Volopay vs Expensify - A comparison

You might find an Expensify Privacy Policy on their website, but the actions of the company show that they care very little about what it actually means.

Countless articles have shown, including ones where the CEO of Expensify has blatantly admitted to the fact that they outsource certain receipt matching processes to humans who are not bound by any contract from Expensify.

This leaves sensitive information about customers on their receipts extremely susceptible to fraud and theft. 

The whole point of customer support is to hear the customer and their issues.

But Expensify support to their customers is limited to a one-dimensional chat. There’s no customer support executive who can be called, informed about an issue, and coordinated to solve queries in real-time.

This has led to many frustrated customers who pay thousands of dollars each month but do not get valuable support from the Expensify team in return to resolve serious problems.

Expensify pricing and their plans are quite confusing and misleading. Potential users should beware of the fine print on their pricing page.

While you save 50% if you choose an annual plan, it holds true only if you spend 50% of your monthly expense using the cards. If it is less than that, then you have to pay $18 per month instead of $9.

This situation becomes even worse if you’re choosing the monthly plan where you don’t get the initial 50% off. This means that the base price you will be paying per month is $18 per user and $36 per user if your card expenses don’t amount to at least 50% of the total expenses you had in a month. 

Once you make an account on Expensify, there is no way to cancel the subscription. The only way to go about it is to completely delete your account and start all over again. 

As a business, you’re providing people with a product or service, and you’re charging them for it. Cool. But all of a sudden, due to system and pricing changes, you’re charging them more than the Expensify plan they chose without informing them? That is not cool. Such an instance has actually been reported by customers of Expensify.

The worst part is that no adjustments were being made to allow the customer to recover extra charges and they had no choice but to cancel their debit card from repeatedly getting charged more than the plan they chose. Billing your customers in an unethical manner like this shows a lack of care for their customers.

The year 2020 has taught everyone how remote work can not only sustain but also aid in the growth of businesses by saving many costs. But for businesses that have many expenses that need to be made by employees, it becomes tough to coordinate, manage, and share the same corporate card.

In such a situation the absence of virtual cards from Expensify definitely raised some eyebrows from their customers as to why this offering is not available? 

On the other hand, if you choose to select a provider like Volopay that is a free Expensify alternative, you can issue unlimited virtual cards from wherever you are and assign them to your employees, set their spending limits, create approval workflows, and much more.

Plus, even if an organization has already issued individual physical cards from Expensify to all their employees, they are always at risk of fraud. Controlling and mitigating monetary theft is much tougher for physical cards than virtual ones since the card number of a virtual card is not directly linked to a bank account.

When the time comes to finalize credit card expense reports, many customers have experienced facing issues with their transactions being duplicated. An error like this once or twice can be rectified and forgiven. But apparently, such a mishap is a recurring issue for many users.

The product just fails to accurately match receipts with the relevant expenses made using the Expensify cards. So the customer ends up having to deal with extra time trying to verify whether all expenses are legitimate and is at great risk of being charged extra.

An expense management solution is supposed to reduce your expenses. Not increase them!

When you’re choosing an expense receipt scanning app, you want to make sure that it is smoothly synced with the credit card transactions being made. This helps in the automated creation of expense reports saving your accountants time spent matching receipts with expense reports. 

Volopay takes this a step further by offering you corporate credit cards integrated with our expense management solution. This negates the need for your employees to even spend time creating and submitting expense reports as all the transactions made through the card are directly synced with the expense software.



Dealing in a business where your customers are paying you well over thousands of dollars every month and not having a customer support team who can solve issues in real-time by talking to the clients is a shame.

An Expensify alternative if you’re tired of dealing with the lazy chat support system is Volopay. Our customer success team handholds every client right from the beginning.

Be it onboarding sessions or any issues you may face. The customer success team will be there to inform you about how each part of our system works, ways you can optimize your finances, and ultimately help you get the most out of your money. 

The expense management app or system that you choose should be such that it allows for easy integration with your accounting systems.

While Expensify has this feature, Volopay helps clients with custom integrations with accounting software like Netsuite. Our pre-existing integrations also include common accounting tools like Xero, Quickbooks, and Deskera among others. Another useful integration Volopay provides is to sync HRM systems to carry out employee salaries.

This keeps employee payments in sync with your expense management software and allows you to avoid using a different platform for salary accounts. 

While Expensify gives your employees the ability to use the credit from the platform to carry out transactions, it doesn't allow separate allotment of finances to each department.

With Volopay, you can assign specific budgets to each team. So whatever your credit limit is on our platform, you can divide it according to your internal company plans and allow only a certain amount to be used by each team. This method of budgeting gives you control and visibility over how each team and team member is spending money. This in turn allows you to see whether financial forecasting and planning done was accurate or needs to be tweaked in real-time to meet the actual requirements.

