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Spendnotify

Everyone compares the features. Almost nobody explains who is paying.

Business travel software: travel management software and corporate travel management platforms, compared

This is the one software category where most of the big vendors will not send you an invoice. Navan, Engine, Ramp and Brex all charge nothing for travel, because the hotel and the airline pay them instead. That makes the usual price comparison useless, and it means the plan labeled free is sometimes the most expensive one you can pick.

Compare travel and expense tools

No sales call. Plans are flat per month, not per user.

Try it on your own numbers

Set a travel budget and watch it fire

Travel is the spend category that moves fastest and gets reviewed slowest, because most of it is committed weeks before it posts. Pick a monthly budget, choose your warning thresholds, and replay a month of spending through the engine to see where a trend line would have reached you while there were still trips left to approve. Runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded.

Data source

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Monthly budgets

Anomaly sensitivity
Alert channels

Short answer

How much does corporate travel management software cost?

On published US rates verified 1 September 2026, the honest range is $0 to a negotiated enterprise contract. Navan Travel, Engine, Ramp and Brex Essentials charge no platform fee. Perk, formerly TravelPerk, charges $0 a month plus 5 percent per booking on Starter, $99 a month plus 3 percent on Premium, and $299 a month plus 3 percent on Pro. SAP Concur, Egencia and Spotnana publish nothing. So the real question is not what the software costs. It is which of three funding models you are signing up for, and what each one does to your incentives.

The finding

Three incompatible ways to pay for the same thing

Read off each vendor's own pricing page on 1 September 2026. The column that matters is the second one, because it tells you who the vendor answers to. A platform funded by supplier commission is paid more when you book more, which is worth knowing before you hand it your travel policy.

Swipe the table sideways to compare all columns.

Platform How it is funded Published software cost What that buys, and the catch
Navan Travel Travel provider commission $0, no platform fee Free for companies with 300 or fewer employees, with no published limit on trips booked. Above 300 employees pricing moves to a demo. Navan Expense is a separate meter: free for the first 5 monthly expensing users, then $15 per user per month.
Engine Hotel commission $0 Its own pricing page says "Not a free trial. Actually free," and explains that hotels pay a commission for the booking. No contracts, no agent-assist fees, no minimum spends. Hotel-led, so it is the narrowest of the free options if you fly a lot.
Ramp Interchange on the card, plus supplier economics $0 on the Free plan Travel is bundled into the spend platform rather than sold separately, and Ramp monitors hotel rates and rebooks automatically when the price drops by $50 or more. The commitment being asked is your card program, not a subscription.
Brex Interchange on the card $0 on Essentials Travel booking is included on the free Essentials tier, verified 30 August 2026. Premium is $12 per user per month. Same trade as Ramp: the card program is the product, the software is how they win it.
Perk Starter
formerly TravelPerk		 Percentage of booking value $0 a month, plus 5% per booking One travel policy and approval process, simplified reporting, cost objects. The 5 percent is the real price, and it is the highest booking rate Perk publishes. Booking fees are subject to minimum and maximum thresholds.
Perk Premium Platform fee plus percentage $99 a month, plus 3% per booking Ten travel policies and approval processes, advanced reporting, cost objects with budget tracking for up to 5 budgets, single sign-on, HR integrations. The two point drop in booking fee is what actually pays for this tier.
Perk Pro Platform fee plus percentage $299 a month, plus 3% per booking Unlimited policies, custom reporting, unlimited budget tracking, advanced and custom integrations. Note the booking rate does not improve over Premium, so the extra $200 a month is a pure feature purchase.
SAP Concur Travel Licence, quote only Publishes nothing No public rate card exists. The only credible public benchmark is Vendr's aggregate across 111 negotiated Concur deals: median about $9,859 a year, roughly $822 a month, with a range of $1,832 to $45,132 and an average negotiated saving of 27.91 percent. Treat that as a negotiation reference, not a price.
Egencia, Spotnana Licence, quote only Publishes nothing Checked 1 September 2026: the Egencia pricing URL returns HTTP 403 and the Spotnana pricing URL returns HTTP 404. Neither vendor exposes a rate card, so any figure you read for them in a roundup came from somewhere other than the vendor.

The pattern is worth saying out loud. In every other corner of business spend, the vendor bills you per seat. In corporate travel, four of the biggest names bill you nothing, because the supplier pays them. You are not really choosing a price. You are choosing whose inventory you see and whose incentive sits behind the recommendation.

The arithmetic

When the free plan becomes the expensive one

Perk is the only major vendor that publishes both a platform fee and a booking percentage, which makes it the one case where you can do the sum yourself. Starter is $0 a month and 5 percent per booking. Premium is $99 a month and 3 percent. The spread is two points, so Premium overtakes Starter once two percent of your monthly booking volume is worth more than $99, which happens at $4,950 of bookings a month. Below that, free really is cheaper. Above it, you are paying for the privilege of not paying.

