SAP Concur vs Ramp vs Navan: $7 a report against $15 a seat

Three billing units, three different prices

The three products do not price the same thing. SAP Concur's published page sells expense reporting by the report: Base starts at $7 per report, Plus at $11 per report, both with unlimited users, and Premium is quoted. Ramp sells seats: the core tier is $0 a user a month, and Plus is $15 a user a month plus a platform fee based on team size, with 20% off for annual billing. Navan sells a free travel platform and charges for expensing beyond a threshold: Navan Business is free for companies of up to 300 employees, travel carries no platform fee, and expense is free for the first five monthly expensing users and then $15 a user a month; above 300 employees the price is a quote.

A 200-person company that files 400 reports a month pays $2,800 a month on Concur Base or $4,400 on Plus, pays $3,000 a month for Ramp Plus at 200 seats, and on Navan pays nothing for travel and $15 a user for expensing beyond the first five. The units are not convertible, which is why the first question in any comparison is who is counted.

What the free tier is buying

None of these tiers is unmonetised. Ramp's free tier includes the corporate card, unlimited virtual cards, card issuing controls, expense management, bill pay, receivables and a 2% yield on cash held in its FDIC-insured checking account. The card is described as a corporate liability charge card, which means Ramp extends the credit and earns its return from the card programme, and the software is the distribution. Navan's free travel tier is explicit about its economics: the pricing page says the platform is powered by travel providers' commission fees, so the booking flow is the revenue line and the expense module is the upsell at $15 a user. Concur has no free tier in its published plans, so its revenue is the report fee and the services around it.

For an IT director the distinction matters at renewal. A vendor paid by interchange or commission has an interest in card volume and bookings; a vendor paid per report has an interest in report volume. Both are aligned with the finance team only up to a point.

The grid, read as three contracts

Read the grid as three contracts rather than three feature lists. The published unit, the free tier and the contract minimum decide the first-year number; the implementation line decides whether the project lands inside the year.

The controls an IT director has to check

The finance team picks the tool; IT signs for the controls. The audit trail is the first test: Ramp lists the audit log, custom user roles and multi-entity visibility restrictions as Plus features, so a company on the free tier does not get the record an internal audit will ask for. Policy enforcement before the money leaves is the second: Ramp's Plus tier locks cards automatically when a receipt or item is missing, and Navan's free tier includes unlimited policy and approval workflows, the control most mid-market companies actually need.

The third test is what the vendor will sign. Navan publishes SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS Level 1 certifications, and its security page describes AES encryption at rest and TLS in transit. Concur's published plans put travel and intelligence in the Premium tier, which is also the tier that is quoted rather than listed. An IT director asked to approve a card programme should read the audit log and the certification list before the feature comparison.

Where the real cost sits

The subscription is the smallest line in a Concur deal. Vendr's Concur dataset puts implementation at 20% to 50% of first-year subscription cost, with mid-market deployments of 500 to 2,000 users running $75,000 to $250,000 and integration work alone at $10,000 to $100,000 or more. It reports that total first-year cost typically exceeds the subscription quote by 30% to 60%, and that annual escalators of 3% to 5% with a 60 to 90 day notice window are standard. Ramp's cost sits in the platform fee and the float: Plus is billed per user, additions are prorated, annual plans are paid upfront and removing a seat produces no refund or credit. Navan's cost sits in the enterprise quote and the booking flow, where the commission model pays for the free travel tier.

Card float is the line no price list shows. A corporate liability charge card means the vendor carries the credit and the company's cash stays in its account until the statement is due, which is worth more to a business with tight working capital than a percentage point of cash back, and worth less to one that already funds travel centrally.

The decision rule

Choose Concur when the SAP ERP integration is the point and the report-based price is genuinely cheaper than seats: at 400 reports a month the Base tier is $33,600 a year. Choose Ramp when the company will move its card spend onto the platform, because the free tier is funded by that spend and the $15 Plus seat buys the audit log and the accounting integrations. Choose Navan when travel is a real line item and the company is under 300 employees, because travel is free and expense costs nothing for the first five users.

Above 300 employees all three are quotes, and the comparison moves to implementation, notice and the uplift cap. Ask for the all-in first-year number, the per-unit price at the volume actually filed, and the notice window in writing. The published rates are the start of the negotiation, not the end of it.