SAP Concur is an expense platform first, whatever else it does. Expense management runs end to end, from receipt capture through auditing and compliance, and accounts payable and invoicing sit alongside it with purchase-order matching and approval routing. Travel booking lives in there too: flights, hotels, rail, rental cars. Policy is the thread holding all of it together. Spending rules can be set by category, amount, geography, or employee group, applied while someone is booking and flagged in real time before a report is ever submitted, then routed through approval hierarchies built around spend thresholds and org structure.
That is a specific and demanding job, and Concur does it. People go looking anyway, usually for one of two reasons. They are buying one part of the suite and paying for the architecture of all three. Or the tier they can afford does not contain the module they came for.
So this page walks the real alternatives by category instead of ranking them into a single leaderboard, because the right answer depends entirely on which piece of Concur you are replacing. Every entry says plainly what it is best for. Catch, the AI Executive Assistant, shows up in the assistant category near the end, and this page is equally clear about the requirements Catch does not meet.
Start by Naming Which Part You Are Replacing
Concur bundles four separate things: expense reporting, travel booking, invoice and accounts payable, and the policy-and-approval layer that governs all of them. Most alternatives replace one or two of those, not all four.
Skip that step and you end up comparing a corporate card platform against a travel agency against an assistant, and none of those comparisons tell you anything. So before reading further, work out which of these is the actual trigger:
- Expense reporting and receipts. You want submissions, OCR capture, auditing, and reimbursement to be faster or cheaper.
- Travel booking. You want employees to book flights and hotels without the interface fight.
- Invoice and accounts payable. You want vendor bills matched and routed.
- Policy and approvals. You want finance to keep control of what gets spent, with an audit trail.
- The executive’s own time. Nobody in the company is complaining about compliance. One or two people are simply drowning in the coordination around trips and meetings.
That last one is a different problem from the other four, and it is worth pulling out separately, because no expense platform solves it and no assistant solves the first four.
Why Buyers Look Past Concur
Concur Travel sits in the top tier only. This is the surprise that comes up most often. The Base plan includes Concur Expense and nothing else. Plus adds ExpenseIt, the User Support Desk, and Reporting, all still on the expense side. Concur Travel appears in the Premium tier, which is custom-quoted. A company that shopped Concur specifically to consolidate travel booking often finds the module is not in the plan they were pricing.
Receipt scanning is not in the entry plan either. ExpenseIt, the mobile OCR capture that reads a photographed receipt and turns it into a categorized expense line, is listed on Plus and Premium. Not on Base.
The cost shape is per report, not per seat. Concur publishes its pricing: Base at roughly $7 per expense report, Plus at roughly $11 per expense report, and Premium at custom pricing, all three with unlimited users. For a large headcount that files rarely, that is genuinely useful. For a smaller team where a handful of heavy travelers file constantly, less comfortable. Either way it is a different budgeting exercise from per-seat software, and some buyers go shopping simply because they want to model the cost the way they model everything else.
There is no free trial on any tier. Base and Plus can be bought self-serve, and Premium goes through a quote, but none of the three lets you try it first.
Reviewers report a heavy interface and a long implementation. Across public review platforms the recurring theme is the desktop experience, described as taking several steps for simple tasks and carrying a steeper learning curve than newer tools. Analysts and enterprise users separately report that total cost of ownership can run above expectations once implementation time and add-ons are counted. These are third-party reports rather than verified platform behavior, and they sit alongside consistent praise for the mobile app, where OCR receipt capture gets called out again and again as a real time-saver.
The other side of the ledger matters too. Concur’s ability to catch a policy violation at the moment of booking or submission, rather than during a month-end audit, is the reason large finance organizations keep it. On the AI side it ships Joule, a copilot that uses natural language to automate tasks, answer policy questions, and navigate the system, plus a Booking Agent that searches and books compliant travel against stated preferences and budgets. If deep governance is the requirement, weigh carefully what you would be giving up before you move.
