CertFocus vs. illumend (Formerly myCOI): COI Tracking Software Comparison

Two COI tracking platforms, two opposite answers to the same question. CertFocus by Vertikal RMS runs Hawk-I AI first, then has a licensed insurance professional decide whether the certificate satisfies the contract. Illumend, the platform myCOI rebuilt and relaunched in May 2025, hands that decision to an AI engine called Lumie and brings people in only for the exceptions.

myCOI has tracked certificates since 2009 and carries 16 years of compliance work behind the rebrand. Their platform now positions directly against the managed service model, describing outsourced review as handing a broken process to somebody else’s team. CertFocus has tracked certificates since 2003 and became a part of Vertikal RMS through a 2019 merger with PreQual. It pairs Hawk-I AI document processing with professional review, plus PreQual for subcontractor prequalification that illumend doesn’t offer at all.

Programs collecting standardized coverage at volume will find illumend faster and easier to run without insurance expertise on staff. Programs where endorsement language routinely requires a judgment call, or where subcontractor evaluation starts before the certificate arrives, will find more in CertFocus.

This comparison covers where each platform wins, what each costs, and which questions your own certificates should answer before you choose.

Quick Comparison

Both platforms collect certificates, check them against your requirements, chase renewals, and tell you who’s out of compliance. The daily experience of using them diverges on one question, which is whether a person reviews the document before your program treats it as compliant. That answer shapes your cost, your turnaround time, and what happens when an endorsement doesn’t clearly satisfy your contract.

Here’s how the two platforms compare on the points that decide most evaluations:

Where CertFocus Wins

Five differences separate CertFocus from illumend, and each one matters to a specific kind of buyer. Weigh them against your own certificate volume, the kind of requirements your contracts carry, and whether prequalification belongs in the same system as certificate tracking.

A Licensed Professional Decides Every Certificate

Hawk-I AI processes the certificate first, reading the full wording of each endorsement language instead of only pulling values from fixed fields on the form. A licensed insurance professional then reviews what Hawk-I found and decides whether the document satisfies your contract. No certificate clears on the AI pass alone.

Judgment matters most on the certificates where two readings are both defensible. Consider a subcontractor who submits a blanket additional insured endorsement covering any party they agreed in writing to add based on a contract demanding completed operations coverage on a primary and noncontributory basis. The question becomes whether the specific endorsement forms behind the ACORD certificate actually deliver both. A licensed professional makes that call and can explain the reasoning if a claim tests it two years later.

illumend takes the opposite position deliberately. Their platform reviews every certificate automatically, and their own materials describe Lumie making each decision itself and escalating only rare items it can’t resolve. Teams that want more human oversight built in get directed to discuss adding it to their subscription package.

Neither company is confused about what they’re doing. Both models answer the same question, which is how much of your certificate volume genuinely needs a person, and the honest answer varies by program. A retail chain collecting general liability from cleaning vendors against a standard template needs less judgment than a general contractor working under negotiated owner requirements.

Prequalification and Financial Analysis in the Same Platform

PreQual by Vertikal RMS evaluates whether a subcontractor should be on your project at all, which is a question certificate tracking never asks. illumend collects certificates and monitors compliance against your requirements, and their product line ends there.

Watch what each system does with a financial statement. A prequalification module attached to a compliance platform typically collects the document, stores it against the vendor record, and marks the requirement satisfied. PreQual analysts read it, then return a rating covering:

• Financial capacity: Working capital, liquidity, and whether the balance sheet supports the contract value you’re about to award.
• Backlog and bonding: Current committed work against capacity, plus the surety relationship and single and aggregate bonding limits.
• Safety performance: EMR verification and OSHA history, measured against customizable scorecards you set rather than a generic pass or fail.
• Past performance: Completed project history, references, and claims experience on work comparable to yours.

Vertikal RMS staffs that work with trained analysts with expertise in construction finance, risk assessment, and industry benchmarks, backed by surety underwriting experience. Turner Construction runs prequalification through the platform.