Swipe the table sideways to compare all columns.

Monthly bookings Starter ($0 + 5%) Premium ($99 + 3%) Cheaper option
$2,000 $100 $159 Starter, by $59
$4,950 $247.50 $247.50 Breakeven
$10,000 $500 $399 Premium, by $101
$25,000 $1,250 $849 Premium, by $401
$50,000 $2,500 $1,599 Premium, by $901

A company sending four people on a $1,200 trip each month is at $4,800 of bookings and should stay on Starter. The same company after a sales hire, running $12,000 a month, is losing roughly $140 a month by staying there. Nobody sends an email when you cross that line, because the vendor is not worse off either way.

The Pro tier is the interesting one, because the booking rate does not move. Premium and Pro both charge 3 percent, so the $200 a month difference buys unlimited policies, custom reporting and custom integrations and nothing else. There is no volume at which Pro becomes cheaper than Premium. If somebody tells you to upgrade to Pro to save money, check that sentence carefully.

One caveat on all of this, stated on Perk's own page: booking fees are subject to minimum and maximum thresholds. A percentage with a floor behaves like a flat fee on small bookings, and a percentage with a ceiling stops scaling on large ones. Ask for both numbers before you model anything, because they move the breakeven in opposite directions.

The nuance

What a travel platform cannot see

Every control described on this page applies to one thing: trips booked inside the platform. Book direct on an airline site, use a personal loyalty account, let a client's office arrange the hotel, or expense a last minute train, and the travel tool has no view of it at all. The policy engine is not bypassed so much as never consulted.

This is the same shape as the gap in card-based controls, where a virtual card governs only the spend on cards that platform issued. It is worth understanding before you assume adoption equals coverage. In practice the leakage shows up in two places: the trips booked in a hurry, and the trips booked by people who do not travel often enough to remember the tool exists.

There is a second, quieter limitation. Travel commits early and posts late. A flight booked in March for a May conference is a real commitment in March, but on most reporting it lands in May, which is why travel budgets tend to look fine right up until they do not. A platform that reports on bookings will show you the commitment. A platform that reports on card transactions will not. Check which one you are looking at before you trust a mid-quarter number.

Shortlisting

Which platform fits which company

Under 300 employees, and you want no software bill

Navan Travel is free with no platform fee and no published trip limit, and the constraint is headcount rather than usage. It is the most complete of the free options because it covers flights, hotels and rail rather than one supplier type. The thing to check is the 300 employee line, because crossing it moves you into an unpublished quote.

Mostly hotels, and you refuse to sign a contract

Engine is free, funded by hotel commission, and explicitly has no contracts, no agent-assist fees and no minimum spends. For field teams, trades and anyone whose travel is a lot of hotel nights and very few flights, that is the shortest path from nothing to some control. It is the narrowest option if air travel matters.

You already run Ramp or Brex cards

Travel booking is included at $0 on Ramp Free and Brex Essentials, so the marginal cost of turning it on is zero and the data lands next to the card spend instead of in a second system. Ramp also rebooks hotels automatically when the rate drops by $50 or more. The real commitment is the card program, which you have already made.

You need more than one travel policy

This is the constraint that quietly forces an upgrade. Perk Starter includes exactly one travel policy and approval process. The moment you need different rules for engineers and for the sales team, or a separate approval path for international trips, you are on Premium at $99 a month, which allows ten. Multi-entity and multi-country teams hit this first.

You are a US buyer who wants travel and expense in one product

Read the fine print on geography. Perk's spend and expense features are Europe-first, and its own navigation labels them "Spend features in Europe" while pointing North American buyers at expense management integrations instead. Navan sells both in the US but meters them separately, at $15 per user per month for Expense after the first five.

Global program, regulated industry, existing ERP

This is where SAP Concur, Egencia and Spotnana still win, and where none of them will tell you a price without a call. Budget for a negotiation rather than a signup. Vendr's aggregate on Concur puts the median around $9,859 a year with an average negotiated saving near 28 percent, which tells you the first number quoted is not the last one.

If your shortlist is really about expense reporting rather than booking, you are on the wrong page and the honest thing is to say so. The comparison you want is travel and expense management software, which covers the reporting, approval and reimbursement side rather than the inventory.

Where we fit

Spendnotify does not book travel

Worth being direct about on a page like this one. We have no inventory, no agents and no booking engine, and we are not trying to sell you a substitute for the platforms above. If you need trips booked and policy enforced at the point of booking, buy one of them, and use the tables here to make sure you understand who is paying for it.

