Qonto vs bunq Business: Expense Management vs AutoVAT and Deposit Insurance

Qonto offers six plans: Essential (EUR 9/month), Business (EUR 29/month), Premium (EUR 45/month), and team-scale plans up to EUR 199/month. Plan tiers are structured around team size, card quantities, and advanced workflow features. All plans include SEPA transfers and FGDR deposit protection.

bunq Business plans range from approximately EUR 9.99/month to EUR 23.99/month (with annual billing reducing the cost). All bunq plans include the full Dutch banking licence, deposit insurance, AutoVAT, and Company Cards. The number of Company Cards and features scale with the plan tier.

Qonto's Essential and bunq's entry-tier plans are comparably priced for a solo operator. As team size grows, Qonto's plans scale more explicitly with headcount and card volumes. bunq's plans are more uniform in structure. Neither platform has a permanently free business tier. For a team of 5–10 people needing comprehensive expense management, Qonto's mid-tier plans provide more structured value.

Qonto's expense management is one of the strongest in European neobanking. Team cards include per-card spending limits, real-time notifications, receipt capture with automatic transaction matching, expense categories, and approval workflows on Premium and above. Managers can set card limits, approve or reject expenses, and pull reports directly from the dashboard. The reimbursement workflow handles out-of-pocket expenses without requiring a separate tool.

bunq offers Company Cards — physical and virtual debit cards issued to each team member with individual spending limits. This provides basic team expense management. However, bunq does not match Qonto's depth on receipt matching, approval workflows, or expense category management.

For companies with a finance team or CFO who needs a complete audit trail of team spending with receipt documentation and approval processes, Qonto is the clearer choice. For smaller teams that need controlled cards without a complex expense workflow, bunq's Company Cards are sufficient.

bunq's AutoVAT is a distinctive feature: it automatically calculates the VAT component of each incoming payment and sets it aside in a dedicated sub-account. This means a VAT-registered business always has the right amount reserved for its quarterly VAT payment, regardless of how much the business owner has spent. It is a genuinely useful cash flow management tool that no other major European neobank offers.

Qonto addresses accounting from the other direction: connecting to your accounting software and making bookkeeping as automated as possible. Qonto integrates natively with DATEV, Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and FEC (French accounting standard). Receipts matched to transactions sync automatically. This reduces the time spent on month-end reconciliation.

Both are valuable — they solve adjacent problems. AutoVAT helps you not underpay tax; Qonto's integrations help you close your books faster. VAT-registered businesses who struggle with tax cash flow management gain more from bunq. Businesses with a bookkeeper or accountant who uses accounting software gain more from Qonto's integrations.

bunq imposes annual SEPA transfer caps: 100–500 free outgoing SEPA transfers per year depending on plan, with EUR 0.13 per transfer beyond the cap. For a business making 30 SEPA transfers per month (360 per year), the higher bunq plan may not include enough free transfers, resulting in additional per-transfer costs.

Qonto includes unlimited SEPA transfers on all plans. SWIFT transfers are charged per transaction but are available across all plans. This makes Qonto more predictable for businesses with high domestic transfer volumes.

For international transfers beyond SEPA, bunq uses Wise as its partner network. Qonto supports SWIFT directly. For businesses with regular international supplier or contractor payments, Qonto's direct SWIFT access and unlimited SEPA create a more predictable cost structure than bunq's caps and partner routing.

Both Qonto and bunq offer strong, statutory deposit protection — a key differentiator from EMI-licensed neobanks like Vivid or Finom. The mechanisms differ. Qonto is an ACPR-licensed payment institution and member of the FGDR (Fonds de Garantie des Dépôts et de Résolution), the French deposit guarantee fund, providing EUR 100,000 protection per depositor.

bunq holds a full banking licence from the DNB (De Nederlandsche Bank). Deposits are covered by the Dutch deposit guarantee scheme, also EUR 100,000 per depositor. The Dutch DGS is one of Europe's most respected and well-capitalised.

In practical terms, both provide equivalent statutory protection for business deposits. The geographic anchor differs: Qonto is French-licensed, bunq is Dutch-licensed. For most businesses, the EUR 100,000 guarantee is the relevant figure, and both platforms meet it. Businesses with concerns about country-specific regulatory exposure may prefer one over the other, but both are solidly within EU regulatory frameworks.