The 2026 Globe and Mail Digital Brokerage Ranking: Low costs aren’t enough to crown the winner

It is a good time to be a Canadian self-directed investor.

A growing universe of asset-allocation exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is giving investors easy, diversified exposure without the expense of traditional mutual funds and advisers. A bull market has enticed more people to try their hand at investing. And intense competition among digital brokerages is driving costs down, attracting new entrants and pushing long-established players to improve their offerings. No fewer than six brokerages now offer commission-free trading for Canadian and U.S. stocks.

But which one is best?

To pick Canada’s best digital brokerage this year, The Globe and Mail first turned to you, our readers. A survey showed that low costs – commission-free trading and low account fees – are most often the deciding factor in choosing a brokerage. You said that you want responsive customer service, a range of account types and the flexibility to invest in different products.

We then partnered with Surviscor, a firm that specializes in financial services-based digital experience rankings, to assess how 15 brokerages fared across a set of criteria, which we weighted according to our reader survey results.

The results showed clearly that, with fees falling and more commission-free ETFs on offer, low costs alone are no longer enough to choose a winner. Stronger mobile platforms have improved the overall user experience, and service levels separate winners from losers. In one case, good service was enough to lift an upstart brokerage above more established competitors.

In the end, one platform stood out with high rankings across a range of criteria. But improvements across the board mean the real winners are Canadian investors who have been able to reap the rewards of intense competition.

Here are a few of the highlights:

If this were a ranking focused solely on low costs and innovation, Wealthsimple may have come out near the top. The platform is well known for leading the way on fee models and offerings that are later adopted by competitors.

It was the first platform in Canada to offer zero-commission trading, and the first to give users the ability to buy fractional shares, letting investors put their money to work immediately. It has continued to push the envelope, most recently announcing plans to roll out an app for controversial prediction markets, allowing Canadians to bet on real-world events. If you’re interested in staying at the forefront of investment trends, keep an eye on what Wealthsimple is doing.

But customers not eligible for enhanced service that comes with larger account sizes face poor support, including long wait times when something goes wrong, Surviscor’s data showed. Wealthsimple ranked last for service among the 15 brokerages that it surveyed.

Surviscor also scored Wealthsimple’s desktop platform, its analysis and market information tools, and the transactional experience across asset types below average, pulling it toward the bottom of our ranking.

The results of our survey made clear that big banks remain the default brokerages for many Canadians. Brand recognition is a factor, as is the convenience of keeping all of your banking and investment accounts in one place. The good news is that the default option is getting better all the time.

Take CIBC Investor’s Edge, described in The Globe’s 2020 ranking as “serviceable at best.” A revamped website and solid mobile app are supported by strong research resources, and Investor’s Edge customers enjoy better-than-average service.

Relatively high costs get in the way of a stronger overall showing: While a commission of $6.95 would have been cheap a few years ago, today it puts CIBC Investor’s Edge behind the curve. The good news is that CIBC now offers more than 180 commission-free ETFs – up from zero last year – and a current promotion offers 200 commission-free trades to new clients.

This newcomer took us by surprise in its first year in our ranking. The Canadian subsidiary of Cayman-incorporated Webull, a market information platform founded in China in 2016 by an alumnus of tech giants Alibaba and Xiaomi, only launched its digital brokerage in January, 2024.

Webull has some rough edges. It bills itself as a professional-grade trading platform so may not be an ideal choice for buy-and-hold investors more interested in a clean, straightforward interface than bells and whistles like real-time options quotes and overnight trading of U.S. stocks. It doesn’t offer registered accounts beyond the basic RRSP and TFSA – even RRIFs, offered by every other brokerage apart from fellow newcomer Moomoo, are unavailable.

Reflecting its origins as a mobile app, the user experience is better on a phone than on a desktop, still the preferred platform for readers in our survey. Unlike most digital brokerages, desktop trading takes place in a stand-alone application (available for Windows, Mac OS and Ubuntu Linux) rather than in a web browser.

Two things lifted Webull to the top half of our list. Zero-commission trading, introduced in April, bumped up its ranking in the fees category. But it was the platform’s service quality, and in particular the speed and helpfulness of responses to user queries, that stood out, putting it in competition with more established brokerages.

Webull is still a new player, and it remains to be seen whether it can maintain that stellar service as it expands. Its software could use a polish and users would benefit from a wider range of registered account options. But for active, tech-savvy and cost-conscious traders, Webull may be worth a look.

TD Direct Investing, which topped The Globe and Mail’s ranking for the last three years, remains a great option for most Canadian investors. Users get a clean, well-designed interface that will feel like home for existing TD clients, and which new clients will settle into quickly.

