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Brex is a platform that improves corporate spending by integrating expense management, reimbursements, bill payments, and business accounts.
This all-in-one solution empowers companies to control diverse expenditures while maintaining strict compliance.
However, your IT, finance, or procurement team might need a SaaS solution that fits your specific needs better. Exploring Brex alternatives opens up new possibilities, offering features more aligned with your company's specific requirements.
When you consider other options, you will optimize your financial processes, enhance employee experiences, and potentially reduce costs.
Understanding how competitive it is enables you to make an informed decision. This will ensure you select the best tool to drive your business forward in the ever-evolving SaaS ecosystem.
TL;DR
- Brex is a comprehensive platform for corporate spending, combining expense management, reimbursements, and business accounts, but may not meet the specific needs of every organization.
- The main challenges with Brex include high balance requirements, prepayment limitations, and some feature restrictions compared to more specialized tools.
- Top alternatives include CloudEagle, Airbase, Ramp, Relay, Mercury, Novo, and Spendesk, each offering unique features to streamline financial operations.
- CloudEagle is highlighted as the top competitor, known for its SaaS spend management, AI-driven insights, and ability to deliver significant cost savings.
- Effective spend management involves tracking and optimizing expenses, including components like expense tracking, budget planning, and procurement, ensuring compliance and efficiency.
Brex - Feature and Challenges
Brex stands out as a comprehensive financial solution for growing businesses. It combines banking, bookkeeping, and rewards into a single powerful platform.
Since its inception in 2017, Brex has rapidly expanded, boasting over 600 employees and securing over $940 million in venture capital.
Key Features of Brex
- Expense management: You can easily handle all types of spending and payment methods globally. It offers purchase orders like approval flows and clearly shows why transactions might be out of policy. Plus, it integrates with Slack and WhatsApp for seamless communication.
- Bill pay: This feature automates your global accounts payable process, from receiving invoices to making payments and reconciling accounts.
- Financial planning: You can ditch unreliable spreadsheets and use Brex's platform to manage budgets, hiring plans, and economic models in real time. It lets you quickly plan for different scenarios and create interactive KPI dashboards.
- Accounting automation: Brex employs AI to speed up general ledger coding and merchant mapping. It supports accruals accounting, even across multiple entities, helping you close your books daily and reduce errors.
Challenges of Brex
- Balance requirements: You must maintain a $10,000 balance in linked bank accounts for a $5,000 credit limit. To use more, you must prepay, which can be inconvenient for managing cash flow.
- Prepayment limitations: While you can set up auto prepay, it only covers the outstanding balance. This lack of flexibility can be problematic if you must top up smaller amounts throughout the month.
- Feature limitations: Some users find Brex's feature set restrictive compared to more specialized tools in specific areas like SaaS spend management or financial planning.
- Manual entry: Despite its automation features, some tasks still require manual input, which can be time-consuming for busy finance teams.
Top 7 Brex Alternatives and Competitors
Below are some of the best Brex alternatives and competitors:
1. CloudEagle
CloudEagle transforms how IT, security, and procurement teams handle their SaaS portfolio. This platform streamlines SaaS management and governance, helping you slash 10-30% off your software spend.
With over 500 direct connectors, you'll gain complete visibility into all your applications, licenses, spending, and vendors.
CloudEagle's no-code Slack-enabled workflows make employee onboarding/offboarding, access reviews, license harvesting, and renewals easy. You'll negotiate better deals and optimize your tech stack using detailed usage insights and benchmarking data.
CloudEagle has already processed over $2 billion and delivered more than $150 million in savings for its clients. Best of all, their lightning-fast 30-minute onboarding ensures you start saving from day one.
Key Features
Clear SaaS spend visibility: CloudEagle gives you a bird’s eye view of your SaaS apps. You'll see usage patterns, spending trends, and vendor data in one dashboard.
With this clarity, you can easily spot underutilization, over-utilization, and duplications. As a result, you can make informed decisions to trim your SaaS costs effectively.
Low-usage app detector: Maximizing your software investments starts with identifying underused apps. CloudEagle quickly pinpoints which apps are gathering digital dust.
With this information, you can make better choices: keep licenses for active apps, retire the unused ones, or reallocate permits to different users.
You can even nudge employees about their app usage and deactivate users when needed, minimizing unnecessary SaaS spending.
License management: Say goodbye to wasted licenses with CloudEagle's end-to-end license management.
This feature automatically deprovisions users from low-usage licenses and harvests them for the following user. Consequently, you'll boost your ROI and prevent avoidable SaaS spend due to unused licenses.
Rationalizing your portfolio: CloudEagle hunts down and exposes duplicate/redundant subscriptions, helping you streamline your SaaS spending.
You'll also receive immediate alerts if someone starts using an unauthorized or free SaaS app, allowing you to nip shadow IT in the bud and ensure compliance with IT policies.
