For the modern tech CFO, the spend management landscape has shifted. Five years ago, the battle was simply about killing the expense report—getting rid of the shoebox full of crumpled receipts and empowering employees with corporate cards. In that war, Pleo was a formidable general. Their bottom-up, employee-first approach revolutionized how teams paid for travel, client dinners, and office supplies.
But in 2025, the P&L of a technology company looks radically different. Software is no longer just a line item; for most tech companies, it is the second-largest expense after payroll, often accounting for 40-50% of total non-payroll spend. Furthermore, the rise of Generative AI has introduced a new, volatile variable into the budget that traditional cards struggle to contain.
This shift has exposed a critical fracture in the "Generalist" spend management model. A platform built to delight employees buying coffee is structurally ill-equipped to govern the complex, high-stakes lifecycle of SaaS infrastructure and AI consumption.
If you are a Finance Leader at a company with 50-500 employees, you likely face a choice: stick with a generalist tool like Pleo that offers "subscription tracking" as a side feature, or move to a purpose-built platform like Cledara that now handles general expenses, too.
This guide provides a consultative, forensic comparison between the two. We analyzed market data, user reviews, and feedback from finance teams to help you decide.
The Core Philosophy: "Empowerment" vs. "Control"
The fundamental difference between Pleo and Cledara isn't just a feature set; it’s a philosophical divergence on how money should leave your business.
Pleo is built on "Delegated Authority" (Post-Spend Control). Pleo’s DNA is "trust." They market the idea of giving every employee a card and dealing with the reconciliation later. While they offer limits, the core user flow is designed to reduce friction at the point of sale. This is fantastic for velocity—a sales rep buying lunch doesn't need a purchase order. But when applied to software, this philosophy becomes dangerous. It leads to "reactive" management: you only know a subscription exists after the charge hits the card.
Cledara is built on "Intent-Based" Spending (Pre-Spend Control). Cledara operates on a "Request-to-Pay" model specially designed for software. Budget is allocated before the card is issued. You don't just track the payment; you approve the contract, the owner, and the renewal date before a single cent leaves the account. For a tech company, where a single forgotten AWS instance or Salesforce seat overage can cost thousands, this preventative control is vital.
The "Asymmetric Risk" of Commingling Spend
One of the most compelling arguments for separating—or carefully segmenting—your SaaS spend from your general employee expense cards is what we call Asymmetric Risk.
Imagine a scenario: A junior employee uses their Pleo card for a team social. The transaction flags a fraud algorithm due to location or merchant category—a common occurrence in fintech. The card, or sometimes the wider account, is frozen.
If this were just a coffee card, it would be an inconvenience. But in many startups using generalist tools, that same card is often tied to mission-critical infrastructure: Slack, HubSpot, or cloud hosting. When the account freezes, your software stack risks going offline.
The Cledara Strategy: Cledara isolates your infrastructure spend. Your AWS bill should never be vulnerable to a flagged transaction at a bar. By managing SaaS on dedicated virtual rails, you ensure business continuity.
The New Frontier: Managing the Volatility of AI Spend
Perhaps the most significant differentiator for 2025 is how each platform handles Artificial Intelligence. AI is not just another software category; it is a new asset class with unique financial behaviors.
1. Consumption-Based Pricing vs. Flat Fees Traditional software was billed per seat. AI tools (OpenAI API, GitHub Copilot, Midjourney) often bill based on consumption—tokens generated, compute hours used, or images rendered.
- The Pleo Problem: Generalist cards rely on monthly "soft limits." If an engineer runs a script that consumes $5,000 worth of API tokens overnight, a standard corporate card might not catch it until the invoice clears.
- The Cledara Solution: Cledara allows you to set Hard Budget Caps on specific virtual cards. You can allocate exactly $500 to the "OpenAI Project X" card. Once that limit is hit, the API stops. This acts as a circuit breaker for runaway AI costs, protecting your runway from accidental consumption spikes.
2. The "Shadow AI" Risk Cledara’s research into "Shadow IT" reveals that Sales and Marketing teams are often the biggest adopters of unapproved AI tools. The risk here is not just financial; it is data security. If employees put proprietary code or customer data into a personal ChatGPT account paid for on a Pleo card, that data may leave your control.
- Governance: Cledara acts as a funnel. When an employee requests "ChatGPT Plus," Cledara can flag that the organization already has an Enterprise License. It redirects the user to the sanctioned, secure corporate account rather than allowing them to spin up a new personal instance on a general expense card.
Deep Dive: SaaS Management vs. "Subscription Tracking"
Pleo has recently introduced features to "track subscriptions," but for a scaling tech company, the gap between tracking and management is the difference between a spreadsheet and an operating system.
1. Discovery: Reactive vs. Proactive
Pleo’s subscription detection is transaction-based. It identifies a subscription only after a recurring payment pattern is established. By the time Pleo tells you that you have a duplicate Zoom account, you have already paid for it—twice.
Cledara is intent-based. Because users must request a new tool to get a virtual card, you capture the subscription at the source. You prevent the duplicate purchase before it happens, saving capital rather than just reporting on the waste.
2. The Renewal Trap
Pleo offers basic renewal reminders based on the last transaction date. This is a "dumb" alert; it doesn't know your contract terms. Knowing you paid on the 1st of the month is useless if your enterprise contract requires a 60-day cancellation notice.
Cledara ingests the contract metadata. We track the legal renewal date and the required notice period. We alert you not just when payment is due, but when you need to act to cancel or renegotiate.
3. Usage & Login Activity
Pleo can tell you that you paid $50 for a seat. It cannot tell you if that seat is being used. Cledara integrates with your team's browsers and your company Identity Provider (Google Workspace, Okta) to overlay usage data against spend data. We show you who has a license but hasn't logged in for 90 days, allowing for immediate rightsizing.
Operational Reality: Reporting & Support
For a CFO, "delightful" software is useless if it creates "messy" data.
Reporting Frustrations Users have bluntly stated in feedback that Pleo is "absolutely rubbish for reporting," with some finance teams resorting to taking screenshots of dashboards because the exports didn't meet their needs. Cledara provides granular, real-time reporting sliced by team, project, and specifically by SaaS category, giving you the data you need for board packs instantly.
The "Chatbot Loop" As Pleo has scaled to 40,000+ customers, support quality has reportedly suffered. Users describe a Kafkaesque experience of trying to reach a human: "You want to leave? Not so easy... no option to actually talk to a human, the chatbot chats to you for a while..." When a critical vendor payment fails, you cannot afford to wait 4 days for a response. Cledara prides itself on specialized support teams that understand software procurement, not just card declines.
The Best of Both Worlds: Introducing Cledara Spend
Historically, the argument for keeping Pleo was simple: "Cledara is great for software, but we still need physical cards for travel and team lunches." Companies ended up paying for two platforms.
That argument is now obsolete.
With Cledara Spend, we have closed the loop. Cledara now offers physical cards and a mobile app for general employee expenses, integrated into the same platform you use for SaaS.
- Consolidation: You no longer need a separate "T&E" tool. You can manage your AWS bill and your team’s travel expenses in one dashboard.
- Context-Aware Controls: Cledara is smart enough to know the difference. Use our virtual cards for software with strict approval workflows (Finance + IT + Security sign-off), and our physical cards for travel with employee-friendly mobile capture.
- Cost Efficiency: Cledara Spend is included in our plans. You can stop paying duplicate subscription fees to Pleo just for the privilege of buying coffee.