The Alternatives Compared
| Tool | Category | Replaces | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAP Concur | Expense-led T&E suite | The full stack: expense, travel, invoice, policy | Base around $7 per expense report |
| Navan | Travel and expense platform | Expense, travel, cards | Free to book on Business; expense $15 per active user/month after the first 5 |
| TravelPerk (Perk) | Travel and spend platform | Travel, spend, approvals | Travel Only from $0/month plus 5% per booking |
| Ramp | Spend management suite | Expense, cards, accounts payable, some travel | Free plan at $0/month per user |
| Engine | Booking-led travel platform | Travel booking and consolidated billing | Free to use the booking platform |
| Ascend | Human travel concierge | The booking work, for one traveler | $300/month or $2,500/year |
| Catch | AI Executive Assistant | The executive’s admin, travel included | Flat $99/month |
| Ezus | Travel agency production software | A different market: agencies selling trips | $89 per user/month, billed annually |
Integrated Travel-and-Expense Platforms
These are the closest structural equivalents. One system, booking and expense together, finance keeps its visibility.
1. Navan - Best for a Modern Rebuild of the Whole Suite
Navan puts business travel booking, expense management, and corporate cards in a single platform, which is the same territory Concur occupies. The difference is generational rather than functional: Navan is built around an agentic AI layer instead of configuration screens.
That layer is called Ava, and it does more than answer questions. Ava can autonomously book, modify, and cancel travel without manual confirmation. It takes a multimodal approach to learning a traveler’s preferences, things like amenities, room size, and loyalty programs, then curates compliant hotel options from them. A separate Waiver Agent monitors airline waivers in real time and prompts travelers to rebook before a disruption strands them. For finance, Ava plays data analyst: summarizing spend by category, comparing spend against policy, projecting future travel habits.
The expense and card side is substantial. Receipt scanning handles on-the-go expenses with automatic transaction categorization. Navan issues its own corporate cards with built-in expense management and up to 1.5% back, and through Navan Connect a company can instead link existing Visa, Mastercard, and American Express corporate cards for automatic reconciliation. There are more than 30 HRIS integrations. Navan Rewards gives employees personal travel credit when they book under budget, which is consistently one of the best-liked features in user reviews.
Pricing splits along a line worth understanding before you budget. On the Business tier, travel booking carries no fee, because it is funded by travel providers’ commissions. Expense management is separate: free for the first five monthly expensing users, then $15 per active user per month. The Enterprise tier is built for companies with more than 300 employees, adds dedicated support and corporate negotiated rates, and is custom-priced.
Best for: organizations that want Concur’s scope - booking, expense, cards, policy - rebuilt around an AI agent, and are comfortable with per-user expense pricing.
2. TravelPerk (Perk) - Best for Buying the Modules Separately
TravelPerk is a corporate travel and spend platform that rebranded to Perk in November 2025 as it expanded past pure travel management. Most search demand still sits on the older name.
Its structural advantage over Concur, for a certain buyer, is that the halves can be bought independently with a visible price on each. Travel Only runs $0 per month plus 5% per booking on Starter, $99 per month plus 3% on Premium, and $299 per month plus 3% on Pro. Travel and Spend starts at $11 per user per month on Premium and $13 on Pro. Spend Only, the direct comparison to Concur Expense, starts at $13 per user per month on Premium and $15 on Pro. A company that only wants the expense half, or only the travel half, is not quoted for a suite.
Approvals are the other thing that sets it apart. Trip approval requests go out through Slack, where an approver can read the trip summary and approve or decline inside the chat window, and the same review can happen in Microsoft Teams. If your approval bottleneck is people not logging into a portal, that alone changes the throughput. FlexiTravel, an optional program, charges a 10% fee per trip to guarantee an 80% refund on cancellations made up to two hours before departure. The mobile app holds itineraries, booking details, and train tickets offline.
Best for: companies that want travel and spend under one vendor but priced and adopted as separate modules, with approvals happening in Slack or Teams.
Spend-Management Suites
If the trigger was expense reporting rather than travel, the center of gravity moves to cards and reconciliation.
3. Ramp - Best for Expense Automation on a Free Base Tier
Ramp is a spend management platform: corporate cards, physical and virtual, paired with software for travel and expenses, accounts payable, and vendor procurement. Where it pulls ahead of Concur is the speed of capture.
Capture is the reason people switch. Users complete expenses and submit receipts through SMS or Slack, at the moment of the transaction rather than in a report-building session three weeks later, and OCR pulls invoice data automatically. On the Plus tier, cards can be locked automatically when required receipts are not submitted on time, which swaps a chasing workflow for an enforcement one. Bills can be paid by ACH, card, check, or wire. Accounting rules integrate directly with QuickBooks Online and Xero. Free wires and same-day ACH through Bill Pay are available even on the free tier.
