Airwallex vs. Brex

At a glance

Best for

Best for companies that invoice, pay suppliers and run teams across several currencies and want spend management on the same account.

Small and mid-sized
Enterprise

Brex

Best for

Best for US-incorporated companies that want corporate cards, expenses and bill pay in one platform and are willing to move their banking across.

Small and mid-sized
Enterprise

Cataleo does not name a winner. Both statements come from the vendors themselves.

Full Comparison

Criterion	Airwallex	Brex
Starting price	Free; Grow $12 / user / month US pricing. Explore has no monthly fee and includes up to 10 Spend users. Grow is 12 dollars per active Spend user per month plus a platform fee based on team size, up to 250 Spend users. Accelerate is priced on request. Monthly fees are charged per legal entity; FX, transfers and payment processing are charged per transaction.	Free; Premium $12 / user / month Essentials carries no software fee. Premium is 12 dollars per user per month. Enterprise and Smart Card are priced on request.
Users	Not stated	More than 35,000 companies, per the vendor
API	Yes, APIs for accounts, payments, transactional FX, payouts, card issuing and billing, plus the AgentOS MCP server for acting on a production account	Yes, REST APIs for accounting, budgets, expenses, payments, team, transactions and travel, with webhooks, plus an official MCP server at api.brex.com/mcp
Hosting	Cloud (SaaS)	Cloud (SaaS)
Made in	Australia (founded in Melbourne)	United States
Invoicing and quotes	Yes, one-off and recurring invoices with automated reminders, credit notes and automatic reconciliation, plus subscription and usage-based billing; incoming bills are captured, approved and paid through Bill Pay	Incoming vendor invoices only: AI invoice capture, two-way matching against purchase orders, approval routing and payment by ACH, wire, check or virtual card
Bookkeeping and bank feeds	No general ledger of its own; bank feeds, expenses and bills sync to Xero and QuickBooks, and from Grow to NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central	No general ledger of its own; transactions, categories and receipts sync to NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero and Sage Intacct
Expenses and receipts	Yes, multi-currency corporate cards with spend controls, receipt data extraction, employee reimbursements in more than 200 countries and a mobile app to submit and approve expenses	Yes, corporate cards with policy enforced at the swipe, AI and OCR receipt capture, auto-generated receipts for common merchants, and reimbursements in more than 40 countries
Tax and compliance	Tax rates are imported from the connected accounting software together with the chart of accounts and applied when expenses are coded	VAT tracking is switched on by Brex Support and then captures the tax portion of a transaction apart from the tax-inclusive total and exports it to the ERP, supported for the NetSuite, Oracle Fusion and Custom Accounting integrations, with Canadian GST, PST, HST and QST handled the same way. On the vendor side, W-9 forms are collected and stored, vendors are flagged 1099 eligible and that data is exported at year end for filing elsewhere. Brex does not issue 1099-Ks
Payroll	No payroll calculation. Airwallex pays out salaries worked out elsewhere: domestic and cross-border payouts to employees and tax authorities through the Payouts API, or embedded in HR, payroll and Employer of Record platforms	No pay runs of its own. More than 40 HRIS and payroll systems connect, among them Gusto, Rippling, ADP Workforce Now, Paychex, Paylocity, Justworks, TriNet, Deel, Personio and Workday, and the connection provisions people and automates card issue and spend limits rather than paying them. Funding the run is covered by reverse wires, which let a provider such as ADP, Gusto or Sequoia One pull from the Brex business account as a wire instead of an ACH debit
Reports and exports	CSV export for expenses and bills and advanced multi-currency reporting; tracking budgets against actuals is marked as coming soon	Yes, real-time spend reporting with custom filters and live budgets, plus AI-assisted GL coding, duplicate detection and memo generation
Integrations and API	Yes, platform APIs with SDKs and e-commerce plugins, accounting sync with Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite and Business Central, HRIS integrations, and an official MCP server	Yes, REST APIs for accounting, budgets, expenses, fields, onboarding, payments, team, transactions and travel, with webhooks and an official MCP server
AI features	Yes	Yes
MCP-ready	Yes	Yes
Deployment	Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based	Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based
Support	Email helpdesk	more entries Phone, Chat, 24/7, Community forum
Onboarding	more entries Documentation and knowledge base, Guided onboarding	Documentation and knowledge base
Company size	Small and mid-sized, Enterprise	Small and mid-sized, Enterprise
Integrations	more entries Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Sage, Odoo, Campfire, Rillet, BambooHR, Workday, Employment Hero, HubSpot, Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Amazon, Zapier	NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, Slack, Gusto, Rippling, ADP Workforce Now, Workday

Compare more tools

Row where the values differ The small markers point at the lower number, the longer list or the stated feature. They describe the data, they are not a verdict.

