Qonto vs N26 Business: Team Expense Platform vs Solo Freelancer Banking

The most important thing to understand about this comparison is the intended customer profile. Qonto is designed for registered businesses — sole traders, partnerships, SAS, SARL, GmbH, and other legal entities across its 8 supported countries. Plans are built around team size, with multiple user seats, team cards, and approval workflows at the core of every offering.

N26 Business is explicitly limited to freelancers and self-employed individuals. It does not support registered companies, employees, or team accounts. There is one user, one account. This is by design — N26 Business is essentially a personal bank account with business-friendly features, not a multi-user business banking platform.

If you have any team members who need their own cards, or if you operate through a registered company, N26 Business is not available to you. Qonto covers both solo operators and teams. This single difference eliminates the choice for many businesses.

Qonto plans start at EUR 9/month (Essential) for a solo operator and scale to EUR 199/month for large teams. The Essential plan includes 1 user seat, 1 Mastercard One physical card, unlimited SEPA transfers, basic accounting integrations, and FGDR deposit protection up to EUR 100,000.

N26 Business has a genuinely free tier: N26 Business (EUR 0/month) with a full German IBAN, unlimited free SEPA including Instant SEPA, one Mastercard, and 0% FX on card spending. Paid tiers (Smart at EUR 4.90/month, You at EUR 9.90/month, Metal at EUR 16.90/month) add insurance, perks, and premium support.

Both Qonto (ACPR + FGDR) and N26 (BaFin + ECB + German DGS) offer deposit protection up to EUR 100,000. This is a genuine point of parity — both are significantly safer than EMI accounts for holding balances. The difference is that Qonto's FGDR membership comes with a business platform; N26's DGS protection comes with a solo account.

Qonto's expense management is one of its flagship strengths. Every plan includes tiered card options: Mastercard One for standard users, Mastercard Plus for managers, and Mastercard X Metal for executives or high spenders. Cards include real-time notifications, per-card spending limits, receipt capture with automatic matching, expense categories, and approval workflows on higher plans. Reimbursement workflows for out-of-pocket expenses are also included.

N26 Business offers exactly one card per account — a single Mastercard debit card for the account holder. There are no team cards, no spending controls for multiple users, no receipt management, and no approval workflows. The card itself is excellent for solo use: 0% FX markup on all international card spending (at the Mastercard interbank rate), no foreign transaction fees, and ATM withdrawals in any currency.

For a team of any size, Qonto is the only viable option. For a solo freelancer who wants the best card for travelling or spending in foreign currencies, N26's 0% FX Mastercard is genuinely competitive.

Qonto supports SWIFT outgoing transfers on all plans, charged per transaction. This allows Qonto users to send payments to non-SEPA bank accounts internationally — to suppliers, contractors, or clients outside the EU. SWIFT access is a basic feature for any business with international operations.

N26 Business does not support outgoing SWIFT transfers on any plan. N26 is SEPA-only for outgoing payments. SEPA covers 36 countries — virtually all of Europe — but excludes the UK (post-Brexit for GBP transfers), the US, Asia, and other non-SEPA regions. Incoming international wires can arrive in an N26 account, but N26 cannot send money outside SEPA.

For any freelancer with clients or suppliers outside Europe (or in the UK requiring GBP SWIFT), N26's SEPA-only limitation is a meaningful constraint. Qonto handles both SEPA and SWIFT. For freelancers who work exclusively with European clients in euros, N26's unlimited free SEPA is entirely sufficient.

Qonto integrates natively with DATEV, Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and several other accounting platforms. Expense data, receipts, and transaction categorisation flow automatically into these tools. Qonto's receipt matching — where card purchases are automatically linked to uploaded receipts — reduces the manual data entry required for month-end bookkeeping.

N26 Business offers CSV export for transaction data but no direct integration with accounting software. There is no DATEV connector, no Xero sync, and no QuickBooks connection. For freelancers using accounting software, transactions need to be exported and imported manually or managed through a bank aggregation layer.

For businesses that use accounting software regularly, Qonto's native integrations save meaningful time. For solo freelancers who manage their own books with spreadsheets or who use a separate bookkeeping tool, N26's CSV export is adequate.