Subcontractor default insurance underwriters expect that kind of review before they issue coverage. A general contractor carrying SDI instead of bonds has to demonstrate that someone evaluated each subcontractor’s financial capacity, and a module that files documents without assessing them won’t satisfy an underwriter asking how you vetted the trades on your project.

Certificate tracking confirms a subcontractor carries the coverage your contract requires. Subcontractor prequalification tells you whether they can finish the work.

One Workflow From Prequalification Through Certificate Compliance

Vertikal RMS develops both products, so a subcontractor exists once across prequalification and certificate tracking instead of twice in two systems that don’t talk to each other.

Your team prequalifies a subcontractor in PreQual and moves them into CertFocus with one click, carrying the vendor record forward without re-entering anything. Their live insurance status then appears on the PreQual scorecard, so the person deciding whether to award work sees current compliance alongside the financial rating. Every action in both products writes to a timestamped audit trail your risk team can produce when an owner or an underwriter asks how a particular subcontractor cleared.

Buying prequalification and certificate tracking from separate vendors puts that reconciliation on your team. Someone matches vendor records across two platforms, someone notices when the entity names don’t align, and someone answers the question of which system holds the current version. Companies absorb that work quietly until an audit makes it visible.

The combined workflow across both CertFocus and PreQual matters specifically to general contractors and owners managing subcontractor risk from award through project close. A retail program tracking janitorial vendors has no prequalification step to connect, so the advantage doesn’t apply.

Coverage Lines and Contract Types Beyond Construction

CertFocus tracks as many as 60 lines of coverage across 25 or more industries. illumend serves seven industries and doesn’t publish a coverage line count.

Construction insurance requirements follow standardized patterns, with general liability at set limits, workers’ compensation, auto, umbrella, and additional insured and waiver endorsements written to familiar language. A platform reading construction certificates encounters variations on requirements it has already processed thousands of times.

Requirements outside construction stop behaving that way:

Programs spanning several industries feel this most. A real estate investment trust holds tenant leases, property management agreements, construction contracts for tenant improvements, and service agreements with vendors touching everything from elevators to landscaping. Each contract type carries its own coverage expectations, and a platform organized around construction workflows handles some of that well and the rest by exception.

How many distinct contract types your program covers decides whether this matters to you. Programs concentrated in construction certificate of insurance tracking won’t notice. Programs managing leases, vendor agreements, and construction contracts in the same system will.

Published Pricing

CertFocus by Vertikal RMS publishes its rates. Self-service costs $6 to $8 per vendor per year, while full-service costs $13 to $29 per vendor per year. Annual minimums range from $5,000 to $10,000, and the full-service minimum is $8,000. illumend publishes nothing, and every path through their site leads to a demo request.

You can price a CertFocus program before speaking to anyone. A company tracking 1,000 vendors on the self-service tier can work out a cost of $6,000 to $8,000 a year, or the minimum if that’s higher. Getting the equivalent figure from illumend requires a sales call, a discovery process, and a proposal.

Published pricing also tells you what the vendor charges everyone else. Quote-only pricing lets a vendor read your company size, your urgency, and your alternatives before naming a number, and buyers rarely find out whether the figure they received matches what a comparable company paid.

Neither approach predicts what you’ll spend overall, since implementation, integration work, and the eventual difference between your projected vendor count and your actual one all move the total. Our breakdown of what COI tracking software costs covers the components that show up beyond the per-vendor rate.

Where illumend Wins

Five things illumend does better than CertFocus. Each one matters to a specific kind of program, and for some buyers they settle the decision.

Speed on Routine Certificates

illumend returns a compliance decision in minutes because no person stands between the document arriving and the answer coming back. Lumie reviews every certificate and endorsement on receipt, and their platform reports 87% faster reviews compared to a manual process, along with 4x faster COI management overall.

Most certificates deserve that treatment. A landscaping vendor submits general liability at $1 million per occurrence against a requirement for $1 million per occurrence, the additional insured endorsement uses standard blanket wording, and the policy dates cover the engagement. Nothing about that document requires judgment, and routing it to a licensed professional adds hours to a decision the language already made.

