Top 6 Spendesk alternatives for UK and global businesses

The days of shoeboxes full of receipts are, thankfully, long past. In 2025, businesses manage their entire expenses process from one screen – from card issuing and claims to approval workflows and payouts.

Spendesk is a common option, but it’s far from the only one. There are dozens upon dozens of spend management tools that can help your business streamline administrative processes and stay on top of expenses.

To save you from vendor overwhelm, we’ve done some groundwork ahead of your search for a Spendesk alternative. We look at the pros and cons of Spendesk, compare seven options from across the market, and give some hints for making your search more productive.

What is Spendesk?

Spendesk sells itself as a “complete procurement and spend management platform”. It offers features including corporate card issuing and management (including virtual cards), accounts payable automation, procure-to-pay, budgeting, and expense management.

Finance teams use Spendesk to simplify, streamline, and automate their work. Common use cases for the platform include managing travel, subscriptions, office expenses, and digital advertising spend.

Why look for a Spendesk alternative in 2025?

Spend management is a crowded field. Spendesk is one of dozens of options you can choose from, so you can afford to be selective.

Spendesk’s pricing might not suit you

Spendesk uses modular pricing – meaning you can select different features to include in your plan, for a bespoke price.

This can reduce inefficient spending, but it can still end up costing more than platforms with user-based pricing. Your unique situation will determine which model works best, but one will always win out against the other.

Limited functionality

While Spendesk offers lots of useful features, they tend to be process-led rather than function-led. Card issuing is the only core financial feature they offer, relying on third parties and integrations for important services like business accounts, FX, and payment acceptance.

No provision for multi-currency businesses

If your company operates worldwide, employee expenses will come in all kinds of currencies.

With Spendesk, “all expense claims reimbursements are made in your Spendesk wallet currency.” In other words, you’ll have to stomach FX costs and fees with every reimbursement.

A spend management tool that lets you handle multiple currencies and local payment rails will start saving you money from the very first expense claim.

Customer service issues

Its overall score of 3.9 is relatively good, but there is a notable selection of negative reviews (16% in total).

One-star reviewers on Trustpilot often mention slow or unresponsive customer service, with many struggling to escalate cases when they really need it.

Shopping around is sensible

Finally, even if you’re happy with Spendesk, there are plenty of reasons to explore the rest of the market. Innovation is rife in spend management, so you should never settle for ‘good’ when ‘great’ is very likely available.

What to look for in a spend management platform

If you’re putting together a panel of options for your spend management tool, we recommend prioritising a few features.

Of course, the specifics will be down to you and what your business needs, but use these features as the baseline for judging the viability of different platforms.

• Multi-currency accounts and local payment rails – helping you payout efficiently and affordably

• Corporate cards (physical + virtual) – to empower teams and employees to spend wherever they are

• Expense management workflows (e.g. approvals, limits, categories) – to keep spend compliant and controlled

• Budget tracking and real-time reporting – so you know where you stand at any moment

• Integrations with accounting platforms (e.g. Xero or NetSuite) – to automate away the manual reconciliation

• Mobile access – on-the-go expense submissions make claims far easier

• Transparent pricing – so you know what to budget for

Take a deeper dive into the benefits and necessity of spend management.

Top six Spendesk alternatives in 2025

You might want a vanilla spend management platform, you might want a financial platform that does every financial service under the sun. We’ve listed a variety of options below which, we hope, will suit both ends of the spectrum and everything in between.

Airwallex

The global payments and financial platform for growing businesses. Our fully fledged spend product is just one piece of the Airwallex suite, as we also offer multicurrency business accounts, online payments, as well as API access to our infrastructure.

Ideal use case: Businesses with international customers, suppliers, or staff (or all three!) and a need to centralise spend, payouts, and accounts. 

Pleo

Pleo is a business spending solution, with a strong focus on prepaid cards for employee spend. As well as its card issuing proposition, the company also provides spend management tools.

Ideal use case: If you’re a small business and many of your staff have regular, upfront expenses.

Ramp

Ramp provides a full-service spend management solution, offering the ‘basics’ of spend management to more advanced features like travel booking and procurement processing.

Ideal use case: If you want to streamline your financial software.

Soldo

Soldo is another employee spend-focused system, offering spend management features but placing decentralised spend as its main priority.

Ideal use case: Lots of employees with lots of expenditure.

Payhawk

Payhawk is a spend management platform that gives users plenty of control. Comparatively, the most expensive option on this list. Its focus on spend management means it’s limited in other ancillary financial features so other vendors would be needed to make up the financial tech stack.

Ideal use case: Large businesses who need (and can afford) enterprise service that focuses on spend management only.

Revolut Business

Revolut has a reputation for regularly releasing new products, so it’s no surprise to see expense management as an addition to their business accounts.

Ideal use case: Existing Revolut users, as it’s included free with all paid business plans.

For an alternative look at spend management tools, check our list of the top 6 spend management software providers for UK businesses in 2025.

Comparison table: Spendesk vs. top competitors

There are plenty of differences between Spendesk and these alternatives (and between the providers themselves). To help you get an idea of where each one excels, we’ve put the basics of each provider in an easy-to-scan table.

We’ve previously written a more detailed comparison of Airwallex vs. Spendesk, if you want to dig deeper.

How to choose the best Spendesk alternative for your business

As with any software decision, the right choice is going to be subjective, based on your company structure, regions of operation and trade, and general approach to expenses.

You’ll need to consider the features and functions of a spend management tool, but also ask some fundamental questions of your own business to narrow down your search.

Start by working out:

• Whether you need multi-currency support (either for employees or vendors)

• How many transactions you make in other countries and currencies

• How many cards you need and in what format (e.g. physical vs. virtual, team vs. employee)

• How many entities you currently and expect to operate

• Which platforms you need it to integrate with (e.g. your accounting or HR software)

• What the next one, five, and ten years look like for your business and how you’ll need your software to scale

Why businesses in 2025 are choosing Airwallex over Spendesk

If you’ve got any kind of international edge to your business, take this as your sign to explore Airwallex.

We’ve built our entire product range to serve growing businesses on the international stage – including our spend management platform.

Along with all the essential features (e.g. on-the-go submissions, card controls and approval flows, virtual and physical card issuing, and integrations), you also get:

• AI recognition on receipt capture

• Connected multi-currency Global Account

• Mobile app for simpler processes

• Multi-currency, multi-country batch transfers

• Transparent, low-cost FX to protect your bottom line

See what Airwallex Spend can do for your business.

The right tool makes spend management simple

As any business grows, expenses scale with it. How you manage those expenses is up to you, but you’re going to need some help.

Spend management software – like Spendesk and its many alternatives – stop you from drowning in receipts and busywork. They provide a reassuring ringfence around an important, but ultimately administrative, part of growing your company.

Spendesk is a solid choice for many businesses, but you can be picky in this area. There are enough options that you shouldn’t settle for second-best. It’s worth taking the time to assess what your business needs against what multiple vendors can provide. The right choice is out there – and we hope it’s Airwallex.

Disclaimer, references, and sources: We wrote this article in Q3 2025. The information was based on our own online research and we were not able to manually test each tool or provider. The information is provided for educational purposes only and a reader should consider the specific requirements of their business when evaluating providers. This research is reviewed every six months. If you would like to request an update, feel free to contact us at [email protected].