Travel is present but it is a small part of the product. Users can book flights, hotels, and car rentals, and can book flights and hotels on behalf of an external guest, a contractor or an interviewee or a consultant, who receives their details by email without needing a Ramp account or the app. Ramp will also match bookings made through any outside travel provider back to the transaction and capture the receipts. Round-the-clock travel phone support exists, but only on the paid Plus and Enterprise tiers.
Pricing starts at a genuinely free plan: $0 per month per user, including unlimited physical and virtual cards. Plus is $15 per month per user plus a platform fee that varies with team size, with a 20% discount for annual billing. Enterprise is custom-priced and includes a dedicated account manager and priority 24/7 global support.
Best for: finance teams whose real problem is receipts, cards, and the accounting close, and who would rather enforce documentation at the point of sale than audit it afterwards.
Booking-Led Platforms
These replace Concur Travel. How far each one goes on the expense side is a separate question to put to the vendor.
4. Engine - Best for Travel Booking Without a Software Subscription
Engine, formerly Hotel Engine, is a corporate travel booking and procurement platform. Since an expansion in late 2024 it books hotels, flights, and rental cars, and it is built around centralized billing.
The financial mechanics are its actual product. Through the Direct Bill program a company receives one monthly statement aggregating all corporate travel charges. Engine can cover hotel incidental holds upfront and route those charges to the corporate invoice instead of leaving them sitting on a traveler’s personal card, which matters enormously for field teams who cannot absorb a large hold at check-in. Administrators can set custom travel policies and budget controls in the platform. There is dedicated support and a specialized interface for group bookings of nine or more rooms and for extended stays. Travelers can enter their own loyalty numbers and earn standard hotel points alongside Engine’s own rewards.
The Engine X card carries no annual fee and pays rewards on eligible travel booked through the platform, on a spend ladder that starts at 6% back up to $250,000 in annual spend, rising to 7% from there, 8% above $2.5 million, and 10% only above $5 million. A FlexPro subscription covers every traveler at the company and lets them cancel or modify hotel reservations without penalty up until noon on the day of check-in, overriding the hotel’s own policy, though it does not refund nights already used.
On cost, the booking platform is free. Engine states it plainly, and its FAQ lists no membership fees, contracts, or minimum spend. The paid pieces, the Flex and FlexPro cancellation cover and the Engine X card, are optional extras rather than tiers.
Reviewers do report friction where the platform meets a physical front desk: arrivals where the property had no record of the booking or would not accept the virtual card, and difficulty getting those situations resolved quickly. Those are user reports, not verified platform behavior, but they come up often enough to raise with a reference customer.
Best for: mid-market and deployment-heavy organizations - construction, logistics, healthcare staffing - that want consolidated travel billing without paying a software subscription for it.
The Assistant Model
The categories above are all systems a company runs. This one is someone the executive hands the work to.
5. Ascend - Best for a Human Handling One Executive’s Travel
Ascend is a membership travel concierge, and it is explicit that it is not a platform. The company states outright that it does not require users to use apps, portals, or forms to book. Booking, changes and support all run end to end over WhatsApp. A member sends a destination and dates, a team of human travel experts curates flight, hotel, and ground-transport options against a stored preference profile, and once an option is approved the team books it and watches the trip. The stated commitment is a one-minute response, 24 hours a day.
Coverage runs to flights, hotels, ground transportation including car rentals and car services, and private aviation. The team monitors trips and manages disruptions before the traveler is affected, protects frequent-flyer status and upgrades, and handles specialized logistics such as pet travel and packages for high-end events. Memberships cover business, personal, and family travel, rather than business trips alone. There are no routine booking, service, change, or cancellation fees, though disclosed handling costs can apply in edge cases such as certain low-cost carriers or complex changes on heavily discounted fares.
The individual tier is $300 per month or $2,500 per year, with unlimited trips and no per-booking fees. A higher tier exists for teams of five or more, adding dedicated account management, multi-user seat management, and centralized visibility. Centralized billing and expense reporting are available, but only on that higher tier.
Best for: a frequent premium traveler who wants a person handling the itinerary, and whose company is not trying to solve a finance-reporting problem at the same time.
6. Catch - Best for Executives Whose Real Problem Is Coordination, Not Compliance
Catch is an AI Executive Assistant. Business travel, live since July 2026, is one of the things it handles, and it belongs in this comparison for exactly one of the five triggers listed at the top of the page: the executive’s own time.
