Navan is a corporate travel and expense platform. Booking, expense tracking, policy enforcement, and corporate cards all sit behind one login, and its AI agent, Ava, can book, modify, and cancel travel on its own. If you want one system covering the whole travel programme, that combination is the product’s core strength.
Most people hunting for a Navan alternative aren’t after a worse version of the same thing. They want a different shape. Some need less than the full platform and would rather not pay for the parts they’ll never open. Others want more hands-on service than a search box can give them. And a few have stopped wanting a booking tool at all, because the real work was never the search. It’s everything wrapped around the trip.
What follows walks the genuine alternatives by category: full travel-management platforms, expense-led suites, and the assistant model. Each entry says plainly what it’s best for. Catch appears in the assistant category, and this page is just as clear about what Catch doesn’t cover.
Why People Look for a Navan Alternative
The pricing has two halves. Travel booking on Navan’s Business tier carries no booking fee, since it’s funded by travel providers’ commissions. Expense management is priced separately: free for the first five monthly expensing users, then $15 per active user per month. Buyers who read “free travel” and budget accordingly are sometimes caught out by that second line.
The Business tier has a headcount ceiling. Navan’s pricing page states the Business tier is for companies up to 300 employees. Past that, buyers move to the Enterprise tier, which adds dedicated support and corporate negotiated rates at custom pricing that isn’t publicly disclosed. Companies crossing that line often re-open the market rather than take a quote at face value.
Support during disruptions is a recurring complaint. Reviewers on Reddit and public review platforms report difficulty getting a booking resolved when something goes wrong mid-trip. These are user reports rather than verified platform behavior, though they come up often enough to explain why a search starts.
The other half of the review record deserves a mention too. Users regularly praise Navan’s interface and the fact that travel and expense live in one place, and Navan Rewards, which lets employees earn personal travel credit when they book under budget, is a genuinely well-liked feature. The question isn’t whether Navan is good at what it does. It’s whether what it does is the job you actually have.
The Alternatives at a Glance
| Tool | Category | Best for | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Navan | Travel + expense platform | One system for booking, expense, and corporate cards | Free to book travel on Business; expense $15/user/month after the first 5 |
| TravelPerk (Perk) | Travel + spend platform | A like-for-like platform swap with flexible cancellation | Travel Only from $0/month plus 5% per booking |
| Engine | Travel booking platform | Mid-market and field teams who want booking without a subscription | Free to use the booking platform; paid add-ons optional |
| SAP Concur | Expense-led enterprise suite | Strict, multi-layered policy and approval governance | Base around ~$7 per expense report |
| Ramp | Spend management with travel attached | Finance teams whose main problem is cards and expenses | Free plan at $0/month per user |
| Ascend | Human travel concierge | Premium travelers who want a person handling the itinerary | $300/month or $2,500/year |
| Catch | AI Executive Assistant | Executives who want travel and the rest of the admin handled | Flat $99/month, everything included |
| Ezus | Travel agency production software | Agencies and tour operators selling trips to their own clients | $89 per user/month, billed annually |
Full Travel-Management Platforms
These are the closest like-for-like replacements. You still log into something, you still search, and the company still gets visibility and control over what gets booked.
1. TravelPerk (Perk) - Best for a Direct Platform Swap
TravelPerk is the most direct substitute here. It’s a corporate travel and spend management platform: employees search a global inventory of flights, accommodations, trains, and rental cars roughly the way they would on a consumer travel site, while company policy filters or flags what shows up. Trips outside auto-approval parameters route to a manager. The company rebranded to Perk in November 2025 as it expanded from travel into combined travel and spend, though most search demand still sits on the TravelPerk name.
Two things set it apart in practice. Approvals get pushed into tools teams already have open: trip summaries with dates, costs, and policy details land in Slack or Microsoft Teams, and an approver can decide right there without opening a portal. Then there’s FlexiTravel, its flexible-cancellation product, which charges a 10% fee per trip to guarantee an 80% refund on cancellations made up to two hours before departure. Useful if your plans move constantly and you’d otherwise be buying expensive flexible fares. The mobile app also holds itineraries, booking details, and train tickets offline.