One case study was when CloudEagle helped RingCentral save $250K by consolidating duplicate apps.
RingCentral struggled with a fragmented view of its SaaS stack, leading to management lapses. CloudEagle's 30-minute onboarding and 500+ integrations quickly provided complete visibility into their SaaS stack.
With this clarity, Eric Silver and his RingCentral team was able to identify duplicate and unsanctioned apps, revoke unnecessary access, and consolidate overlapping applications. The result was a whopping $250K in savings.
AI-powered vendor recommendation engine: Making the right SaaS purchase decisions is easy with CloudEagle's AI-powered recommendation engine.
This feature provides in-depth vendor research and insights, allowing you to compare features, reviews, and costs among various SaaS solutions. As a result, you'll make more informed and cost-effective choices for your tech stack.
Contract renewal management: Never be caught off guard by auto-renewals again. CloudEagle's renewal workflow alerts you 90 days before a vendor contract is set to renew automatically.
This notice gives you ample time to evaluate whether to continue using the tool, discontinue, or renegotiate terms. Consequently, you'll avoid unnecessary renewals and have leverage in negotiations.
Cost optimization: CloudEagle helps you identify and eliminate redundant apps that could silently drain your SaaS budget.
It will analyze your usage data and identify which tool is being underused if you use more than one tool for the same purpose.
By pinpointing and helping you provision these duplicates, CloudEagle ensures you're not overpaying for overlapping functionalities.
Expert vendor negotiation: CloudEagle's experienced negotiators continuously monitor market trends and provide you with up-to-date pricing benchmarks.
You can take charge of the negotiation based on their advice or let them negotiate on your behalf. One case study showed their effectiveness when Nowports secured 34% savings with CloudEagle's negotiation.
Nowports lacked crucial data points like app usage and contract renewal dates, hindering their ability to negotiate effectively. CloudEagle provided access to these data points, sent timely renewal reminders, and offered a centralized view of all contract details.
Combining AI-driven insights with experienced SaaS buyers, CloudEagle negotiated substantial discounts on Nowports' contracts, saving them significant time and money.
So, you have seen that outsourcing procurement to CloudEagle will save your team time and boost their productivity.
No-code procurement workflows: Reduce bottlenecks and increase transparency with CloudEagle's no-code procurement workflows.
These customizable workflows streamline the procurement process, saving you valuable time. Features like automated workflows and customizable intake forms make CloudEagle a top choice for procurement teams looking to simplify SaaS buying.
Shadow IT alerts: Configure alerts to notify you instantly when a new unsanctioned application is detected in your system. This approach helps you prevent shadow IT in its early stages, save on spending, and ensure compliance with the latest regulations.
Slack integration for easy procurement: CloudEagle's Slackbot for procurement enables your users to raise purchase or renewal requests directly from Slack. Stakeholders receive notifications and can approve or deny requests without leaving Slack.
You can even create private Slack channels for each workflow to collaborate and make informed decisions.
Pros
- Offers complete visibility on SaaS spend and usage.
- Boasts an intuitive, user-friendly interface.
- Provides round-the-clock AI engine and expert negotiators for vendor discussions.
- Delivers cost-effective solutions.
- Offers pre-negotiated vendor discounts.
Pricing
- Starter - $2000/month.
- Growth - $3000/month.
- Enterprise - $4000/month.
Rating
2. Airbase
Airbase is a top-rated modern spend management platform for mid-sized businesses. It simplifies spending control, speeds up financial closing, and enhances risk management.
Airbase combines accounts payable automation, expense management, and corporate cards into one user-friendly package. It integrates seamlessly with popular accounting software like NetSuite and Sage Intacct.
Key Features
Customizable approval workflows: You can create rules that match your policies, no matter how complex they are.
Intuitive expense reporting: Employees can request spending without memorizing policies. The system automatically routes approvals and notifications.
Automatic audit trail: Airbase records every transaction, making it easy to retrieve documentation for bookkeeping or audits.
Streamlined procure-to-pay process: Make global payments, process invoices automatically, and sync entries to your general ledger.
Pros
- User-friendly interface.
- Significant time and cost savings.
- All-in-one product suite for comprehensive spend management.
Pricing
Customized pricing.
Rating
3. Ramp
Ramp revolutionizes finance management for modern businesses. This all-in-one platform combines corporate cards, expense management, bill payments, and vendor management.
Over 20,000 companies, including big names like Shopify and Glossier, use Ramp to save an average of 5% more and close their books 8 times faster.
Key Features
Comprehensive user management: You can easily control roles and access across your organization.
Streamlined expense reporting: Simplify the process of tracking and submitting expenses.
Smart policy compliance: Ensure your team follows spending guidelines automatically.