There is no travel dashboard and no search interface. The executive asks in whatever channel they already use, Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or a phone call, or Catch raises the trip first, having spotted it in the executive’s own data: a conference ticket receipt sitting in the inbox, a meeting in another city on the calendar. Catch then books flights, hotels, and ground transport end to end, acting as the travel agent itself rather than handing back options to choose between. It applies preferences it has learned, including hard requirements the executive has flagged before, and it keeps managing the trip after booking: watching for a better rate and, where the booking is flexible, cancelling and rebooking when one appears, picking a hotel within walking distance of the actual meeting address, calling the front desk to confirm a room detail, arranging late checkout, rearranging when the trip moves. Where a company has a travel policy, Catch books within it.
Travel is one lane of a wider role. The same assistant triages the inbox and sends replies to the executive’s intent rather than leaving drafts to be finished, chases the quiet threads that matter, resolves calendar conflicts by contacting the other side, books scheduling rather than just sharing a link, flags what needs attention and reminds the executive of what is coming, updates connected CRM and project tools, and places real outbound calls to hotels, restaurants, and offices. What it understands about the executive comes from connected data and from ongoing feedback, and it applies judgment rather than a rule table. Autonomy is earned: early on it checks before doing things on the executive’s behalf, and it handles more independently as it learns how someone works.
Pricing is a flat $99 per month with everything included. Voice calls carry no per-call fees, and there are no usage tiers. Setup is self-serve in under three minutes: connect Gmail or Outlook and start messaging. There is a 10-day free trial. Catch is SOC 2 Type II certified and CASA Tier 2 verified. Against the alternative it most often stands in for, a fully loaded US executive assistant runs roughly $120,000 to $180,000 a year, and that comparison is not an argument for letting anyone go. The traditional administrative role gets handled, and the person in it grows into the operational and in-person work Catch does not cover.
Where Catch is the wrong answer, stated plainly. Catch does not handle expense management, T&E, receipt capture, reimbursement, or spend reporting today. It does not run approval chains or enforce travel policy against a finance console. If any of those are on your requirements list, and for most people shopping for a Concur alternative at least one of them is, the platform or spend-suite categories above are the right place to buy.
Best for: an executive who travels the same routes to the same cities repeatedly and wants the whole administrative role, travel included, handled rather than organized into a better interface.
A Different Market Entirely
7. Ezus - Best for Agencies Selling Trips to Their Own Clients
Ezus turns up in travel software searches next to Concur, but it answers the opposite question. It is a travel production platform for agencies, destination management companies, and tour operators, the businesses selling trips rather than the companies buying them for staff.
Users build day-by-day itineraries combining transport, hotels, and activities with variants per traveler or room, manage budgets with real-time markups, VAT handling, multi-currency support, and live margin control, and generate branded proposals, quotes, vouchers, and invoices from governed templates. There is also a CRM, supplier catalog and contract management, an integrated payment gateway accepting cards and SEPA transfers, and mobile-optimized client web pages. Premium adds automatic translation and multilingual documents.
Professional is €75 or $89 per user per month billed annually, Premium is €100 or $119, and Enterprise is on request above 30 users. Onboarding packs are mandatory and priced on top: €1,990 for the Starter pack, €2,490 for the Complete pack.
Best for: travel businesses building tailor-made trips for paying clients. If you are managing your own employees’ travel, this is not the category.
If Expense Reporting Is the Requirement
This gets its own heading because it is where most of these searches actually end.
If you need expense reports submitted, receipts captured and matched, reimbursements processed, or spend approved against policy before it happens, then the shortlist is Navan, TravelPerk, Ramp, or staying on Concur. Engine consolidates travel charges into a single monthly invoice through Direct Bill, which solves reconciliation for travel spend. Ascend offers centralized billing and expense reporting only on its higher team tier. Catch does not do any of it today.
That is the sorting line worth applying before you compare feature tables. An assistant that books and manages a trip does not close your books, and no expense platform takes the coordination off an executive’s plate.
Matching the Alternative to the Module
Replacing Concur Expense. Ramp is the most direct swap on capture speed, with a free base tier and submission through SMS and Slack. TravelPerk’s Spend Only plans start at $13 per user per month. Navan’s expense pricing is free for the first five monthly expensing users, then $15 per active user per month.
Replacing Concur Travel. Engine costs nothing to use as a booking platform. TravelPerk’s Travel Only tiers price the booking function on its own. Navan bundles it at no booking fee on the Business tier, funded by supplier commissions.