Pricing is unusually legible. Travel Only runs $0/month plus 5% per booking on Starter, $99/month plus 3% on Premium, or $299/month plus 3% on Pro. Travel and Spend starts at $11 per user per month on Premium and $13 on Pro; Spend Only starts at $13 and $15 respectively.
Best for: companies that want the Navan shape (search, policy, approvals, spend) with a per-booking pricing model and a flexible-cancellation option.
2. Engine - Best for Booking Without a Subscription
Engine, formerly Hotel Engine, is a corporate travel booking platform built around centralized procurement and billing. After an expansion in late 2024 it books hotels, flights, and rental cars. Administrators can set custom travel policies and budget controls, and there’s dedicated support for group bookings of nine or more rooms and for extended stays.
Its strengths are financial rather than editorial. Through Direct Bill, a company gets a single monthly statement aggregating all corporate travel charges. Engine can cover hotel incidental holds upfront and route those charges to the corporate invoice instead of the traveler’s personal card, which matters enormously for field teams who can’t absorb a large hold. Travelers can enter their own loyalty numbers and earn standard hotel points alongside Engine Rewards. The Engine X card carries no annual fee and pays rewards on eligible travel booked through the platform on a spend ladder starting at 6%, plus custom spending controls. FlexPro, a paid add-on, lets travelers cancel or modify hotel reservations without penalty up until noon on the day of check-in, superseding the hotel’s own policy, though it doesn’t cover nights already used.
On cost, the booking platform itself is free. Engine’s pricing page says so plainly, and its FAQ lists no membership fees, contracts, or minimum spend. The paid pieces are optional extras: the Flex and FlexPro cancellation cover, and the Engine X card.
Best for: mid-market, project-based, and deployment-heavy organizations (construction, logistics, healthcare staffing) that want consolidated billing and hotel-led booking without a platform subscription.
Expense-Led Suites
If you’re shopping because of expense reporting, receipts, or spend control rather than the booking experience, these two lead with that and treat travel as an attached module.
3. SAP Concur - Best for Strict Policy and Approval Governance
Concur is the enterprise standard for structured travel and expense governance. It handles travel booking across flights, hotels, rail, and rental cars; automates expense management including receipt capture, auditing, and compliance; and manages accounts payable and invoicing with purchase-order matching and approval routing.
Control is where it earns its keep. Concur allows granular spending policy configuration by category, amount, geography, or employee group, applies travel policy during booking and flags out-of-policy options in real time before a report is even submitted, and supports configurable approval hierarchies that route reports by spend threshold and organizational structure. On the AI side, Joule is a copilot that uses natural language to automate tasks, answer policy questions, and navigate the system, and a Booking Agent helps search and book compliant travel against preferences and budgets. ExpenseIt, the mobile OCR receipt capture, reads receipt images and creates categorized expense entries automatically.
Pricing is published, and the tier structure matters more than the headline number. Base runs around ~$7 per expense report and Plus around ~$11 per expense report, both with unlimited users, while Premium is custom-quoted. Base includes Concur Expense alone. Plus adds ExpenseIt, the User Support Desk, and Reporting, still expense only. Concur Travel appears only in the Premium tier. No tier comes with a free trial.
Best for: mid-market and enterprise organizations with formal travel programmes, multi-layered approvals, and compliance requirements that justify the configuration effort.
4. Ramp - Best for Card and Expense Automation
Ramp is a spend management platform: corporate cards, physical and virtual, paired with software for travel and expenses, accounts payable, and vendor procurement. Travel is a real part of the product but a small one. The centre of gravity is cards, receipts, and reconciliation.
Capture is what it does exceptionally well. The moment a card transaction hits, Ramp prompts for a receipt through Slack or SMS, then uses OCR to pull the data and match it to the transaction. Cards can be locked automatically when required receipts aren’t submitted on time, on the Plus tier. Bills can be paid by ACH, card, check, or wire, and there are native accounting integrations for QuickBooks Online and Xero. On the travel side, users can book flights, hotels, and rental cars, and can book flights and hotels for external guests (contractors, interviewees, consultants) who get their details by email without needing a Ramp account. Ramp will also match bookings made with any outside travel provider and capture the receipts. Round-the-clock travel phone support exists, but it sits behind the paid tiers.
