Concur vs Navan 2026: Which Travel and Expense Platform Fits Your Company?

The short answer

Concur and Navan both offer travel booking and employee-expense products. They are not the only providers with those functions: compare the selected configurations alongside relevant alternatives. Check actual booking inventory, entities, accounting exports and approval exceptions instead of assuming a fixed enterprise-versus-self-serve division.

Compare the billed unit, contracted scope and implementation milestones. Navan’s Business offer has a company-size condition; Concur publishes US per-report Expense starting prices and separately quotes Premium or other modules. The required accounting connector and workflow must be tested, while security certificates alone cannot demonstrate equivalent operational compliance.

Pricing: compare users, reports and separately quoted modules

Navan's own pricing page, checked 2026-08-22, lays out the structure clearly: Navan Travel is free with unlimited bookings for any company with 300 or fewer employees, funded by commissions from airlines, hotels, and car rental providers, with no subscription fee. Navan Expense is free for the first five active expensing users, then $15 per user per month. Companies over 300 employees have to request a custom Enterprise quote. That's worth flagging as a recent change: earlier writeups, including our own Navan review published in May 2026, describe Navan as fully quote-only with no published numbers. That description no longer holds for companies at or under the 300-employee threshold.

SAP Concur’s current US Expense page lists Base at $7 and Plus at $11 per report, with unlimited users and a monthly commitment. Premium and Invoice need their own proposals. Travel services and implementation must be quoted for the intended scope. The older $9–24 seat figures and $30,000 Invoice floor are not current universal official tariffs [Concur pricing, checked October 12, 2026].

For an illustrative company with fifty active expensing users in a month, Navan Expense costs $675 after its first five free users: 45 × $15. Fifty Concur reports at the advertised US starting rates would be $350 Base or $550 Plus before the monthly commitment and other quoted services are applied. Fifty employees need not submit fifty reports. An Invoice quote is a different scope and cannot establish which employee-expense configuration is cheaper.

Implementation timeline: weeks vs months, and why

Compare an actual rollout plan covering the required legal entities, countries, accounting interface, approval rules and migrated records. Starting Travel does not prove that Expense and cards are operational. This comparison has no common benchmark establishing that most Navan deployments finish in one or two weeks or that every Concur deployment takes three to six months.

Ask both implementation teams to identify the configuration tasks, data owners, testing and support covered by their proposals. A commission-funded travel product or enterprise contract alone does not prove a particular implementation duration. Test the actual accounting fields and reviewer routes instead of inferring project effort from the business model.

Compliance and security: closer to parity than the marketing implies

There's a common assumption, one that shows up implicitly in a lot of why-enterprises-stick-with-Concur content, that Concur's compliance depth is a moat Navan hasn't caught up to. That's outdated. Navan completed SOC 1 Type II, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS audits back in February 2023, and has maintained them since. Concur has held SOC 2 certification since 2017 with audits every six months, plus ISO 27001 and PCI Level 1 status as a registered CISP-compliant service provider, audited annually. On the certification checklist itself, both platforms hold the same set.

Test the actual Concur or Navan connection to SAP S/4HANA using the intended accounting fields and audit records. Confirm whether a connector, partner service or middleware is included in the selected configuration. Neither the ERP brand nor this comparison establishes a universal manual-reconciliation requirement or an automatic benefit for every SAP customer.

Booking experience and AI: Ava vs Concur's workflow

Navan's AI layer, branded Ava, handles real-time flight and hotel rebooking during disruptions, answers policy questions 24/7, and reads receipts via OCR and NLP to capture more than 130 data points per transaction automatically, including GL codes, cost centers, and attendee data pulled from calendar integrations. A separate audit agent flags expense-policy violations by risk level, and a review agent auto-approves low-risk items while escalating exceptions for human review.

The quantified user-experience gap shows up in G2's category subscores: Navan scores 9.5 out of 10 for booking ease versus Concur's 8.0 out of 10, checked 2026-08-22. That tracks with the qualitative pattern in Reddit discussions of switching, several users describe moving from Concur or Egencia specifically because the interface felt dramatically simpler, and one described rarely needing to contact customer service after the switch.

Not every switch story ends there, though. Some companies that trial Navan or other alternatives return to Concur, citing fragmented data across systems, weaker consolidated reporting, or pricing complexity that showed up only after they tried to scale the alternative across a larger org. The pattern favors Navan for straightforward travel-heavy mid-market companies, and favors Concur once an org's reporting requirements get significantly more complex.

