Questions About Insurance Agency Management Software and CRMs
Answers to the questions life and health insurance agencies should ask before choosing insurance agency management software
A NextAgency Resource
Last Updated: July 12, 2026
Synopsis:
Insurance agencies selling benefits, senior, and life policies are increasingly shopping for technology to help them become more effective and efficient. One of the most critical platforms they will choose are agency management systems, CRMs and commission tracking software. What is the difference between a CRM and an agency management system? Is the software affordable? Do they need software designed for life and health insurance agencies or will a generic version do? This article provides answers to agency owners’ most common questions.
Looking at Software for your Life and Health Insurance Agency?
Before asking for details about NextAgency, insurance agency owners often ask us foundational questions about software. This isn’t surprising. Life and health insurance agencies are being asked to do more for their clients while downward pressure on agency commissions increases each year. Agency owners recognize that their success depends on being as effective and efficient as possible. They hope technology can help.
The good news: it can. The bad news: only if it’s the right system for your agency. Otherwise, the software just gets in the way, making their insurance agency less productive. Or the technology goes unused as expensive shelfware. We thought it would be helpful to gather some of the more frequent questions to help identify what life and health agencies should consider before deciding on a CRM or agency management system.
People use these terms interchangeably, but CRMs and agency management systems are different. This is similar to how people use “agent” and “broker” as fungible synonyms when there are significant differences between the two. Here’s what’s different between CRM and agency management systems.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and that’s what these systems do — provide structure to how you stay in touch with prospects and clients. CRMs bring together in one place as much of your customer interaction as possible (emails, texts, phone calls) so you have it handy when you need it. They surface reminders, automatically send emails, and make it easy to find the history of your interactions with contacts. All of this is very useful, but it’s not enough for most insurance agencies today.
An agency management system (sometimes called an “AMS”) is a CRM plus a lot more. They include insurance-specific tools built for the things agencies do: track policies, manage commissions and sub-agents, complete compliance requirements, automate workflows, process renewals, cross-sell, and glean business-building information from all your data.
Think of an agency management system as a carpenter’s tool kit. A hammer (that would be the CRM module) is useful. But sometimes you need a screwdriver or a saw. Agency management systems are that complete toolkit.
But — to continue the analogy — not all toolboxes hold the same tools. The toolkit of a plumber is much different than that of a carpenter. Similarly, agency management software and CRMs built for property & casualty agencies are very different from those designed for life and health agencies. P&C AMS integrate with IVANS, DMVs, and ACORD. They support financing arrangements that are unique to P&C policies. There’s some overlap, and P&C agencies may try to shoehorn their benefit departments into using a P&C AMS. It’s rarely a happy experience.
Then there are agency management systems, like NextAgency, that are built specifically for agents selling benefits, senior, and life policies. This software has built-in fields and tags designed for these policies. They make it easy to automate workflows built around the responsibilities and tasks of life and health insurance agencies. For example, several, including NextAgency, include compliance tools that make it easy to obtain the authorizations and make the disclosures required to sell and service ACA and Medicare plans.
The unique nature of life and health insurance agencies is also why generic CRMs are usually not a great solution for these agencies. Salesforce, Zoho, HubSpot, and the rest can be made to work for agencies selling benefits, senior, and life policies. But wrestling them into useful shape can be expensive and time-consuming. Some agency management systems try to address this problem by scaffolding an insurance layer on top of generic platforms. This helps, but the result is often inflexible and can be more expensive than platforms built specifically for the market. On the other hand, it does provide access to the app ecosystem of the underlying generic software.
What’s the best agency management system for a health insurance agency?
The best agency management system for a health insurance agency is one built specifically for agencies selling benefits, senior, and life policies. Avoid trying to adapt a P&C AMS or a generic CRM to your unique needs as a life and health agency. When you want Chinese food, you wouldn’t go to Dennys. So why struggle to fit into agency management software designed for another purpose when there are great solutions built for you?
When shopping for an agency management system for a benefits agency, look for:
- records, reports, tasks, and workflows built specifically for life and health insurance agencies
- renewal management and automation
- commission tracking and sub-agent management tools
- ACA, Medicare, and group-specific consent and disclosure forms
- reports and dashboards relevant to health, senior, and life policies
- integrations with software you use like Employee Navigator and BerniePortal
- ease of use and ease of administration
- a free trial long enough to know it’s a good fit
- reviews and ratings from agencies like yours on sites like G2 and Capterra.
We also recommend looking for a company that respects you. For example, is their pricing clear? Do they require a long-term contract? If a company won’t give a price without a sales pitch and locks agencies into year-long commitments, it may tell you something about how they view their customers. NextAgency believes in transparency so our fees are clearly presented on this website.
Many health insurance agencies find their choice narrows down to two platforms built specifically for life and health agencies: AgencyBloc and NextAgency.
- AgencyBloc is older, larger, and is backed by a private equity firm. They have the most reviews of any competitor in this space —thus their claim to be the “#1 Recommended Agency Management System.”