The Free plan is $0/month per user and includes unlimited physical and virtual cards. Plus is $15/month per user plus a platform fee based on team size, with a 20% discount on annual billing. Enterprise is custom-priced with a dedicated account manager and priority 24/7 global support.
Best for: finance teams whose primary pain is expense reporting, card control, and the accounting close, with travel booking as a convenience on top.
The Assistant Model
The third category doesn’t hand you a better place to search. It takes the searching away.
5. Ascend - Best for a Human Concierge Over Messaging
Ascend is a membership travel concierge. There’s no platform: the company says outright that it isn’t one and doesn’t require apps, portals, or forms to book. Everything runs over WhatsApp. A member sends a message with 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 they book it and monitor the trip. The team commits to a one-minute response time, 24 hours a day.
Coverage includes flights, hotels, ground transportation such as car rentals and car services, and private aviation. It actively 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, which is a meaningful break from every corporate platform on this list. 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. Centralized billing and expense reporting exist, but only on the higher Enterprise tier.
Best for: frequent premium travelers and executives who want a human handling the itinerary and aren’t primarily solving a finance-visibility problem.
6. Catch - Best for Executives Who Want the Whole Admin Role Handled
Catch is an AI Executive Assistant, and business travel, live since July 2026, is one of the things it handles. It isn’t a booking platform, and there’s no travel dashboard to open. 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 books flights, hotels, and ground transport end to end, acting as the travel agent itself rather than handing back search results. It applies preferences it has learned, airline, seat, hotel class, and the hard requirements the executive has flagged before, and it keeps managing the trip afterwards: watching for a better rate and rebooking where the rate is flexible, picking a hotel within a short walk of the actual meeting address, calling the front desk to confirm a room detail, arranging late checkout, rearranging when the trip itself moves.
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 finish, chases the quiet threads that matter, resolves calendar conflicts by contacting the other side, books scheduling and generates links, flags what needs attention, and places real outbound calls to hotels, restaurants, and offices. Its picture of the executive comes from connected data and from ongoing feedback, and it applies judgment rather than a rule table. Early on it checks before acting; as it learns how someone works, more happens without asking.
Pricing is a flat $99 per month with everything included. Voice calls carry no per-call fees, and there are no usage tiers. Against the alternative it most often replaces, a fully loaded US executive assistant runs roughly $120,000 to $180,000 a year. That comparison isn’t an argument for letting anyone go: the traditional administrative role gets handled, and the person in it grows into operational and in-person work Catch does not cover. Setup is self-serve and takes under three minutes, connect Gmail or Outlook and start messaging, and there’s a 10-day free trial. Catch is SOC 2 Type II certified, audited by EY, and CASA Tier 2 as a Google Verified app.
Where Catch is the wrong choice, stated plainly. Catch does not today handle expense management, T&E, receipt capture, reimbursement, or spend reporting. It doesn’t enforce travel policy or run approval chains. It books within a company’s policy, but it doesn’t sell the policy-and-spend-control console that Navan and Concur are built around. It’s built and positioned around business travel rather than consumer trip planning. If your actual requirement is finance-side control over what a whole company spends on travel, choose from the platform or expense categories above.
Best for: executives who travel repeatedly, the same conferences, the same client cities, the same routes, and want the administrative role, travel included, handled end to end rather than organized into a nicer interface.
A Different Job Entirely
7. Ezus - Best for Agencies Selling Travel to Their Own Clients
Ezus turns up in Navan searches, but it solves the opposite problem. It’s travel production software for agencies, destination management companies, and tour operators: the people selling trips, not the companies buying them. Users build day-by-day itineraries combining transport, hotels, and activities, manage budgets with real-time markups, VAT handling, multi-currency support, and live margin control, and generate branded proposals, quotes, vouchers, and invoices from templates. There’s also a CRM, supplier catalog management, an integrated payment gateway, and mobile-optimized client web pages.
Professional runs €75 or $89 per user per month billed annually, Premium €100 or $119, and Enterprise is on request for organizations above 30 users. Onboarding packs are mandatory and priced separately: €1,990 for the Starter pack, €2,490 for the Complete pack.