Sending payments overseas can be a bother due to foreign exchange charges and remittance fees. Oftentimes you end up paying a lot more because of the currency conversion rate. Neither do you nor does the platform benefit from this as all the charges are kept by banks and the responsible networks.

As a solution, Volopay has come up with a multi-currency feature where you can transact using the local currency of the place the payment needs to go to. This enables us to levy no currency exchange charges saving you a lot of money. Our platform supports over 65+ currencies in 100+ countries with all the major currencies included. 

There is a line between giving your employees the freedom to spend using company credit and at the same time maintaining control over how budgets are spent. This line in between is called the ‘auto-approval feature.’

Volopay allows you to enforce your company finance policy within our platform by setting custom rules and guidelines. For example, you can set a rule where any spend below $100 is auto-approved when a transaction request is made.

This ensures that your employees get the flexibility and freedom to carry out tasks without any hindrances and at the same time you get to maintain visibility and control for expenses higher than the amount you set under your rules.



When dealing with finances, it is very important to make sure that the third-party software or system you are using has strict privacy policies and guidelines they follow to ensure that your data is safe from fraud or theft. The risk will always be there, but the actions the third-party company takes to safeguard sensitive information should be an indicator of how much you can trust them.

Speaking of actions, Expensify has been under the limelight many times for the wrong reasons. They have openly admitted to outsourcing work that involves exposing sensitive client data to other humans not under any contract with Expensify, putting their customers at risk.

Whichever alternative to Expensify that you choose, make sure that their words match their actions.

While it’s a good feature to have that you can add receipts directly to your credit card expenses, it solves only half of the problem for an accountant as they still have to manually check whether the receipt matches the amount on the card statements or not.

With Volopay, you get automatic credit card expense matching because of a feature called OCR (optical character recognition) that scans and reads information from the receipts and matches it with card statements to verify whether the transaction is legitimate. 

Usually when employees file for reimbursements they have to wait weeks and months to get their money back.

Using Volopay, employee expense reimbursement happens immediately. As soon as the approver approves the claim through their admin dashboard on Volopay, the amount is transferred to your employee's bank directly through the credit that the company uses on Volopay.

Such an instant reimbursement process will keep your employees happy and they can always make purchase decisions on behalf of the organization with complete trust.

What makes Volopay an excellent Expensify free alternative is the ability to create unlimited virtual cards.

What makes them so special is that you can use them to manage all your subscriptions in an organized manner and keep track of every service that you’re paying for each month. Virtual cards can be created and a limit can be set on them to stop the risk of overspending or any subscription charging you more than how much you planned for.

You get the option to create one-time use cards that expire within 7 days or monthly cards that refresh on the 1st of every month. You can use such cards for recurring subscriptions to services like Hubspot, AWS, etc.

When enforcing your company expense policies within Volopay, you get a lot of customization to control your budgets. You can not only set approval workflows but rather multi-level approval workflows where more than one person has to approve a transaction of a certain amount. 

For example, if John wants to spend more than $100 on an expense, the transaction must first be approved by the team lead. If John wants to make a purchase that is above $500 then the transaction must be approved by the team lead first and then the team manager. 

In this way, you can set up multiple rules and regulations to always ensure that everyone is on the same page about the purchase decisions.



A spend management software should give you the capability to divide your entire budget, allocate it to teams, and be able to track and control every dollar.

If you can’t do that using an expense management software, what exactly are you even managing?

Volopay gives you the control to assign specific amounts of your budget to each department. You can go even granular by setting limits on how much each team member can spend. This level of control truly lets you make sure that budgets are being utilized to their full potential.

Instead of having your employees spend hours creating expense reports at the end of each month, using a system like Volopay will allow your employees to directly attach expense receipts to the relevant expenses.

This not only saves time for all your employees but also your finance department by negating the entire process of collecting and sorting receipts along with their expense reports.

The finance team can directly access all expenses on one platform rather than manually collating multiple reports into one system. Due to this the verification process also becomes simpler as it is easier to match and reconcile all expenses.

Whether it is reimbursing your employees, carrying out online transactions, sending money to another business, Volopay becomes your central platform for all payments.

Physical cards can be used by employees to carry out in-person transactions such as client visits, buying stationery for the office, etc. and virtual cards can be used for safer online transactions for subscriptions, advertising spends, etc.

Employees can request reimbursements through our mobile app and get reimbursed instantly. Our bill pay feature allows businesses to transfer money directly to bank accounts, both domestic and international.

Volopay’s platform allows businesses to transfer money in more than 65+ currencies across 100+ countries with all the major currencies. 

As a user, you can choose to maintain currency-wise credit balances on the platform and use them accordingly for relevant transactions. 



Sending money abroad can often cost a lot due to the foreign exchange charges.

But since you can transfer money in the local currency of your receiver, you save the surcharges that are generally applied by banks and networks allowing you to pay only what you need to pay and save on remittance fees. 

Curious about other alternatives to Expensify? Explore our detailed blog on 10 top expensify alternatives for more options!