- NextAgency launched its software in 2018 and is run by founders with extensive experience as agents and health insurance executives. They have better ratings, which led G2 to name NextAgency the “Best Life and Health Insurance Agency Management Software” in the country.
You can compare NextAgency and AgencyBloc to other platforms based on the features most important to you using the NextAgency AMS comparison tool.
Can we afford an insurance agency management system?
Costs for insurance agency management systems vary considerably. Most platforms base their fees on the number of agents and staff using the platform. NextAgency is one of the most affordable with a monthly subscription of $85 per seat and an annual license fee of $850 — which equates to $70.83 per month — for our core platform. We offer a 30-day free trial, too. Other systems are priced in the $100–$200 range. NextAgency publishes our pricing. Some vendors don’t publish their rates and require you to talk to a salesperson to get a price. That opacity says something about their view of the world and of you, so be careful.
For many agencies, the core insurance agency management system with its CRM, compliance, marketing, and business analytics tools is enough. Others want help tracking commissions and managing sub-agents, too. Commission modules not only help you find missed payments, but they can help you project future revenue, identify your most profitable clients, and much more. They can also help you track sub-agents — including the appointments and licenses of those downstream agents — and generate commission statements for them.
Commission modules can be very affordable. Many platforms charge one flat fee for the entire agency; others base their charges on how many agency management users you have. NextCommission, NextAgency’s commission management add-on, is just $120 per month regardless of how many NextAgency seats an agency has. As far as I know, NextAgency is the only agency management system that also offers commission tracking as a standalone product — NextCommission Solo — for agencies that choose to stay with their existing CRM but want better commission tools. The cost for NextCommission Solo is $160 per month for every set of five seats.
The cost of a system isn’t just what you pay per month. It’s also what you’re required to pay if you decide to leave. A handful of agency management systems, including NextAgency, offer a subscription that is truly month-to-month — you can leave at any time. Most competitors lock you in for at least a year. We think this is wrong. To help agencies deal with this, we launched our Switching Assistance Program: we’ll reduce our fees by 50% while you’re also paying your current vendor, for up to six months.
Aren’t agency management systems for large agencies?
Some complex, high-maintenance systems are built for large agencies. You’ll often see these described as “enterprise platforms.” Other software, like NextAgency and our peers are built for smaller operations.
The reality is that even sole proprietors juggle mountains of files, appointments, reminders, and mailers. Having this information scattered across multiple systems wastes time and risks important information or promises falling through the cracks — which can be even more dangerous for smaller agencies because they lack the bandwidth to absorb inefficiencies.
This can make an agency management system even more important for smaller agencies than larger ones. As NextAgency user Charisse E., explained: “Our book became too big to manage on a spreadsheet.” After switching, she found NextAgency made it “easy to manage policies, create task lists, saved notes, and run customized reporting.” Agencies tell us consistently that having everything in one place means spending less time hunting for information and more time doing the work that grows their business.
How do I know if the money I spend on an agency management system is worthwhile?
Increasingly, agencies are realizing that investing in insurance agency management software is a smart business decision. Afterall, time spent searching for client information, manually tracking renewals, or reconciling commission payments is time away from selling and servicing clients. A missed return call or a dropped follow-up can cost you a client. Not getting paid on cases is gifting money back to the carrier.
Here’s a quick way to figure out whether moving to an agency management system has a positive ROI for your agency — it’s adapted from an approach recommended by legendary sales trainer Tom Hopkins.
- Estimate what percentage of the day you and your team spend on administrative work: filing, commission tracking, paperwork, chasing compliance forms, and sending follow-up emails.
- Multiply your annual payroll by that percentage — including benefits. This is your annual cost of administration.
- Divide your annual cost of administration by 2080 to approximate your hourly cost.
How many hours does a system like NextAgency have to save you each month to justify the cost? Less than you think.
Then there’s the ability of commission systems to find the money you’re not being paid. Finding just one or two missed commission cases can pay for a commission tool like NextCommission for months.
It depends on which agency management system you choose. At one end of the spectrum is NextAgency — we’re known for the ease with which agencies can customize our software to fit their existing workflows. At the other extreme are systems, usually built on top of a generic platform, that allow very little customization. Most competitors are somewhere in between.
This is where a free trial can be especially useful. Many vendors offer no more than a seven-day trial, which doesn’t give you much time to see how the platform performs using your own data. NextAgency and at least one competitor offer a 30-day free trial — plenty of time to kick the proverbial tires.
That depends on the tools and customer support provided by the vendor, and on the nature of your data. If your agency information is already well structured — spreadsheets help here — migration can go quickly. If your data is a mess, it will take longer. The good news is that onboarding is usually easier than you expect.
NextAgency and most of our peers have invested heavily in onboarding tools and processes. Over 93% of agencies moving to NextAgency upload their own data with the support of our experienced team. For agencies with especially complex situations, or who simply don’t want to spend time on migration, we offer our optional NextConcierge program: you provide the data, we do the heavy lifting for a one-time fee.
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