Cardboard is the perfect alternative to Pleo for SaaS spend management

Pleo focuses on employee spending with smart cards, reimbursements, and mileage tracking, making it suitable for in-store and on-the-go purchases.

Cardboard is built for SaaS-heavy companies with one card per subscription, automated receipt collection, usage tracking, and full visibility across vendors and renewals — delivering stronger control on software spend and reduced operational risk.

Compare Pleo vs. Cardboard

Pleo is good at employee spending. But it was built for general expense management — so it leaves critical questions around SaaS subscriptions, renewals, ownership, and license visibility unanswered.

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Blended cards and Shadow IT

Mix of employee and vendor cards leading to shadow IT through purchased software subscriptions.

Centralized SaaS control through one vendor card per subscription and full visibility in software spends. No employee cards.

Seats/licenses tracking

No seat or license overview of SaaS tools.

Full visibility into subscriptions, seats/licenses paid for, and renewals.

Software usage

No seat or license data. Cannot track usage or identify unused/underutilized licenses.

Shows the number of seats paid vs. actually used, enabling the detection of overspend and unused licenses.

Employee offboarding and ownership

Software subscriptions could be linked to employee cards, and hence, there is a risk of subscription disruption when the employees leave.

Cards are company-level and vendor-linked, ownership remains with the business regardless of staff changes.

Receipt automation

Limited automation, though pitched as smart receipts. Manual uploads for many subscriptions make bookkeeping tedious.

Automatically collect receipts from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. AI-driven receipt matching saves time in bookkeeping.

Customer support

Reported response times of upto 3 business days, creates risk during billing and card issues.

Response times are less than 1 business day, leading to prompt support for high-impact financial operations.

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Pains and risks faced by CFOs and finance teams

Black box of SaaS costs

Pleo focuses on general expenses, including SaaS vendors. However, the diluted focus on SaaS leads to limited visibility and control over a company's software subscriptions.
Cardboard is laser-focused on SaaS management and provides full visibility into a company's software spends, thereby reducing shadow IT and wasted spend on unnecessary software tools.

Email crawler

Pleo uses a mailbox crawler for receipts. CFOs and employees must give a third party ongoing access to personal or work email. This raises trust and security concerns.
Cardboard does NOT crawl your email inbox since it uses its own receipt collection emails for each subscription. It is built with privacy at its core and is a more secure solution.

Receipt collection and matching

Pleo has limited receipt automation, and receipts that are not received via email need to be uploaded and matched manually one at a time. This is a time-consuming and inefficient process.
Cardboard automates receipt collection for any SaaS tool out there, such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more! Plus offers AI-driven receipt matching to save time on bookkeeping.

No receipt exports

Pleo does not export receipts creating gaps in audit preparation & bookkeeping.
Cardboard exports all transactions and matched receipts into easy accounting exports and through accounting integrations.

Why Cardboard is better for SaaS spend management

Full subscription overview

Track all your SaaS subscriptions in one place, for example, Notion, Slack, AWS, Google, and more.
Choose from our existing catalog of 3,500+ services, or add your own.
Get full control of all SaaS spend in your company.

Real-time spend insights

Live spend tracking on subscriptions.
Usage tracking for seats paid for vs. actually used.
Breakdown by teams and tools.
Automatic alerts are sent if the budget is exceeded.

Virtual cards for software spends

Get unique virtual cards to help set and track budgets for each subscription.
Set access controls to manage who has access to which cards.
Suspend a subscription's card without affecting the other subscriptions.

Automate receipt collection and matching

Use Cardboard to automatically collect and match your receipts with payments.
Add your accounting settings once, and let Cardboard do the work for you every time you export to your accounting system.
We alert subscription owners in case of missing receipts, so you don't have to.