Navan vs TravelPerk: pricing, booking fees and which platform costs less

What each one publishes

Both companies do publish prices, which already puts them ahead of SAP Concur, Amex GBT and Spotnana, none of which show a rate anywhere. Read the two rate cards side by side and the mismatch is immediate. One is a flat zero with a headcount ceiling. The other is a subscription with a transaction fee bolted on.

Both rate cards read from the vendors' own pricing pages on 4 September 2026.

The percentage is the whole comparison

A flat fee and a percentage behave differently as you grow, and that is the entire story here. Navan costs the same nothing whether your team takes 20 trips a year or 400. Perk Starter costs nothing per month and then takes a twentieth of every dollar booked. At small volumes the difference is a rounding error. At real travel volumes it becomes a line item that would fund a headcount.

Run it out. At $20,000 of annual bookings Perk Starter costs $1,000 and Navan costs $0. At $40,000 it is $2,000 against $0, and $40,000 is roughly 40 to 50 typical US domestic trips, which is a small company. At $250,000 it is $12,500 against $0. For context, a small travel management company with a published rate card charges somewhere around $1,400 to $8,000 a year for a program that size, so by the time you are booking a quarter of a million dollars through Perk Starter, the percentage model is more expensive than hiring an agency to do it for you.

None of that makes Perk a bad product. It makes the Starter plan an expensive way to buy it, which is a different criticism, and one worth acting on before you sign.

Which TravelPerk plan should I choose?

Work it out from your monthly booking volume rather than the plan names, because the plan called free is not the cheapest one for most companies that would seriously evaluate Perk. Starter is $0 plus 5%. Premium is $99 plus 3%. The spread is two percentage points, so the $99 pays for itself once 2% of monthly bookings exceeds $99, which happens at $4,950 of bookings a month.

Derived from Perk's published North America travel plans, 4 September 2026. Pro at $299 plus 3% only makes sense for its feature set, not on price, since it shares Premium's 3% rate.

Does TravelPerk work for US companies?

For booking, yes, and Perk publishes North America travel plans. For spend and expense the answer is weaker, and this is the detail most comparison articles miss. Perk's own pricing page lists the combined travel-and-spend plans and the spend-only plans under Europe, and North American visitors get a line pointing them to expense-management integrations instead. If you are evaluating Perk as one platform covering both travel and expense the way Navan does, confirm what is actually available to a US entity before you assume parity.

The naming is also in flux. TravelPerk is rebranding to Perk, the pricing page now reads "Perk Plans & Pricing" and the app sits at app.perk.com. Search for both names when you are reading reviews, because a lot of the material written before the change is filed under the old one.

Where the expense half lands

If expense is part of what you are buying, Navan's meter deserves the same scrutiny as Perk's percentage. Navan Expense is free for the first 5 users and $15 per user per month after that, and Navan counts an active expense user as anyone who submits a transaction, manually or through Navan Connect. That counts submitters, not approvers, so a 40-person company where 35 people file expenses is looking at $525 a month, and the free travel product sits next to a bill that is not free at all.

That is the number that sends most teams to a card-led platform. Ramp Free is $0 per user per month with unlimited users, Brex Essentials is $0, and BILL Spend & Expense is $0, all funded by interchange on the card rather than by a seat licence. You can keep booking in Navan at $0 and move only the expense half, which is often the cheapest configuration available. The full set of options is laid out in our comparison of Navan competitors and alternatives, and if it is Ramp specifically you are weighing, the Navan vs Ramp comparison goes through the trade properly.

The part neither platform solves

Both of these tools enforce policy at the point of booking, which is genuinely the right place for it. What neither does well is the week after. A booking tool knows about the trips it processed. It does not know that your marketing team has spent 55% of a quarterly budget by day 12, which annualizes to about 137% of plan while every threshold alert stays silent until day 18. That is six days of warning lost inside a tool that is technically reporting correctly.

The same gap shows up in the mundane parts of running a travel program. A traveler wants to know whether a $340 hotel is inside policy, the answer lives in a document that is not the booking tool, and the practical outcome is that they guess. Teams that fix this usually do it by making the answer findable rather than by writing a longer policy, which is where a proper search layer across the tools people already work in earns its keep. Our guide to writing a travel and expense policy covers what the document itself should say.

So which one

For a US company under 300 employees, Navan wins on cost and it is not close, because zero is difficult to beat and the commission model means the zero holds at any booking volume. Choose Perk when the booking experience, the support model or the European coverage genuinely suit you better, and go in knowing you are paying a percentage for that. If you do choose Perk, do the $4,950 arithmetic before you accept the Starter plan, because the plan that advertises $0 is the more expensive one for any company with real travel.

Above 300 employees the published comparison stops being useful and you are into quotes from Navan Enterprise, Concur and the agencies. At that point the number worth pinning down is total fees as a share of total travel spend. Corporate Traveler, which earns those fees, and Engine, which competes with the companies that earn them, independently publish the same benchmark: above roughly 5% of travel spend, it is time to review the pricing model or the provider. Two opposed commercial interests landing on one figure is about as trustworthy as a benchmark gets in this category.