A vendor who learns within minutes that their limits fall short can call their agent the same afternoon and fix it, while a vendor who learns a day later has moved on to other work and may not open the notice until the following week. illumend frames this as resolving issues in one cycle instead of a chain of emails, and that framing holds up.

How much any of this matters to you depends on volume, because a program processing 300 certificates a year absorbs review time without noticing while a program onboarding 200 vendors in a quarter ahead of a project start feels every hour of it.

Lumie Answers Questions CertFocus Makes You Escalate

Lumie holds a conversation, which means a project coordinator who doesn’t know a CG 20 10 from a CG 20 37 can ask what the difference is and get an answer without finding someone to ask. illumend built the platform for people who never trained in insurance and don’t want to, and their conversational layer explains its own findings to your team and to your vendors in language neither group needs a broker to interpret.

CertFocus offers nothing comparable, since a licensed professional reviews the certificate and returns a decision, which puts the expertise inside the process instead of in front of the coordinator staring at an endorsement they don’t recognize. Getting that question answered means emailing someone and waiting for a reply.

Think about who actually does this work at most companies, because certificate compliance frequently belongs to a project administrator, an office manager, or an accounts payable clerk who inherited it from whoever held the job before them. None of them chose insurance as a career, and a platform that answers their questions directly builds capability in the person doing the work while a platform that only answers the certificate builds none.

Your vendors get the same benefit when a certificate fails. A subcontractor can ask illumend what specifically fell short and what to tell their agent, instead of forwarding a rejection notice to a broker who then calls your compliance team to find out what you actually wanted.

Every Document Reviewed the Same Way

A model applying identical logic to every certificate returns the same answer every time, and illumend makes that argument directly, noting that consistent rigor means you aren’t relying on whoever happened to open the email that day. Any process involving people carries some variance, since two licensed professionals reading the same ambiguous endorsement can reach different conclusions.

Consistency and judgment describe different properties, and the tradeoff between them is the real decision facing anyone comparing these platforms. A model applying identical logic to every certificate eliminates reviewer drift and returns answers in minutes. A licensed professional catches the endorsement that satisfies a requirement’s wording while failing its purpose, then owns that reading if anyone questions it later.

What your certificates look like determines which property serves you better. A retail program collecting general liability from janitorial and landscaping vendors against standardized requirements gets little from human judgment and a great deal from speed and repeatability. A general contractor managing subcontractors under negotiated owner requirements, with delegated design and per-project aggregates in play, encounters ambiguity often enough that a consistent wrong answer costs more than a slower right one.

Neither platform can prove its accuracy to you before you buy, which is worth saying plainly. Both make claims about how well their review works, and the only test that settles it is running your own certificates through and reading the results.

Documented Third-Party Validation

illumend has 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2 and 4.6 on Capterra, with more than 50 reviews across both websites. Their platform reports managing more than 45 million insurance documents and over 200,000 third parties. Sixteen years of operating history under the myCOI name produced that record, alongside the scale figures their site reports:

Reviews carry information a buyer can’t get any other way, since every one of them comes from a company that ran the software and chose to write publicly about implementation, support responsiveness, and what went wrong along the way. Reading a dozen of them gives you a picture no sales conversation will.

Weigh those reviews against their timing, though, because most of them describe myCOI. The platform changed substantially in May 2025 when illumend rebuilt the review model around Lumie. A review praising myCOI’s managed service team describes a product that no longer works the way it did when someone wrote it.

Contract-to-Requirement Extraction

Uploading a contract to illumend produces a set of insurance requirements the platform extracts on its own, which removes the step where somebody reads the insurance article and types limits and endorsement obligations into a compliance system. Lumie then checks incoming certificates against what it pulled.

That step consumes real time during onboarding, especially for programs where requirements vary by agreement. A property manager holding 400 leases negotiated over fifteen years has 400 different insurance articles, so someone will have to read through all of them when starting a compliance program.

