Innov8 Tools

Products / Quoting, Rating & Proposal Tools

ZY

Zywave

Public facts

Benefits CPQ and multi-line quoting platform

Insurance-distribution software whose Benefits CPQ rates medical, dental, and vision plans across all 50 states and builds branded proposals.

Visit zywave.com

Overview

Zywave is a Milwaukee-based insurance technology company that sells quoting, proposal, data, content, and AI products to brokers, carriers, and MGAs. For employee-benefits shops the named quoting product is Benefits CPQ (also marketed as CPQ: Employee Benefits), which the vendor says sources rates directly from 1,000+ carriers and 100,000+ plans in all 50 states. A Group Benefits Quoting API exposes the same dataset to other platforms. Zywave also sells commercial and personal-lines raters (including TurboRater) and, in 2026, markets Zywave Apex as an AI layer that connects to existing AMS and AI assistants.

Why it matters It is one of the few benefits CPQ products that publicly claims carrier-direct rates in all 50 states at 1,000-carrier scale, which is why many multi-state brokerages treat it as a default rater.

Target buyer
Employee-benefits brokers and agencies that need multi-carrier small-group rating and proposals; also commercial brokers, carriers, and MGAs using Zywave’s broader quoting and AI suite.
Pricing model
Not published; modular / sales-assisted subscription
Zywave does not list Benefits CPQ or Apex prices on the public site. Third-party directories quote module bundles; those figures were not verified on zywave.com and are not used here.
Availability
National
Research
Last researched 2026-08-23
Agent-strong category

Key features

  • Benefits CPQ with directly sourced medical, dental, and vision rates
  • Side-by-side plan comparison, including dual, triple, and unlimited medical assignments
  • Branded PowerPoint and Excel proposals plus stored enrollment booklets
  • Renewal modeling in the same quoting workspace
  • Group Benefits Quoting API for embedding rates in other systems
  • Census self-report for level-funded plans (2026 Benefits CPQ update)

Integrations

  • Agency management systems (vendor says Apex connects to existing AMS platforms; named AMS roster not fully listed on public CPQ pages)
  • Employee Navigator (named in Zywave broker/comparative-rater materials)
  • Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini via Zywave Apex MCP
  • 1,000+ carrier connections (vendor figure)

Overview

Zywave is headquartered at 10100 W. Innovation Drive, Suite 300, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Public pages describe about 30 years of insurance-data and content work, 15,000+ customers and partners, 4 million+ employer records, 85 million+ household profiles, 1,000+ carrier connections, and 15,000+ expert-reviewed content assets (all vendor-reported).

The homepage in 2026 leads with Zywave Apex, an AI platform that the company says sits on top of those datasets and existing AMS tools rather than replacing them. Apex MCP is described as a Model Context Protocol connection so Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and other MCP clients can query Zywave insurance data. Producer Agent (live) and Advisor Agent (early access) automate prospecting and 90-day renewal queues.

For this category the primary product is Benefits CPQ. Zywave positions it as a centralized configure-price-quote and proposal system for employee-benefits brokers, with rates “sourced directly” and available in all 50 states. A companion Group Benefits Quoting API is sold to platforms that already hold census or enrollment data and want to rate without a new UI.

Key Capabilities

  • Multi-carrier small-group quoting for medical, dental, and vision with vendor claims of 98% directly sourced data and over 99% quoting accuracy.
  • Plan modeling that supports dual, triple, and unlimited medical assignments and side-by-side comparison.
  • Proposal generation in branded PowerPoint or dynamic Excel, plus automatically created enrollment booklets stored on the client profile.
  • Renewal quoting in the same system so brokers do not rebuild from scratch.
  • Level-funded census collection: the Summer 2026 release says Benefits CPQ can invite employees to self-report census and individual medical-questionnaire data.
  • API access to the same 100,000+ plan / 1,000+ carrier library, with a claimed data-operations team of 170+ people updating carrier files.
  • Adjacent Zywave quoting products (TurboRater, commercial CPQ, cyber quoting, MGA Hub) exist for other lines; they are not required to use Benefits CPQ.

Integrations & Ecosystem

Public CPQ pages emphasize carrier-direct rate feeds and a quoting API rather than a named HCM or payroll directory. Zywave broker and comparative-rater materials mention connectivity to agency management systems and to Employee Navigator. Apex is marketed as connecting to the AMS and AI tools a firm already uses, with MCP as the AI interface.

A complete current list of AMS, benefits-admin, and carrier API partners was not published as a single directory on the pages reviewed.

Pricing

Software pricing is not on zywave.com. Products are modular (Benefits CPQ, quoting APIs, Apex agents, content/data clouds). Buyers contact sales. Implementation time for Apex Producer Agent is marketed as 30 days; MCP “in days.” Those are deployment claims, not fees.

Notes & Limitations

  • Base subscription, PEPM, and implementation fees are not public.
  • Accuracy, “directly sourced,” and scale statistics are vendor-reported and not independently audited here.
  • Zywave also sells CRM-like sales, marketing, and agency tools; this entry covers quoting/proposal as the primary category, not a CRM listing.
  • “National” availability is based on the vendor’s all-50-states Benefits CPQ claim, not a state-exclusion matrix.
  • Third-party sites list annual package prices; they were not confirmed on Zywave’s site.

Sources

Tags: benefits CPQ · small-group quoting · proposal · carrier rates · broker software · Zywave Apex