Pros
- Incredibly user-friendly interface.
- Offers an immersive, end-to-end financial experience.
- Provides multiple easy ways for employees to meet policy requirements (text, email, mobile app, or web app).
- Helps you save money and close books faster.
- Integrates various financial tools into one platform.
Pricing
- Free - $0/user/month.
- Plus - $15/user/month.
- Enterprise - Customized pricing.
Rating
4. Relay
Relay Financial offers an all-in-one business banking and money management platform. It helps you understand your earnings, spending, and savings at a glance.
Key Features
Receipt management: Centralize your receipts in Relay and stay audit-ready. Capture receipts instantly when purchases happen, eliminating the need to chase team members.
Interest-earning automated savings: Enjoy a fee-free savings account with tiered interest rates. To maximize your earnings, you'll need a balance of at least $1 million.
Streamlined accounts payable: Manage multiple accounts, set custom user permissions, and enjoy unlimited transactions. Relay simplifies your banking so you can focus on growing your business.
Pros
- Quick and responsive customer support team.
- No minimum balance requirements or monthly fees.
- User-friendly interface.
- Comprehensive view of your business finances.
- Automates many banking tasks.
Pricing
- Free - $0/month.
- Pro - $30/business/month.
Rating
5. Mercury
Mercury is a fintech powerhouse that is made for startups. It offers various financial services, from basic banking to advanced credit options.
Over 100,000 startups trust Mercury to manage their finances as they grow. Apply today to join them in just 10 minutes.
Key Features
Smart spend management: Control your team's SaaS spending easily using Mercury's intuitive tools.
On-the-spot virtual cards: Empower your team to start spending immediately with instant virtual cards.
Startup-friendly credit limits: Boost your spending power with higher credit limits tailored for startups.
Pros
- Low minimum cash balance requirement.
- Earn 1.5% cashback on all your spending.
- Streamline your finances by combining banking and cards in one place.
- User-friendly interface makes banking tasks more enjoyable.
- Scales with your business, offering more advanced services as you grow.
Pricing
- Free - $0/month.
- Plus - $35/month.
- Pro - $350/month.
Rating
6. Novo
Novo offers a straightforward yet powerful business banking platform tailored for modern entrepreneurs. It integrates seamlessly with numerous business tools, giving you a clear view of your finances and helping you manage cash flow more efficiently.
Key Features
Quick business financing: Access fast, flexible funding directly from your Novo account if you're eligible.
Free, unlimited invoicing: Create and send as many customized invoices as you need at no extra cost.
Extensive integration options: Connect Novo with your payment, payroll, and other business tools to centralize your financial insights.
Pros
- Enjoy free business checking with no hidden fees or minimum balances.
- Make unlimited transfers without extra charges.
- Navigate the platform easily, thanks to its user-friendly design.
- Appreciate the sleek, intuitive interface.
Pricing
Customized pricing.
Rating
7. Spendesk
Spendesk offers a comprehensive spend management platform that gives you complete visibility into your company's expenses.
This 7-in-1 solution combines corporate cards, invoice payments, expense reimbursements, budgets, approvals, reporting, compliance, and pre-accounting in one user-friendly package.
Key Features
Real-time spend tracking: Monitor all team transactions instantly, accessing consolidated data with full payment details.
All-in-one financial management: Handle corporate cards, invoices, reimbursements, budgeting, and more in a single platform.
Automated compliance and reporting: Streamline your financial processes with built-in automation and easy-to-follow approval workflows.
Pros
- User-friendly interface.
- Save time and money across all spending processes.
- Easy to use.
Pricing
Customized pricing.
Rating
Conclusion
We've explored the seven best Brex alternatives: CloudEagle, Airbase, Ramp, Relay, Mercury, Novo, and Spendesk.
Each offers unique features to streamline your financial operations. However, CloudEagle stands out as the top choice for SaaS spend management and cost optimization. Its comprehensive visibility, AI-powered insights, and expert negotiation services set it apart.
CloudEagle's proven track record of delivering significant savings makes it the ideal solution for businesses looking to optimize their SaaS spend.
Ready to transform your SaaS management and cut costs? Take the next step: Book a demo with CloudEagle today and discover how it can transform your financial operations.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the meaning of spend management?
Spend management involves controlling and optimizing your company's expenses. It helps you track, analyze, and reduce costs while ensuring compliance with your financial policies.
What are the components of spend management?
Key components include expense tracking, budget planning, procurement, invoice processing, and contract management. Additionally, it covers policy enforcement, spending analysis, and supplier relationship management.
What is the number one competitor to Brex?
While several alternatives exist, CloudEagle stands out as the top Brex competitor.
It offers comprehensive SaaS spend management, AI-powered insights, and proven cost-saving capabilities, making it the go-to choice for businesses aiming to optimize their SaaS expenditure.
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