The short version
Both are European card platforms solving spend control, but they model money differently. Pleo attaches a smart card to each user and charges per user as you grow; Soldo pools money in prepaid wallets you allocate to cards, with users and wallets capped by plan tier. Pick Pleo for per-employee spend culture and tighter real-time sync; pick Soldo for wallet-level budget segregation, like projects, departments, or campaigns, and predictable prepaid exposure.
| Feature | Pleo | Soldo |
|---|---|---|
| Money model | Company cards issued per user; spend draws on the company's Pleo balance with per-user and per-team limits. source | Prepaid wallets: load funds, allocate to company or user wallets, spend from cards tied to those wallets. source |
| Pricing | Starter from £9.50/month capped at 3 users; Essential £39/month billed annually plus £11 per extra user; Advanced £99 plus £15 per user (as of July 2026). source | Standard £21/month +VAT with 3 users and 3 cards; Plus £33/month +VAT with multi-currency wallets; Unlimited priced on request (as of July 2026). source |
| Xero sync | Direct feed plus batch export; imports chart of accounts and VAT rates; exported bill status syncs one way because Pleo is the source of truth. source | Transactions are automatically sent to Xero daily; users enrich them with receipts, categories, and tax codes before export. source |
| Receipt capture | App prompts the cardholder for a receipt at purchase; missing receipts and codes are flagged before export. source | Mobile app captures receipts and notes at the point of purchase; admins choose whether attachments are required or optional. source |
| Beyond card spend | Invoices (accounts payable), reimbursements, and mileage arrive as modules on Essential and above. source | Focused on card and wallet spend, with outbound bank transfers capped per plan tier. source |
| Growth pricing shape | Per-user fees compound with headcount: £11 to £18 per additional user per month depending on tier. source | Plan tiers gate users, cards, wallets, and transfer counts; growth means stepping tiers rather than adding seats. source |
Where ExpenseFlow fits (our stake, disclosed)
ExpenseFlow is not a card platform and will not replace either tool's plastic. Our overlap is what happens to the paperwork: we capture every client bill and receipt regardless of which card paid, extract every line, apply GST or VAT treatment through a deterministic rules engine, and sync approved captures to Xero as drafts, under one firm account priced per client. Bookkeepers often run us alongside a card product; the linked pages give the sourced detail.
Same promise, different plumbing
On a feature checklist, Pleo and Soldo blur together: company cards, an app that nags for receipts, spend controls, an accounting integration. The real distinction is underneath, in how each thinks about money before it is spent.
Pleo’s mental model is the person. Each employee gets a smart card, limits follow the person or their team, and the company’s balance sits behind all of it. Control is exercised through per-user limits and review, which suits companies whose spend is a function of people doing their jobs: the salesperson travels, the office manager restocks, the marketer boosts a post.
Soldo’s mental model is the pot. Money is loaded into prepaid wallets, wallets map to whatever you want them to mean (a department, a project, a vehicle, a campaign) and cards draw on a specific wallet. Control is exercised by deciding how much a pot holds; a card cannot overspend a wallet that was funded with £500. That makes Soldo naturally strong where budget segregation is the point, and it caps downside in a way per-user limits do not quite match.
The pricing shapes diverge as you grow
Entry pricing favours Pleo: Starter at £9.50 a month on annual billing against Soldo’s £21 plus VAT, both covering a three-person setup (as of July 2026). But the growth curves bend differently. Pleo grows per head: £39 a month for Essential plus £11 for every user past three, £15 on Advanced. Twenty users on Essential is a meaningfully bigger number than the headline. Soldo grows in steps: tiers gate users, cards, wallets, and even outbound bank transfers, so expansion is a plan upgrade rather than a per-seat drip, with the Unlimited tier priced on request.
Neither shape is wrong. Per-user pricing tracks value if spendings really are per-person; tier pricing is easier to budget but means paying for headroom you have not used yet.
What the bookkeeper inherits
Both platforms feed Xero, and the differences here are the ones a bookkeeper feels monthly. Soldo’s feed is daily: transactions arrive in Xero once a day, enriched with whatever receipts, categories, and tax codes users added, and admins can make attachments mandatory. Pleo pairs a direct feed with batch exports, imports the chart of accounts and VAT rates so coding happens against real ledger fields, and flags expenses missing receipts or codes before they export.
One Pleo behaviour deserves a highlight because it surprises Xero-centric firms: for exported bills, Pleo states plainly that it is the source of truth, with status syncing one way from Pleo into Xero. Firms whose review and workpapers live in Xero should decide up front which system owns state, or month-end becomes a two-console reconciliation.
Receipt discipline is comparable in intent: both apps prompt at purchase, which is genuinely the best moment to catch a receipt that will otherwise never be seen again.
Trial both against one messy month
Both vendors offer trials, and card platforms reveal themselves fastest under mess rather than demos: the fuel receipt photographed at night, the subscription renewal nobody remembers authorising, the wallet that ran dry mid-project. Load a realistic month into each, then audit what reached Xero unaided. Which transactions arrived coded, which receipts attached themselves, and how long did the stragglers take to chase? The platform that degrades more gracefully under real behaviour is the one your team will still be using properly in a year.
Picking one
Choose Pleo when spend is people-shaped, the team values a slick per-user experience, and you want missing-receipt flags plus an AP module in the same product. Watch the per-user line as headcount grows. Choose Soldo when budgets are pot-shaped, prepaid exposure limits matter, or wallets map cleanly to how the business already thinks about money. Watch the tier gates on users, cards, and transfers.
Either way, card platforms solve the spending side; the supplier bills and line-level coding that make up most of a client’s ledger still need a capture workflow, which is the part ExpenseFlow handles, stake disclosed above.