Xactimate vs Symbility: An Adjuster Who Uses Both Tells You What's What

I Use Both. Here's the Truth.

I'm an independent adjuster based out of Charlotte. I work with eight carriers. Six of them run Xactimate through XactAnalysis. The other two, one regional and one Canadian carrier I picked up last year, require Symbility.

So every week, I'm bouncing between both platforms. And I have thoughts.

The short version? Xactimate is the 800-pound gorilla and it's not going anywhere. Symbility is genuinely easier to learn and use, but that doesn't matter much when 85% of the industry runs on Xactimate. Let me break down the details.

The Market Reality

Look, I'm not going to sugarcoat the numbers. Xactimate owns this industry.

Verisk (they make Xactimate) has something like 80-85% of the US market locked down. State Farm uses it. Allstate uses it. USAA, Liberty Mutual, Farmers, Nationwide, Travelers, the list goes on forever. If you're a staff adjuster, IA, or contractor doing insurance work in the US, you need Xactimate. Period. It's not optional.

Symbility (owned by CoreLogic since 2019) sits at maybe 10-15% in the US. But in Canada, it's a completely different story. Intact Financial, The Co-operators, TD Insurance... Symbility runs at 40-50% up north. If you're adjusting in Ontario or Alberta, you absolutely need it.

And then there are the outliers. Hippo Insurance in the US uses Symbility. A few regional mutuals do too. Every time one of those claims lands on my desk, I groan a little. Not because Symbility is bad, but because now I'm context-switching between two completely different systems.

Alright, Let's Compare These Things

The Money Thing

Xactimate costs me $315/month. That's for one user, one license, with the current price list subscription. I've been paying Verisk this amount every single month for nine years. Do the math on that if you want to feel sick.

Symbility? I don't pay a dime. Both carriers that require it provide access to their adjusters and contractor networks. The carrier eats the licensing cost. That's CoreLogic's whole strategy: get carriers to pay, then lock their network into the platform.

But here's the catch nobody mentions. When I write an exterior storm estimate in Symbility and compare it to the same scope in Xactimate, Symbility's numbers consistently come in 15-20% higher. Same line items. Same quantities. Different pricing database. This causes real headaches when a homeowner gets one estimate from a Symbility carrier and another from an Xactimate carrier. The numbers don't match and everybody's confused.

Which Carriers Use What?

I get asked this all the time, so here's my running list based on actual claims I've handled.

The Xactimate list is basically everyone: State Farm, Allstate, USAA, Liberty Mutual, Farmers, Nationwide, Travelers, Erie, American Family, The Hartford. Basically every major US carrier and most regionals.

On the Symbility side: The Co-operators, Intact Financial, TD Insurance (all Canadian). In the US it's mostly Hippo, plus a handful of smaller regionals that I won't name because they keep switching back and forth.

The Conversion Nightmare

Here's where it gets really fun. Last month I had a claim where the contractor submitted his estimate in Xactimate, but the carrier required Symbility. Guess what I got to do?

Re-type the entire thing. Every. Single. Line.

There's no export button. No "Save As Symbility." No conversion tool built into either platform. Verisk and CoreLogic are competitors, so they have zero interest in making your life easier by talking to each other.

The manual conversion process is brutal. You print the Xactimate estimate to PDF (or open it on one screen), open Symbility on the other screen, and start hunting for equivalent line items. They don't use the same codes, so it's not a simple find-and-replace. Then you re-enter quantities, adjust for Symbility's different pricing structure, redraw the sketch from scratch, and wonder why you chose this career.

On a medium-sized loss, this takes me 2-3 hours. On a big one? Half a day.

There are a couple of tools starting to address this. ECM-AI does Xactimate-to-Symbility conversion with some kind of AI matching. ProjectEstimatePro handles the PDF-to-Xactimate side. But cross-platform conversion is still the wild west.

So Which One Should You Learn?

Depends on where you work and who you work for. But if I had to advise a new adjuster walking into this industry today, I'd tell them this.

Add Symbility when you need it. If you pick up a carrier that requires it, you'll learn the basics in a day or two. It's not hard. The concepts are the same: rooms, line items, scopes. The interface is honestly better. You just won't use it as often.

If you're in Canada, learn both from day one. The market is genuinely split up there.

My Prediction

Xactimate isn't losing ground anytime soon. Verisk keeps adding features, the network effect is massive, and switching costs are brutal. But I do think the conversion problem will get solved in the next couple of years. Someone's going to build a tool that makes moving between these platforms painless, and when that happens, the whole "which one should I use" question gets a lot less stressful.

Until then, I'll be over here with two monitors and a lot of coffee.