Navan

A single system for booking business travel and submitting expenses, where the AI checks each expense against your policy automatically instead of a human reviewing every receipt.

Money & invoicing Agents

Checked 25 Sep 2026

Open navan.com

What you'd use it for

Booking a flight or hotel and having the expense report for it already reconciled against policy by the time you land.

Book flights, hotels, car rentals and trains through Navan's own travel inventory with company policy applied automatically
Snap a photo of a paper receipt, or forward one by email, and have Navan read the merchant, amount, date and tax off it
Have a submitted expense checked against policy automatically and routed for approval, with only the exceptions flagged for a human
Issue Navan corporate cards or connect an existing Visa, Mastercard or Amex so card spend reconciles without a separate expense report
Reimburse an employee's out-of-pocket purchase in a few days instead of the two to three weeks a manual process typically takes

The verdict

Navan earns its keep by connecting the trip and the expense report so nobody re-enters either, and the receipt-reading genuinely removes a chunk of month-end admin. Both travel booking and expense management for up to five users are free — Navan makes its money on travel-booking commissions, not a subscription, so trying it costs nothing but the setup. It suits a company that books real travel volume and wants one system for both halves; a company with no travel budget is paying in complexity for a travel platform it will never open. Past the free thresholds, pricing for anything beyond self-serve expense moves to a custom Enterprise quote, so growth here means a sales conversation, not a plan upgrade.

What it costs

Tier	Price	For	Includes
Free	$0	Any company up to 300 employees. This is Navan Business, and it is the whole travel product.	Travel booking at no cost -- flights, hotels, car rentals and trains, global inventory, unlimited policy and approval workflows, 24/7 travel support, reporting and HRIS integrations -- plus expense management free for the first 5 monthly active users.
Expense (self-serve)	$15/user/month	Companies that have outgrown the 5-user free tier for expenses.	Continued expense submission, approval and policy checks once you're past the free cap.
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Companies past 300 employees, or wanting negotiated rates and a named account team.	Everything in the free Navan Business plan, plus unlimited users and travellers, negotiated corporate rates, a designated account executive and customer success manager, custom implementation and back-office support.

Read from Navan's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.

What you need to start

A work email to register — no credit card is needed to create the account itself
A company payment card added by an admin before card spend or travel bookings can flow through automatically
300 or fewer employees to use the free self-serve Navan Business tier; larger companies are routed to a custom Enterprise quote

Creating an account takes a few minutes with just a work email; getting the AI checks doing anything useful still needs an admin to add a company card and configure expense policy first.

Your first run Signing up takes a business email and no card; the first real result is submitting a receipt — snap a photo in the app or forward it by email, and Navan's OCR reads the merchant, amount and date and checks it against policy within minutes, though an admin needs to add a company card and set that policy first.

Where it breaks

The only list price Navan publishes is expense management beyond the free five users, at $15/user/month. Travel booking itself is not quote-gated -- it is in the free plan for companies up to 300 employees -- but the Enterprise tier, which is what you move to past that headcount or for negotiated corporate rates, carries no public number at all. The free travel product is also not free of cost to Navan: it is funded by booking commissions, which is worth knowing when judging whose interest the recommended fare serves.

Web app and mobile app for travel booking, receipt capture and approvals.

First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.

When not to use it

Not for a company with no real travel budget — the appeal here is travel and expense together, and a business only after receipt-scanning and approvals is better served by a plain expense tool. Also not a fit once you're past 300 employees or need negotiated corporate travel rates, since Navan stops publishing a number at that point and pricing becomes a custom Enterprise quote.

Navan bundles two things that usually live in separate tools: booking a flight or hotel, and submitting the expense report that follows it. The pitch is that when both live in one system, the expense report writes itself — the receipt, the itinerary and the policy check are already connected before you’ve landed.

The AI does the unglamorous part: reading a receipt, matching it to policy, and flagging the exception rather than routing every expense through a human approver. For a company that has ever chased down a stack of receipts at month-end, that alone is the case for switching.

Where the free tier actually stops

Navan gives you expense management for up to five monthly active users at no cost — genuinely useful for a very small team. Past that, expense-only usage is $15 per user per month, a real self-serve number. The travel-booking side of the platform, which is the larger part of what Navan actually sells to bigger companies, is negotiated rather than listed: corporate travel rates depend on your company’s volume and route patterns, so there is no public number to anchor against.

Choosing between this and the alternatives

Against a plain expense tool like Bonsai, the difference is scope — Navan is a travel-and-expense platform first, and expense-only pricing is really the entry point into a much bigger commitment. If your company doesn’t book meaningful business travel, you’re likely paying for capability you won’t use.

Alternatives

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Bonsai

Contracts, proposals, invoices and basic tax tracking for freelancers in one place, with AI drafting the first version of each document from a short brief.

Checked 25 Sep 2026

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Brex

Corporate cards and expense management that checks spend against your policy automatically and matches receipts to transactions without anyone filing them.

Checked 25 Sep 2026