Best for: travel businesses building tailor-made trips for clients. If you’re a company managing your own employees’ travel, this isn’t the category you want.
How to Choose
It comes down to which problem is actually costing you the most.
If the problem is finance visibility and control, stay in the platform or expense categories. Navan, TravelPerk, and Concur all give a finance team policy enforcement, approvals, and reporting; Ramp leads with cards and receipts; Engine consolidates billing without a subscription. Catch replaces none of that, and Ascend’s centralized billing and expense reporting sit on its Enterprise tier only.
If the problem is cost structure, compare the shapes carefully. Navan splits free booking from per-user expense pricing. TravelPerk charges a platform fee plus a percentage per booking. Engine’s booking platform is free with paid extras. Concur charges per expense report. Ramp has a free tier, with a platform fee based on team size above it. Catch is a single flat $99 per month.
If the problem is that someone still has to do the work, no platform here solves it, because a search interface is work by definition. That’s the line between the first two categories and the third. Ascend puts human experts on it for premium travel, personal trips included. Catch puts an AI assistant on business travel and the rest of the executive’s admin at a flat rate.
If you need both, the categories aren’t mutually exclusive. A company can keep an expense platform for the finance side and use an assistant for the executive whose calendar and inbox are the real bottleneck.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Navan alternative?
There’s no single answer, because Navan bundles three jobs. TravelPerk is the closest like-for-like platform. Concur is the choice for strict policy governance, Ramp for card and expense automation, and Catch for executives who want the trip booked and managed for them rather than searched.
Is there a free alternative to Navan?
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 has a free plan at $0 per user per month, and TravelPerk’s Starter tier has a $0 platform fee with a 5% per-booking charge.
How much does Navan actually cost?
Travel booking on the Business tier has no booking fee, funded by travel providers’ commissions. Expense management is free for the first five monthly expensing users, then $15 per active user per month. The Enterprise tier, for companies above 300 employees, is custom-priced and not publicly disclosed.
Which Navan alternative is best for a company over 300 employees?
Navan’s Business tier is capped at 300 employees, so larger organizations either move to Navan Enterprise or look elsewhere. Concur is built for exactly that profile: multi-layered approvals, granular policy, and deep governance. TravelPerk serves small businesses through large global enterprises on published pricing.
Do any Navan alternatives book travel without a search interface?
Ascend does: it runs entirely over WhatsApp, where human travel experts curate and book options, and the company explicitly 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.
Which alternative handles expenses as well as travel?
Navan, TravelPerk, Concur, and Ramp all cover expense management alongside booking. Engine consolidates travel charges into a single monthly invoice through Direct Bill. Catch does not currently handle expenses, receipts, or reimbursement.
Can any of these enforce a company travel policy?
Navan, TravelPerk, Concur, and Engine all apply policy at the point of booking, and Concur adds configurable approval hierarchies routed by spend threshold. Catch books within a company’s travel policy but does not enforce it or run approvals.
What is the difference between Catch and Navan’s Ava?
Ava is Navan’s agentic AI inside the Navan platform, able to book, modify, and cancel travel autonomously, curate compliant hotels from learned preferences, and act as a data analyst on spend for finance managers. Catch isn’t a travel product with AI attached. It’s an executive assistant that handles email, calendar, scheduling, calls, and bookings, with business travel as one capability, reached through Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or phone.
Which option is cheapest for a single executive?
For one person, Catch at a flat $99 per month covers business travel plus the rest of the administrative role with no per-call or per-booking fees. Ascend is $300 per month or $2,500 per year and covers personal and family travel as well. Platform pricing is generally built around teams rather than individuals.
Do these alternatives handle personal or leisure travel?
Ascend does, since memberships cover business, personal, and family travel. Catch is built around business travel and is not positioned for leisure or consumer trip planning. The corporate platforms are built for managed business travel programmes.
Is it worth switching from Navan at all?
Only if the shape is wrong for you. Navan’s consolidation of booking, expense, cards, and policy in one interface is genuinely strong, and its interface and rewards programme are well reviewed. Switch when you’re paying for parts you don’t use, when you’ve outgrown the Business tier, or when what you actually need is for someone else to do the work rather than a better place to do it yourself.