Real user ratings, side by side

Navan holds a 4.7 out of 5 rating on G2 across 9,099 reviews, and 4.6 out of 5 on Capterra across 210 reviews, with Capterra's sub-scores breaking out to Ease of Use 4.6, Customer Service 4.4, Features 4.4, and Value for Money 4.2. Concur holds 4.0 out of 5 on G2 across 6,567 reviews, and 4.3 out of 5 on Capterra across 2,241 reviews, all checked 2026-08-22.

The cited August 2026 scores reflect different submissions and sample sizes on G2 and Capterra. Review counts alone do not establish that one site represents expense submitters and the other finance or IT implementers. Read the dated comments and collection methods; neither score is a customer-wide measure of implementation problems or routine usability.

Who should pick which

Evaluate Navan when the required booking, expense and accounting configuration passes the firm’s actual tests; a five-hundred-person cutoff or a fixed weeks-versus-months promise is not established here. It's a particularly strong fit when travel is a meaningful cost center, and our Navan review covers the pricing: Navan Business is free for companies up to 300 employees, with Expense free for the first five users and $15 per expensing user after that, so the real question is how many people you put on Expense.

Include Concur when the proposed entity, currency, accounting and approval setup fits the requirement and complete quote. See our full SAP Concur review for the complete pricing and complaint breakdown. Test both providers where relevant; a two-hundred-to-five-hundred employee range and absence of SAP do not independently establish a cheaper or faster implementation.

If corporate cards and spend controls matter as much as travel booking, our separate Ramp vs Concur comparison covers that angle, and if travel booking itself, not expense management, is the primary need, our roundup of corporate travel management software covers more options than just these two.

FAQ: Concur vs Navan

Does Navan actually cost less than Concur for a mid-size company? Calculate both offers from the expected submitter and report counts, including commitment levels and quoted services. On Business, Navan bills fifteen dollars monthly per active submitter beyond its five complimentary users; company eligibility also matters. Concur’s US starting report prices are seven dollars Base and eleven Plus. No unconditional cost winner or universal Invoice floor is established by those units.

How long does switching from Concur to Navan actually take? Agree dates for accounting exports, traveler setup, cards, reviewer setup and transferred data, then test the complete process. Existing customer references can reveal dependencies, but the project’s scope governs its schedule. Activating an account cannot establish a guaranteed one-to-two-week migration.

Is Navan compliant enough for an enterprise that currently requires Concur's certifications? On paper, largely yes. Navan passed audits for ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 1 Type II, and SOC 2 Type II in February 2023 and has kept them current. SOC 2 has been in place at Concur since 2017, audited twice a year, along with ISO 27001 and a PCI Level 1 rating. The certification sets match; a security attestation cannot prove operational data exchange. Identify the actual SAP or other connector, records exchanged, permissions and reconciliation process, and have each provider demonstrate the required configuration. [Navan press release, Feb 2023; SAP Trust Center]

Can Navan replace Concur at a firm that already uses SAP S/4HANA? Demonstrate the intended SAP fields and reconciliation workflow in the proposed Navan setup. Obtain documentation of any required connector or partner service and compare it with the current Concur configuration. An SAP deployment is not sufficient evidence that every proposed setup needs a manually reconciled export or middleware.

Which platform has better real user reviews, Navan or Concur? In the dated August snapshot, Navan scores 4.7 on G2 and 4.6 on Capterra, compared with Concur’s 4.0 and 4.3. The cited Capterra submission counts are 210 and 2,241 respectively. Those totals cannot identify reviewers’ jobs or prove either product’s ordinary-user or administrator satisfaction rate.

Who are Concur's main competitors? Navan, the subject of this comparison, is Concur's most direct challenger for companies not locked into SAP. Ramp and Brex also compete for the same travel-and-expense budget from the corporate-card side rather than the booking-platform side; our Ramp vs Concur and Concur vs Brex comparisons cover those specific matchups.

Who are Navan's main competitors? SAP Concur, covered throughout this comparison, is the incumbent Navan has to unseat for companies that want both booking and spend tracking under a single vendor. Brex and Ramp offer card, expense and travel configurations to evaluate alongside Navan. Assess the offered reservation service, countries, policy rules and support obligations in a representative trip; see our Concur vs Brex comparison for that angle.

What big companies use Navan? Navan's published case studies include Visa, Canva, Duolingo, HelloFresh, and SolarWinds, among others, and the company's stated sweet spot is 600 to 2,500 employees rather than the smallest startups [Navan case study resource center, checked 2026]. Named customer stories are individual vendor-selected examples, not evidence for a universal five-hundred-employee purchasing threshold.