Cledara: The Best Navan Alternative for SaaS Spend Management

If you're using Navan for your company's expense management, you've probably appreciated its travel booking features. Flights, hotels, car rentals, and self-serve employee booking are genuinely good. But here's the gap that keeps growing: Navan is a travel platform that added expense management on top. For tech companies, that's like optimizing 10-15% of your spend while ignoring the other 40-60%.

That larger bucket is SaaS subscriptions. And it's where Navan falls completely short.

Companies aren't replacing Navan with Cledara. They're adding Cledara alongside Navan. Navan handles what it does best: travel. Cledara handles what Navan can't: software spend management, renewal tracking, duplicate detection, and vendor optimization. This post explains why the two actually complement each other, and why tech finance teams are increasingly running both.

Quick Comparison: Navan vs Cledara

The Core Issue: Travel Tool vs SaaS Platform

Navan's DNA is travel. The platform was built to solve a specific problem: employees booking flights and hotels, companies managing those bookings, and expenses flowing downstream. Everything about the platform reflects that origin story. Self-serve booking, airline partnerships, corporate card programs tied to travel, approval workflows tuned for trip costs.

Then Navan layered on general expense management. And that's where the complications start.

Users consistently describe Navan as complicated for non-travel expenses. The same users contrast that with Cledara being more user-friendly and simpler. When you ask why, the answer is consistent: Navan works great for what it was built for (travel), but for everything else it's a workaround.

SaaS subscriptions don't fit neatly into the travel-expense-reimbursement model. You're not booking a seat on a plane. You're not submitting a per-trip receipt. You're managing recurring software contracts, monitoring vendor lock-in, tracking when licenses renew, and optimizing vendor relationships. Navan wasn't designed for this workflow, so it adapts poorly to it.

The UX Divide: Simple vs Complicated

There's a reason the research kept coming back to a single word: complicated. Navan's approval process, VAT handling, reimbursement workflows, and overall interface are oriented toward travel booking. When you're using it for general expenses, you're fighting the design.

Cledara is the opposite. It's built ground-up for the expenses that tech companies actually have. Submit a receipt, tag it as SaaS or travel or equipment, it flows through. No separate tax codes to decode. No convoluted approval chains designed for travel trip size and structure.

This isn't a marginal preference. It's the difference between a tool that was retrofitted for your use case and a tool that was built for it.

The Tax and VAT Nightmare

Here's a concrete pain point that separates the two: VAT and tax handling.

Companies across the EU, UK, and other jurisdictions need to separate VAT from non-VAT line items on expenses. Navan is notoriously poor at this according to direct user feedback. The platform wasn't designed with tax architecture in mind, so users resort to manual spreadsheets and accounting team workarounds to separate lines correctly. When you're processing hundreds of expenses, this becomes a compliance and auditing nightmare.

Cledara was built with tax handling as a native feature, not an afterthought. Jurisdictional rules are baked in. VAT separation happens automatically. Accountants don't need to fix data after the fact.

This is a small-sounding difference. Until you're a Finance ops person manually fixing Navan exports because the tax codes don't map correctly to your GL. Then it's everything.

The Real Math: SaaS is Your Bigger Spend Bucket

Here's the strategic reason tech companies are adding Cledara alongside Navan rather than replacing Navan entirely.

For a typical tech company:

• Travel spend: 10-15% of non-payroll budget
• SaaS spend: 40-60% of non-payroll budget
• Other (hardware, office, etc): 25-50%

Navan is laser-focused on optimizing the smallest bucket. It does that bucket brilliantly. But it ignores the largest one entirely.

If Navan perfectly optimizes your travel spend, you might save 10-15% on flights and hotels. That's real money. But meanwhile, your SaaS budget is growing unchecked. Duplicate subscriptions pile up. Unused licenses go unnoticed. Enterprise vendors lock you in without negotiation. You're missing the bigger opportunity.