The short version

Key Differences

Starting price Airwallex Free; Grow $12 / user / month Brex Free; Premium $12 / user / month
Support Airwallex Email helpdesk Brex Phone, Chat, 24/7, Community forum
Made in Airwallex Australia (founded in Melbourne) Brex United States
API Airwallex Yes, APIs for accounts, payments, transactional FX, payouts, card issuing and billing, plus the AgentOS MCP server for acting on a production account Brex Yes, REST APIs for accounting, budgets, expenses, payments, team, transactions and travel, with webhooks, plus an official MCP server at api.brex.com/mcp
Invoicing and quotes Airwallex Yes, one-off and recurring invoices with automated reminders, credit notes and automatic reconciliation, plus subscription and usage-based billing; incoming bills are captured, approved and paid through Bill Pay Brex Incoming vendor invoices only: AI invoice capture, two-way matching against purchase orders, approval routing and payment by ACH, wire, check or virtual card

Every line is one datapoint from the table above, picked automatically. Nothing here is written text.

The trade-offs

Strengths and Limitations

Airwallex

Strengths

Explore has no monthly fee and covers up to 10 Spend users
Collect and hold funds in more than 20 currencies, with local transfers to more than 120 countries
Invoicing carries no platform fee
AgentOS MCP server lets AI agents act on the production account, with money-out actions off by default

Limitations

No general ledger, so an accounting system is still needed alongside
The platform fee on Grow depends on team size and is not published
FX conversion, SWIFT transfers and card acceptance carry per-transaction fees
Several listed features are marked as coming soon, among them budget tracking and single sign-on

Brex

Strengths

Essentials carries no software fee, so the entry plan is usable indefinitely rather than for a trial period
Cards accepted in more than 120 countries, payments in more than 30 local currencies and reimbursements in more than 40 countries
Official MCP server, so an AI assistant can act in the account under the user's own permissions
Business account with free same-day ACH, domestic wires and checks, and up to 6 million dollars of FDIC coverage through the vault

Limitations

No general ledger, so an accounting system is still needed alongside
Built around US incorporation, which narrows eligibility for companies without US operations
The economics rest on running card spend through Brex, so a company keeping its cards elsewhere gets less from it
Enterprise and Smart Card are priced on request, so the top of the range is not published

Plans

Pricing

Airwallex

Explore $0 Per month. Up to 10 Spend users, multi-currency accounts, unlimited corporate cards, expenses and reimbursements, bill pay, payment acceptance and invoicing. Sync with Xero and QuickBooks.
Grow $12 Per active Spend user per month, plus a platform fee based on team size; up to 250 Spend users. Adds multi-conditional approvals, the AI expense policy agent, bill automation and vendor approvals, and sync with NetSuite and Business Central.
Accelerate Not stated Priced on request. Adds purchase orders, AI three-way matching, a direct ERP Spend API integration, multiple legal entities, a dedicated account manager and onboarding support.

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Brex

Essentials $0 Per user per month. Global card acceptance, AI-powered spend rules, accounting integrations, real-time reporting and bill pay.
Premium $12 Per user per month. Adds multiple customisable expense policies, dynamic review chains, AI compliance detection, advanced approvals, multi-entity support and live budgets.
Enterprise Not stated Priced on request. Adds unlimited entities, local card issuance, a named account manager, an admin centre and customisable implementation services.
Smart Card Not stated Priced on request. Global cards, local-currency cards in more than 50 countries and merchant card controls.

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What users say

Review Scores · opens after launch

Airwallex

Ease of use: Not rated yet
User interface: Not rated yet
Onboarding: Not rated yet
Support and service: Not rated yet
Value for money: Not rated yet
Features: Not rated yet

No reviews yet. Nothing has been published here yet, and no score is shown. How a review is checked before it appears is described below.

Brex

Ease of use: Not rated yet
User interface: Not rated yet
Onboarding: Not rated yet
Support and service: Not rated yet
Value for money: Not rated yet
Features: Not rated yet

No reviews yet. Nothing has been published here yet, and no score is shown. How a review is checked before it appears is described below.

How we check reviews

Reviews are not published yet. The form on a tool's page works, and a review reaches us as soon as its author confirms it, but nothing from it appears on this site, so no score here is based on a review. The rules below are the ones that will apply once reviews go live.

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Read the full version on our methodology page

Where this comes from

Airwallex https://www.airwallex.com · no check date recorded yet

Brex https://www.brex.com · no check date recorded yet

This table lists factual criteria taken from information the vendors publish themselves. For how we put it together, see the methodology.