Luminary

Estate documents, not tax returns, are what Luminary reads. Upload a trust instrument or a will and the AI extracts the structure into a digital record, which the platform then renders as a dynamic flowchart showing where assets go, what passes to whom, and what tax falls due at each transfer. Estate360 turns that into a client-ready summary. From there the modeling runs growth scenarios and projects estate tax liability under different assumptions. Role-based permissions let a case be shared with the estate attorney, the trustee and outside advisors without handing over the whole file.

The client profile is stated plainly on the pricing page: estates and net worth from $5 million to more than $1 billion. Wealth advisors, family offices and trust companies are the named buyers, with estate attorneys and CPAs listed after them, and the reference customers are BNY, Focus Financial, Wealth Enhancement and Carson Wealth. An accounting firm with a genuine high-net-worth estate practice, where the work is reading complicated instruments and explaining them to a family, will recognize the problem this solves. Case preparation time reduced by up to 80 percent is a vendor claim, but the underlying task, manually charting a multi-generational trust structure, is real and slow.

The catch for anyone landing here from an income tax planning search is that Luminary does not do income tax planning. There is no 1040 OCR, no import from Lacerte or UltraTax, no AMT or net investment income tax calculation, no QBI phase-out, no excess business loss limitation, no state income tax module. The deliverable is an estate flowchart and a transfer tax projection, and the source list this product was drawn from filed it under miscellaneous rather than tax planning, which was closer to right. Pricing is quoted per firm with nothing published, and given the target client size, the number will reflect that. The estate law variation between states is also not described anywhere public, which matters when state estate and inheritance thresholds differ so sharply.

There is no useful head-to-head with Intuit Tax Advisor, Corvee or Bloomberg Tax's Income Tax Planner, because none of them read a trust deed and Luminary does not project income tax. The nearest neighbour is Holistiplan, which has an estate module listed as in development, and if that ships it will be the cheaper, shallower option for a firm that wants basic estate document tracking alongside its tax review work. Luminary is the specialist tool for firms where estate work is the practice, not an adjacent service.

One-to-watch stands, and the reason is fit rather than a weak product. The security evidence is the strongest in this batch: SOC 2 Type II, AES 256-bit encryption in transit and at rest, US-only AWS data centres with no offshore storage, third-party penetration testing, and an explicit commitment that neither Luminary nor its AI vendors train models on customer data. What keeps it out of a higher tier for this directory is that a firm of 2 to 50 buying tax planning software is almost never buying this, and the small number that should be are buying it for estate work under a different budget line.