Cledara manages that larger bucket. AI-driven spend tracking surfaces subscriptions you've forgotten about. Renewal alerts come 90 days before contract end so you can renegotiate. Duplicate detection catches overlapping tools your teams spun up independently. License monitoring shows you when you're paying for seats nobody uses.

This is why the companies adopting Cledara aren't ditching Navan. They're running both. Navan for the travel that represents 10-15% of spend. Cledara for the software that represents 40-60%. Together, they cover your actual spend categories.

Where Navan and Cledara Coexist

The question isn't "Should I replace Navan with Cledara?" The question is "Where do these two tools fit in my spend management?"

What Navan Does Best (Keep It)

If your employees book travel through Navan, it's working. Direct airline and hotel booking, self-serve employee access, corporate card tied to trips, travel approval workflows, per-trip cost controls. These are the features Navan was built for, and they're genuinely strong. Most companies aren't going to rip out a working travel booking system.

What Cledara Handles (Add It)

For everything outside of travel, Cledara is the missing piece. SaaS subscription management, card controls tied to spend categories, AI-driven expense intelligence, intuitive receipt submission, proper tax handling, accounting integrations. These are the workflows Navan treats as secondary features bolted onto a travel core. Cledara treats them as primary.

The integration is smooth. Cledara can sit alongside Navan in your tech stack. Employees use Navan for travel (as before), use Cledara for software subscriptions and general expenses. Finance teams get better tax separation, accounting teams get cleaner GL mapping, and procurement teams finally have visibility into the 40-60% of spend that was previously invisible.

What G2 Reviewers Say About Navan

Navan dominates the travel management category on G2 with 9,028 reviews and a 4.7 out of 5 rating. It's the number one ranked platform in Travel and Expense Software for every quarterly G2 report in 2025 and into 2026. For travel booking, those numbers are deserved. Cledara holds a 4.6 out of 5 on G2 with 248 reviews.

But here's what's telling: the G2 complaints center almost entirely on the expense management side. Reviewers describe the expenses section as tedious, noting you can't submit multiple expenses at once and that uploading receipts one at a time is painfully slow. Booking workflow confusion, unclear steps during hotel changes, and limited options for non-travel expenses are recurring themes.

This mirrors exactly what Modjo research showed: Navan excels at travel but frustrates users on everything else. G2 reviewers validate the positioning gap perfectly. Navan's 4.7 score is earned for travel booking, but if you need software spend management, subscription tracking, or intuitive expense handling beyond travel, those aren't capabilities Navan's reviewers praise, because they don't exist in the platform.

Keep Navan If... / Add Cledara If...

Keep Navan if:

• Your travel booking workflow is working well and employees are actively using self-serve booking
• Your travel program is strategically important and you want dedicated optimization for that bucket
• You've negotiated favorable corporate card rates or airline partnerships through Navan

Add Cledara if:

• You're frustrated with Navan's expense management outside of travel
• Your finance team is manually fixing VAT and tax codes from Navan exports
• You have no visibility into SaaS spending, renewals, or vendor contracts
• You want AI-driven spend intelligence instead of just expense categorization
• You need better tax handling across multiple jurisdictions
• Your accounting team is asking for better GL mapping and audit trails
• You're paying for licenses or subscriptions you've forgotten about

The Verdict

Navan is a travel platform that added expense management. Cledara is a SaaS platform that handles spend management. They're not competitors in the way that "vs" comparison posts suggest. They're complementary.

For travel, Navan is strong. For SaaS and general expenses, Navan falls short and users describe the experience as complicated with tax-handling issues. Cledara was built for the category that actually represents the majority of tech company spend.

If you're looking at Navan and thinking "this doesn't quite work for our SaaS spend," you're not wrong. Navan was never designed to optimize software subscriptions. It optimizes travel. Adding Cledara alongside Navan means you're finally managing the spend category that matters most, with a platform built to handle it.