FlyQuote vs Xactimate: Insurance Estimating and Retail Quoting Are Different Jobs

This is a comparison of two tools that solve different problems, written by the people who make one of them. Statements about Xactimate are general and current as of October 2026; confirm specifics on Verisk's Xactimate pages.

What Xactimate is

Xactimate is Verisk's estimating platform for property insurance claims. It carries a regularly updated, regionally priced database of line items, a sketching tool for room and roof dimensions, and the output format adjusters expect. When a homeowner files a claim and the insurer's adjuster writes an estimate, that estimate is very often an Xactimate estimate, and a restoration contractor who wants to be paid by the carrier generally has to speak the same language: same line items, same pricing basis, same format for supplements.

It is a professional tool with a subscription price to match and a real learning curve. Contractors who do insurance work treat it as a cost of doing that work.

What FlyQuote is

FlyQuote is quoting and estimating software for retail work: a homeowner or a property manager is paying you, and the price has to come from your own costs, your own markup, and your own minimums rather than from a carrier's database. The job arrives as photos, video, a call recording, or a walkthrough; a question flow you build turns it into line items; a deterministic pricing engine prices them from your cost codes; and the customer gets a branded proposal they e-sign.

The difference in one sentence

Xactimate answers "what will the insurer pay for this scope." FlyQuote answers "what should I charge this customer for this job, given what it costs me." Those are different numbers derived from different sources, and a contractor who does both kinds of work needs both answers.

Side by side

Xactimate for contractors: when you need it

If a meaningful share of your revenue comes through insurance claims, water, fire, storm, mold, you need to produce estimates the adjuster can reconcile line by line, and that means Xactimate or a tool that exports to it. Trying to get a carrier to pay from a retail-style quote is slow and usually ends with you rewriting it anyway.

When you do not

If the homeowner is paying you directly, Xactimate's pricing is the wrong basis. Its numbers describe what carriers reimburse in a region, not what your crew, your overhead, and your margin require. Plenty of contractors who bought it for the odd claim job find it is heavy for retail quoting, and their retail quotes drift toward database pricing that has nothing to do with their books.

Restoration contractors often run both

A roofing or restoration company with a storm division and a retail division is the common case: Xactimate for the claim scope and supplements, FlyQuote for the retail replacement quotes, upgrade work the carrier will not cover, and every job that comes through the website rather than through an adjuster. FlyQuote also keeps the photos from the inspection on the lead record, which helps the supplement conversation later even though the supplement itself is written elsewhere.

Our guide on how to estimate a roofing job covers the retail side of storm work in more detail, and roofing estimating software shows how FlyQuote handles it.