It also gives investors a great deal of flexibility, offering a wide range of registered accounts, including self-directed registered disability savings plan (RDSP) accounts. TD also lets you buy fractional shares – what it calls “partial share investing” – in eligible U.S. and Canadian stocks and ETFs. Only two other brokerages, Wealthsimple and Interactive Brokers, can match that.

TD’s strong customer support translated into a second-place finish in the service category overall, but it fell short in our heavily weighted fees category.

Like most bank-owned brokerages, TD Direct Investing charges commissions on stock and ETF trades – a $9.99 flat fee for U.S. and Canadian stocks and ETFs, and $1.99 on fractional share trades. A big step up from last year is that TD now offers more than 100 commission-free ETFs, but this wasn’t enough to move ahead of real zero-commission brokerages.

As a way around this, TD offers 100 free trades a year (up from 50 last year) through TD Easy Trade, a mobile-only platform aimed at younger, less experienced investors. Those free trades cover U.S. and Canadian shares, ETFs and fractional shares, though in exchange for raising the number of fee-free trades, TD has removed unlimited fee-free trading of its own ETFs.

TD makes the fair point that Canadians with online brokerage accounts make an average of 20 trades a year, so for most people that limit won’t be a deal-breaker. As an easy-to-use, low-cost platform for buying and selling shares and ETFs, TD Easy Trade is an excellent choice.

At the same time, TD Easy Trade and TD Direct Investing are separate products requiring separate accounts. A platform combining the low-cost strengths of TD Easy Trade with the products and services TD Direct Investing would be compelling, but investors looking for an all-in-one solution may be better served elsewhere.

This year’s winner is a digital brokerage veteran. Launched more than a quarter of a century ago, Questrade has built up a reputation as a dependable, continuously improving low-cost platform with excellent service. This is the first time it has topped The Globe’s ranking of digital brokerages.

The key to Questrade’s success is consistently strong performance across all of the criteria that we assessed. Some brokerages have low fees, others have good service, others have excellent platforms and a variety of investment products. Questrade has it all.

The introduction of commission-free trading in February, 2025, helped to lift Questrade to second place in the crucial fees category (Similarly named Qtrade, which topped the fee category, went to zero-commission trading in October). It received consistently excellent usability scores, from its painless account opening process to its slick desktop and mobile apps offering customers clear information and easy access to account management tools and a range of products including bonds, GICs and custom indexes.

The new Questrade Pro platform offers users charting and options trading tools, as well as eye-catching features like AI analysis.

Underpinning an excellent platform is quick, helpful service and many digital support options that lifted Questrade’s service score head and shoulders above its peers.

There is still room for improvement. Questrade has introduced fractional share trading, but with limitations to U.S. stocks and ETFs; if you want to buy partial shares in Canadian firms, you’ll still need to look at Interactive Brokers, TD Direct Investing or Wealthsimple for now. The platform also doesn’t yet offer support for RDSP accounts – not an issue for most investors, but a significant shortcoming for eligible Canadians.

More concerning, some responses from long-time Questrade customers in our survey suggest that the platform’s vaunted service quality has come under pressure. To maintain its place on the top of the leaderboard, Questrade will have to show that it remains committed to one of its consistent strengths. The competition isn’t standing still.

The methodology

Surviscor surveyed brokerages in April, 2026, to assess their platforms across four key areas. The firm asked 45 questions about brokerage platforms related to the following categories:

1. Fees, including commissions for trading of stocks, options and ETFs, market data costs, foreign-exchange rates, account interest and fees.
2. Support, assessing available interaction resources and both the speed and quality of responses to general inquiries.
3. Platforms, which combines both desktop and mobile platforms. The analysis looked at investor usage criteria, including opening an account or additional accounts, the design of the platforms, account information and account resources, trading experiences, the depth and usability of market information, resources for supporting investor growth, and the availability of investment products.
4. Platform products and services, assessing the availability of products and services related to investing through the digital platform.

Surviscor used the results of the survey to update data it had collected to the end of 2025, then standardized brokerage scores and adjusted them according to the results of a Globe and Mail reader questionnaire conducted in April, 2026.

Service scores were based on repeated interactions with firms in the 12 months to April 30, 2026, except for Moomoo and Webull, whose scores were extrapolated from data collected from Jan. 1, 2026 to April 30, 2026.

The Globe and Mail weighted category scores as follows, based on the reader questionnaire:

• Fees: 35 per cent
• Support: 15 per cent
• Platforms: 20 per cent
• Platform products and services: 30 per cent