The short version
Expensify crushes the 'employee submits a receipt, manager approves, corporate card reconciled' workflow. If you're a solo freelancer, you don't need approval chains — you need to know which project is profitable. Different tool, different job.
Honest
What Expensify is actually good at
Expensify wins on
- Corporate card reconciliation
- Multi-person expense approval workflows
- SmartScan OCR (industry-leading)
- Accounting software integrations (NetSuite, Oracle)
- Corporate travel policies
Hustlay wins on
- Designed for freelancers, not employees
- Per-project P&L instead of expense reports
- Split shared infrastructure costs across projects
- Tag transactions by domain, client, or anything else
- Invoicing built in (Expensify needs Bill.com alongside)
- Time tracking → profit per hour
- Flat transparent pricing (no per-user per-feature upsells)
- Free plan forever with real functionality
Side by side
Feature matrix
TL;DR
Our honest take
Expensify is enterprise-grade for a reason — companies love it. As a freelancer or side hustler, you're paying for features you'll never use (approval chains, corporate card reconciliation, audit trails) while the things you actually need (multi-project profit, shared-cost splitting, invoicing) are missing or require add-ons. Hustlay is shaped for you.