What we do is the layer that sits across all of it. A travel platform can only tell you about the travel it booked. Spendnotify watches budgets across the cards, accounts and vendors you already have, including the trips that never went through the tool, and tells the right person when spend is trending past a limit while there are still bookings left to approve. Travel is the category where that timing matters most, because the commitment happens weeks before the charge does.

Questions

Business travel software, answered

What is corporate travel management software?

It is a platform where employees book their own flights, hotels and rail inside rules the company set in advance, instead of booking on consumer sites and claiming it back afterwards. Policy is enforced at the moment of booking rather than argued about at expense time, and the spend is categorized automatically. The booking control is the point; the reporting is a by-product of having everything in one place.

How much does corporate travel management software cost?

Verified against vendor pricing pages on 1 September 2026: Navan Travel, Engine, Ramp and Brex Essentials charge $0. Perk charges $0 a month plus 5 percent per booking on Starter, $99 plus 3 percent on Premium, and $299 plus 3 percent on Pro. SAP Concur, Egencia and Spotnana publish no rate card at all. The spread is not really about features, it is about whether the supplier or you are funding the vendor.

How is corporate travel software free?

Because the airline, hotel or car rental company pays the platform instead of you. Navan says it is powered by travel providers commission fees. Engine says hotels pay us a commission for bringing them business. The software is how these vendors win the booking, and the booking is where the money is. It is the same economics that make corporate card software free, where interchange pays for the product.

Is Navan really free?

Navan Travel is free with no platform fees for companies with 300 or fewer employees, and Navan publishes no limit on how many trips you can book. The gate is headcount, not usage. Above 300 employees, pricing becomes a demo conversation. Navan Expense is metered separately: free for the first 5 monthly expensing users, then $15 per user per month, so a company can be on free travel and paid expense at the same time.

What is the best corporate travel management software for small business?

For a company under 300 employees that wants no software bill, Navan Travel is free with unlimited trips. For hotel-heavy travel with no contract, Engine is free and commission funded. If you need more than one travel policy or genuine budget tracking, Perk Premium at $99 a month plus 3 percent per booking is the cheapest published plan that includes them. Do the booking volume sum before assuming free is cheapest.

What should travel spend analytics software cost per employee?

Between $0 and roughly $4 per employee per month for the software, plus any booking fee. Navan Travel and Engine charge nothing at all. Perk Premium at $99 a month works out at about $0.50 per employee across a 200 person company, before the 3 percent booking fee that is the real cost. SAP Concur, using Vendr's median of roughly $822 a month across 111 negotiated deals, lands near $4.11 per employee. The thing worth knowing is that reporting and analytics are bundled into every one of these rather than metered separately, so a vendor quoting travel analytics as its own line item is charging you for something the rest of the market includes. The per employee figure also moves far more with your licensed user ratio than with the vendor you pick.

What is the difference between a TMC and travel management software?

A travel management company is a service business: agents book and service trips on your behalf, historically for a per transaction fee. Travel management software is self-serve, with policy enforced automatically in the booking flow. The distinction has blurred, because Navan, Perk and Egencia all attach human agents to software, and the modern versions bundle 24/7 support rather than billing for each agent touch. If you are weighing an agency contract against a platform, the published fee ranges on both sides are broken down in what corporate travel management companies charge.

Do I need travel management software if we already have an expense tool?

They solve different halves of the problem. An expense tool tells you what a trip cost after it happened. A travel platform decides what the trip is allowed to cost before it is booked. If your travel spend is small and predictable, the expense tool alone is usually fine. Once policy disputes or out of policy bookings start reaching finance, the control needs to move earlier, to the booking screen.

Is there travel budget tracking software that sends alerts when departments exceed their monthly limit?

Partly, and the gap is worth understanding before you buy. Booking platforms enforce policy at the moment of booking, so they will stop a $900 flight when the cap is $600, and they report departmental spend afterwards. What they generally do not do is hold a monthly departmental budget across every travel cost and message the budget owner when the department is trending over. Travel arrives on several instruments at once: the booking platform, an employee's own card for meals and ground transport, and a supplier invoice for an event. A limit on any single one of those sees a fraction of the number, which is why a projection across all of them catches an overrun weeks before a per-tool cap does.

Does SAP Concur publish pricing?

No. Concur has never published a public rate card, and both of its pricing URLs return errors, checked again on 1 September 2026. The most useful public benchmark is Vendr's aggregate of 111 negotiated Concur contracts: a median of about $9,859 a year, roughly $822 a month, with a range from $1,832 to $45,132. The average negotiated saving of 27.91 percent is the more actionable number, because it tells you the opening quote is negotiable.

Keep reading

Related pages

Book the trips. Catch the overspend earlier.

Whichever platform you pick, it only sees the travel booked inside it, and it reports the charge weeks after the commitment. Spendnotify watches budgets across the cards, accounts and vendors you already have and tells the right person while there are still bookings left to approve.

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