Over the years, we evaluated all the core competitors and we kept coming back to Divvy as our top pick. It's what we still use today! Let's dive deeper.

Best Expense Management Tools

1. ✅ Divvy: Our Top Pick (Top Pick)
2. ✅ Ramp: The Runner Up
3. ❌ Brex: For Venture Backed Start-Ups ONLY
4. ❌ Expensify: The OG
5. ❌ Mercury: Not an Expense Management Solution (Yet)

1. Divvy (BILL Spend & Expense)

We've used all of the core competitors (Ramp, Brex, Expensify, and Airbase), and we're here to tell you to look no further than Divvy. (Oh and it's totally free 👀)

Divvy has the best UI/UX, does a fantastic job at natively integrating with QuickBooks Online (for automating your expense reconciling process), and handles team budgeting like a dream:

Virtual Cards & Rewards

Create a virtual credit card and map it to the respective category + set up an email forwarding filter within your email once, and every single time the card is charged, your QuickBooks Online is already reconciled and up-to-date with a PDF of the receipt.

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).

Divvy gives us so much control when it comes to our spending. We simply set a budget for each credit card for the exact amount that we know will be charged. If a subscription service decides to increase their pricing and charge our card, it will decline. And we like that, because we want to be the one deciding if someone should charge us more or not. 💪

Because we're able to put virtual cards down with each vendor, Divvy's allowed us (and our vendor) to actually catch a person that committed fraud by stealing and using our credit card 🤯 Of course, the employee of our vendor was fired. Catching them would have been impossible to pin down if we had a generic credit card on file. We share this story in this 1 minute video.

Opening Requirements

Divvy's requirements to open an account are also way more accessible than that of Ramp and Brex (who both make their account criteria unnecessarily high). There is no barrier to entry. Divvy is great for startups and teams of all sizes, even if you're just getting your business started.

Final Thoughts

Because of all this, we whole-heartedly believe Divvy is the best tool in the spend management, budgeting, and basic accounting automation suite for most businesses of all sizes.

If we've sold you, sign up for Divvy and get $200 for signing up using this link (you don't pay to use Divvy, it's free and you get $200 just for signing up).

2. Ramp

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. (It's totally free also 👀)

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:

Main Focus

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).

Virtual Cards & Rewards

Like the other platforms listed here, Ramp has the same virtual card functionality (and physical cards for employees). You'll want to spin up a virtual card for each company you use with Ramp, and you can even restrict (lock) these cards to a specific merchant.

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).

Opening Requirements

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.

Final Thoughts

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 and are a good option.

If Ramp is more your style, you can sign up and get $250 just for signing up using this link (you don't pay to use Ramp, it's free and you get $250 just for signing up).

3. Brex

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 the customers out of nowhere.

Opening Requirements

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).

Concerns

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 4+ 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:

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.

Final Thoughts

All-in-all, they seem to be relying quite heavily on their Y Combinator (YC) startup network, getting most YC companies to use them by offering as many perks to them as possible. When actually comparing Brex against the competitors 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.

4. Expensify

Expensify is one of the original expense management solutions on the market. We actually used Expensify for the first few years in business (more recently switching to Divvy).

It started as a simple invoice/receipt scraping tool that you'd forward your receipts into receipts@expensify.com via email, and it would pull out all of the details, learn from past classifications, and sync that over to your accounting software like QBO or Xero.

They have more recently moved into the virtual credit card experience, realizing that if the charge starts with a virtual credit card, all the categorization is way more consistent and seamless (whereas that's where Divvy, Brex, and Ramp all started).

While Expensify was a leader in the space, they are more so now playing catch-up as the options above are far more superior.

Have more questions that we didn't cover? Shoot us a message via chat. We're always evolving the content on our site.

5. Mercury

A lot of people have been asking us lately about if they even need an expense management tool like Divvy if they are using Mercury, as it too has virtual cards.

While we know it's super confusing, we use both Mercury and Divvy. Mercury is not a spend management or budgeting tool.

Just creating virtual cards does not mean you can actually scale a team and keep close track of budgets and receipt matching + QBO automatic reconciling without a proper expense management solution.