Best robo-advisors in Canada for 2026

The name may be offputting, but robo-advisors occupy a key middle way in the investment landscape between do-it-yourself investing and having a live investment advisor. They will cost you a lot less than a commissioned or fee-for-service advisor and the often pricey investment products they recommend. 

But a robo-advisor won’t leave you alone to fend for yourself either; they will place your savings in a generally low-cost, portfolio matched to your circumstances and needs. And they’ll be there should you need to change course.

Made possible by financial technology and the proliferation of their main investment vehicle, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), robo-advisors have been around for more than a decade in Canada. These days there are nine providers available coast to coast. As you’ll find below, some have settled into specific niches, while others continue to actively prospect for new customers, both from rival robos and from banks and mutual fund sales representatives. They differ in the investments they carry, the fees they charge and the way they charge them, the level of personalized service they provide, and their track record of performance.

Robo-advisors’ costs, including their own portfolio management fees and the management expense ratios (MERs) of the funds they use, range from about 0.5% to 1% of assets under management per year (some socially responsible and private-asset portfolios may cost more). Your returns probably won’t shoot out the lights, but they’ll be competitive with the alternatives. 

We should note that, since 2019, there has been another, even lower-cost option for investors to obtain algorithm-assisted portfolio management in Canada: the all-in-one, globally diversified, asset allocation ETF. What robo-advisors offer that these ETFs don’t is advice. They will steer you toward the right portfolio for your needs and make changes as your needs change. The choice of what asset-allocation ETF to buy and whether to stick with it, by contrast, is all on you.

A robo-advisor is a suitable, modestly priced solution for people who don’t feel comfortable investing on their own. And even if you do know a thing or two about investing, a robo can save you a lot of time tinkering with your portfolio. Just set it and forget it.

With this, the 2026 edition of MoneySense’s robo-advisors guide, we’ve sifted through all the options available to Canadians in the hope of helping you find the best provider for your situation.

The best 3 robo-advisors in Canada

These three providers offer the best balance of features and modest costs for retail investors.

Best overall (Gold): Justwealth

Best for: Investors with substantial sums to invest, multiple accounts, and complex needs (the minimum account size in most situations is $5,000); investors seeking more personalized service.

Justwealth is just a robo-advisor. That’s all it does, which, depending on your perspective, may be a plus or a minus. The upside is evident in the performance of its portfolios. Because Justwealth is free to make use of the best-performing ETFs regardless of the fund company, it tends to have the best or near-best returns in almost every portfolio category over various periods. Rival robos, by contrast, are often tied to certain fund families through their parent companies or industry partnerships.

Justwealth also assigns clients a dedicated advisor to deal with instead of an anonymous help desk. And it has by far the widest range of portfolio types—more than 80 of them. Need an account timed to your expected retirement date in 2040? Justwealth has it. Need a first home savings account? They’ve got it. Want the option of switching portfolios as your needs change? You can do that, too.

What Justwealth can’t offer is other financial services such as banking or brokerage services. It doesn’t have a sideline in crypto trading or tax preparation. But if all you want is low-cost, automated portfolio management, Justwealth is hard to beat.

Best Overall (Silver): Wealthsimple

Best for: Investors open to other investing and financial services, from cryptocurrency to physical gold holdings to personal lines of credit.

Wealthsimple started out as a robo-advisor—Canada’s first, in 2014—but has since branched out into just about every aspect of personal financial services. Indeed, it’s mounting a challenge to the country’s notorious banking oligopoly. If you open a managed investing account (as Wealthsimple now calls its robo-advisor service), expect pitches for a lot of other services too. For example, it recently launched direct indexing, a buzzy strategy for holding individual stocks instead of index ETFs.

In addition to basic index ETF portfolios, Wealthsimple now offers its managed investing clients the Summit Portfolio, which combines ETFs with private assets for greater diversification, and access to a private infrastructure fund (expect higher fees for these). It also introduced income portfolios designed to pay out a stream of cash every month, useful in a registered retirement income fund (RRIF). 

And since our last survey, the company has added full-service wealth planning at a cost starting at 0.9% of assets under management per year, which includes portfolio management fees. Long an underperformer with respect to its portfolio returns, Wealthsimple has been competitive with its robo rivals in recent years.

Best Overall (Bronze): Questwealth

Best for: Frugal investors intent on paying the lowest fees; investors who also want to dabble in self-directed investing with a (mostly) commission-free brokerage account.

Questwealth Portfolios is the robo-investing arm of online brokerage Questrade, which last year made a splash by moving to 0% commission stock trading. The robo service occupies a similar niche in that it charges the lowest fees among Canadian providers for most kinds and sizes of account. 

Annual portfolio management fees are just a quarter of one percent for accounts valued between $250 and $100,000 (while there’s no minimum account size, funds are only invested once you hit $250). For amounts over $100,000, the fee is just 0.2%. And since Questwealth uses low-cost index ETFs from iShares, BMO, and Global X, you can expect all-in fees to add up to less than 0.5% of the value of your portfolio per year. 

For that you get a solid service offering—this year saw upgrades to the onboarding process and the QuestMobile app—and competitive investment returns.