Replacing the policy layer. This is the hardest thing on the list to leave behind. Navan applies policy dynamically at booking, TravelPerk filters and flags against configured policy and routes approvals through Slack or Teams, Engine lets administrators set custom policies and budget controls, and Ramp evaluates transactions against a configured travel and expense policy. What Concur documents here is approval hierarchies configured to route by spend threshold and organizational structure. If multi-level routing is a hard requirement, put that question to each vendor directly.
Replacing accounts payable. Concur handles invoicing with purchase-order matching. Ramp is the closest here, with bill payment by ACH, card, check, and wire, plus OCR invoice extraction.
Solving the executive’s time problem. The platforms above are built around travel spend and the finance workflow behind it, not around an executive’s admin load. Ascend puts human experts on premium travel, personal trips included. Catch handles business travel plus the inbox, calendar, scheduling, and calls at a flat rate.
Needing both at once. These categories are not mutually exclusive, and the most common real-world setup is two products: an expense platform for the finance side, and an assistant for the one or two executives whose calendar and inbox are the genuine bottleneck.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best SAP Concur alternative?
Depends which module you are replacing. Navan is the closest full-suite equivalent, TravelPerk lets you buy travel and spend separately, Ramp leads on expense capture, and Engine covers travel booking at no platform cost. There is no single winner, because Concur is not a single product.
How much does SAP Concur cost?
Concur publishes three tiers, all with unlimited users: Base at roughly $7 per expense report, Plus at roughly $11 per expense report, and Premium at custom pricing. Base and Plus can be purchased self-serve; Premium goes through a quote.
Does SAP Concur have a free trial?
No. None of the three tiers offers a free trial.
Why is Concur Travel not included in the cheaper plans?
Base includes Concur Expense alone, and Plus adds ExpenseIt, the User Support Desk, and Reporting, so both are expense-side plans. Concur Travel appears in the Premium tier, which is custom-priced.
Is there a free alternative to SAP Concur?
Engine’s booking platform is free to use, with no membership fees, contracts, or minimum spend, though its Flex and FlexPro cancellation cover and Engine X card are paid extras. Ramp also offers a free plan at $0 per user per month.
Which Concur alternative is best for a company with strict approval rules?
Concur is the one that spells this out: granular policy configuration by category, amount, geography, or employee group, and approval hierarchies routed by spend threshold and org structure. Navan applies policy dynamically at booking, and TravelPerk flags against configured policy and pushes approvals into Slack and Teams. If multi-level approval routing is a hard requirement, ask each vendor how far theirs goes.
Which alternative replaces Concur’s expense reporting most directly?
Ramp. It captures receipts through SMS or Slack at the moment of the transaction, extracts invoice data with OCR, can lock cards when receipts are overdue on the Plus tier, and integrates with QuickBooks Online and Xero.
Do any of these alternatives book travel without a search interface?
Ascend runs booking and support end to end over WhatsApp, where human travel experts curate and book options, and the company states it does not require apps, portals, or forms. Catch books from a message or from calendar and email context, with no dashboard to open. Navan sits in between: its Ava agent can book, modify, and cancel travel autonomously.
Can Catch replace SAP Concur?
No, and it is not intended to. Catch does not handle expense reports, receipt capture, reimbursement, spend reporting, or approval workflows today. It books and manages business travel and handles an executive’s email, calendar, scheduling, and calls. Companies that use both typically keep an expense platform for finance and use Catch for the executive.
What does an AI travel assistant cost compared with these platforms?
Catch is a flat $99 per month with voice calls included and no per-call fees. Ascend, the human concierge option, is $300 per month or $2,500 per year. Platform pricing is structured around teams instead: per expense report at Concur, per user at Navan and TravelPerk’s spend plans, per booking percentage at TravelPerk’s travel plans.
Which option handles personal or leisure travel?
Ascend does, since memberships cover business, personal, and family travel. Catch is built around business travel. The corporate platforms are designed around managed business travel programs.
Is it worth leaving Concur at all?
Only if the shape is wrong for you. Catching a policy violation at the point of booking or submission rather than during a month-end audit is a real capability, and the mobile receipt capture is well reviewed. The case for moving is strongest when you are paying for modules you do not use, when the tier that holds the module you need is out of budget, or when the problem was never compliance in the first place.