Manual entry can also introduce errors that can affect the quality of your data for years:

• Transposed limits: Somebody records $1 million where the contract says $2 million, and every certificate afterward gets measured against the wrong threshold.
• Missed endorsement obligations: A waiver of subrogation requirement buried in a paragraph about indemnity never makes it into the requirement set, so nobody ever asks the vendor for it.
• Stale requirements after endorsement: The person configuring the system assigns a subcontractor’s limits to a supplier who never sets foot on site, and the supplier either gets rejected repeatedly or nobody notices the mismatch until an audit.
• Stale requirements after amendment: The contract gets amended in year three and the compliance system keeps checking against the original terms, because updating it was nobody’s assigned job.

Human error is real, and any process where a person reads a contract and configures a system carries some risk of it. CertFocus addresses that by putting the configuration work with people who read insurance requirements for a living. The Vertikal RMS team builds your requirement sets during implementation, so the person deciding whether a waiver of subrogation obligation belongs in the configuration is someone who recognizes one buried in an indemnity paragraph.

Both approaches produce a working configuration. illumend’s puts the extraction capability in your hands afterward, which matters when you sign a new contract type in month eight and want the requirements loaded without opening a support ticket.

Choose CertFocus If

CertFocus by Vertikal RMS is the stronger fit for organizations where a wrong reading of an endorsement carries real cost and where vendor evaluation has to go deeper than the certificate. If your program spans several contract types or your subcontractor risk decisions start before the certificate arrives, CertFocus is built for that.

Choose CertFocus by Vertikal RMS if:

• You need prequalification along with certificate tracking: General contractors and owners evaluating subcontractor financial capacity get both functions from one vendor, with the vendor record moving from prequalification into compliance tracking without anyone re-entering it.
• Your contracts carry negotiated insurance terms: Programs holding commercial leases, healthcare vendor agreements, or professional services contracts encounter requirements that vary by document, which is where breadth of coverage lines and contract types earns its keep.
• A wrong call on an endorsement would cost you real money: Certificates involving delegated design, per-project aggregates, or completed operations obligations on a primary and noncontributory basis benefit from a licensed professional who decides and can defend the decision.
• You want to price the program before a sales call: Published per-vendor rates and a stated annual minimum let you build a budget number without entering a discovery process first.
• Your requirements come from negotiated contracts, not a standard template: Vertikal RMS builds your requirement sets during implementation, so the person deciding whether a waiver of subrogation obligation belongs in the configuration reads insurance requirements for a living.

Choose illumend If

illumend is the stronger fit for programs where certificate volume is high, requirements are consistent, and the people managing compliance never trained in insurance. If speed and self-sufficiency matter more to you than professional review on every document, illumend was rebuilt for exactly that.

Choose illumend if:

• You have a high certificate volume and standard requirements: Retail, franchise, and vendor programs collecting general liability against a consistent template get more from minutes-long turnaround than from judgment they rarely need.
• The person managing your compliance never trained in insurance: Lumie answers questions about endorsement forms and coverage requirements directly, so a project administrator or accounts payable clerk who inherited compliance can resolve them without finding someone to ask.
• Procore is your only integration requirement: illumend’s Procore connection syncs projects, vendors, and commitments in both directions, and a program that lives entirely inside Procore needs nothing further.
• You want independent evidence before you buy: Over 50 reviews across G2 and Capterra give you accounts of implementation and support from companies that ran the platform, which is more third-party material than Vertikal RMS publishes.
• You’re loading requirements from contracts you already hold: Automatic extraction turns a stack of negotiated agreements into configured requirements without anyone transcribing them by hand.

The Bottom Line

Your certificates decide this. Programs collecting standardized coverage at volume get more from illumend, where Lumie returns answers in minutes and nobody waits on a review queue. Programs where endorsement language routinely requires a call, or where subcontractor evaluation has to start before the certificate arrives, get more from CertFocus by Vertikal RMS and the prequalification that comes with it. Read twenty of your own certificates and count the judgment calls, because that number tells you which platform you’re actually buying.