The rest of the pack

While our top three seem to be working the hardest to win over new customers, these other providers also have compelling offerings for certain kinds of investors.

BMO Smartfolio

Best for: BMO banking clients—transferring money into and out of your robo account will be an easy, one-step process.

Bank of Montreal long ago went big into the ETF space, not only becoming a leading issuer of ETFs in Canada but also establishing an in-house robo-advisor, BMO Smartfolio. Compared to other robos, it’s bare bones, with just five portfolios made up of all-BMO ETFs and not even a responsible investing option. There’s something to be said for simple, though. If you’re not likely to look beyond core index portfolios, Smartfolio is worth a look.

CI Direct Investing

Best for: Investors seeking to diversify beyond stocks and bonds. Its active portfolios include exposure to Nicola Wealth’s Core Portfolio Fund, which features private asset holdings. Fees on these portfolios range from 0.95% to 1.75%, though.

Among Canadian robo-advisors, CI Direct pioneered the practice of offering private-asset portfolios in addition to those holding ETFs invested in stocks and bonds. There’s a whole movement towards allocating at least some of your nest egg to this alternative asset class to increase diversification and reduce risk, but these portfolios come with substantially higher fees and thus stray from robo-investing’s original mission of providing low-fee services. CI Direct has conventional ETF and responsible investing portfolios too, however.

This year, CI Direct declined to provide performance data for its balanced funds for our table. The listed one-year return of 13.8% reflects the performance of the applicable CI Balanced Asset Allocation ETF that clients with accounts worth less than $50,000 get invested in. (Launched in late 2023, this fund does not yet have three- and five-year annualized returns.) Higher-net-worth customers get allocated to portfolios made up of multiple ETFs.

Like other robos, CI Direct has its own phone app for accessing your account, and it promises advice from an in-house Certified Financial Planner if you need it. Unlike other services, it does not yet offer a first home savings account.

Nest Wealth

Best for: Investors who may have soured on mutual funds but still want to work with their longtime investment advisor.

Nest Wealth, owned by Italian fintech Objectway since 2024, works harder than other robos to integrate its service with financial advisors and wealth management partners like National Bank, Raymond James, and Manulife Securities. Many of its clients come to the firm through that channel, although you can still go to its website and sign up as an individual.

Nest Wealth charges its fees in a series of five tiers, starting with a flat monthly fee of $5 to accounts worth $10,000 or less, which may be on the high side for small investors just starting out. But it does a good job of keeping ETF fees under control, with a capitalization-weighted average MER of 0.13%.

Qtrade Guided Portfolios

Best for: Socially responsible investors.

Qtrade is an online brokerage owned by Aviso Wealth, the investing arm of Canada’s credit union movement. It launched the robo-advisor VirtualWealth in 2017 and has since rebranded it Qtrade Guided Portfolios.

What stands out about Qtrade is that, whereas most robos charge a higher fee on responsible investing accounts than mainstream ETF accounts, it doesn’t. It puts RI clients into mutual funds managed by its sister firm, NEI Investments, which happens to be one of the most experienced environmental, social, and governance (ESG) specialists in Canada. Its returns, especially over longer periods, tend to be very close to those of broad-market portfolios. MERs for its funds are higher than typical ETFs, however—between 0.72% and 0.96%.

Qtrade’s stated returns in the comparison table look impressive, but note that here we used the Growth & Income Portfolio, which allocates 65% to equities and 35% to fixed income, because it was the most comparable to competitors’ products (Qtrade’s Balanced ETF portfolio, by contrast, aims for a 50/50 allocation). Still, the higher equity allocation gives it an advantage over its peers—especially after an outstanding year for stock markets like 2025.

RBC InvestEase

Best for: Existing RBC personal banking clients—transferring money into or out of your InvestEase account will be painless and instantaneous.

Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s largest financial institution, has its own robo-advisor service, InvestEase. It hews very closely to the original vision for automated portfolio management, with a simple selection of index-based and responsible investing portfolios. RBC invests exclusively with iShares ETFs, with which it has a formal partnership. 

One advantage of bank-owned robos is you get access to a wealth of authoritative investor education material and market commentary through your client portal. 

Modern Advisor

Best for: Investors who still see potential to outperform or mitigate market risk using active strategies.

Modern Advisor did not respond to our requests for information for this year’s robo-advisors guide. (We heard from third parties that it is no longer soliciting retail investors, preferring to work with its existing book of clients and network of advisors.) So the information we have is based on past research and MA’s website, which this year posted some respectable performance numbers.

Part of that good performance may be due to the fact that, relative to other robos, Modern Advisor’s core portfolios have relatively low exposure to American equity markets and a higher allocation to Canada. That could appeal to investors concerned about U.S. valuations, as well as the “elbows up” crowd. 

In addition to passive ETF portfolios, Modern Advisor offers portfolios made up of funds actively managed by BCV Asset Management and a Harmony portfolio class that employs a blend of active and passive strategies.

Methodology

All stated returns are for a balanced portfolio made up of approximately 60% equities and 40% fixed income, net of fees, as of Dec. 31, 2025. All performance figures are denominated in Canadian dollars and assume the reinvestment of distributions. Three- and five-year returns are annualized.

^{*As of Dec. 31, 2025; annualized, net of fees}