Robinhood vs Wealthsimple Trade — which broker is better?

Pros

• Equity and ETF options carry no commission and no per-contract fee — only about USD 0.04 per contract of pass-through, against USD 0.65 at Schwab and Fidelity
• USD 0 commission on US stocks and ETFs, fractional orders from USD 1, and no account minimum
• Among the lowest retail margin rates in the US market, 5.25% on balances up to USD 50,000 on a standard account as well as on Gold (rates as of 16 September 2026), with the first USD 1,000 of margin interest-free for USD 5/month Gold subscribers
• Robinhood Gold pays 3.35% APY on eligible uninvested brokerage cash with no cap and no minimum — far above Schwab's default sweep
• Retirement accounts with a 1% contribution match, rising to 3% for Gold members — no other major US broker matches IRA contributions at all
• Futures at USD 0.75 per contract per side (USD 0.50 for Gold), plus index options at USD 0.50 (USD 0.35 for Gold)
• The mobile app is the benchmark for the category, with 90+ technical indicators and genuine feature parity with the web platform
• Around 22 cryptocurrencies alongside equities in the same account, plus prediction markets — an unusually broad retail shelf for one login

Cons

• Four significant regulatory settlements since 2020 — SEC USD 65m in 2020, FINRA USD 57m in 2021, NYDFS USD 30m in 2022 and FINRA USD 26m plus USD 3.75m restitution in 2025 — covering order-flow disclosure, supervision, AML and reporting failures
• USD 100 to transfer your account out, versus USD 0 at Fidelity — a deliberate exit cost, and one of the most common complaints on public review sites
• No bonds, no mutual funds, no international exchange access and no forex; the equity universe stops at US listings and ADRs
• Research is thin: no economic calendar, no sector heat maps, no yield curve tools and limited fundamental data, with AI Digests reserved for Gold
• Support has no direct phone line for prospective clients and no branches — it runs on in-app chat and callback requests, which is a poor fit for anything urgent
• No conditional order types or backtesting on any platform

Pros

• CAD 0 commission on Canadian and US stocks and ETFs, plus USD 0 per equity and ETF options contract on every tier, including free assignment
• Futures at USD 1 per contract with free real-time futures market data — no Canadian competitor matches that combination
• CAD 0 to transfer your account out, where Questrade, Qtrade and the banks all charge CAD 150
• Best-rated broker app in Canada at 4.6 on the App Store across roughly 130,000 ratings, with real-time streaming quotes free to everyone
• 24/5 trading on eligible US stocks and ETFs and 24/7 on gold and crypto — the longest trading hours available in Canada
• Margin at prime + 0.5% on Core and prime − 0.5% on Generation, well under the big banks
• CIRO-regulated with CIPF coverage of CAD 1,000,000 per account category, backed by Power Corporation of Canada with a 52.4% stake
• Interest on chequing balances of 1.25% to 2.25% by tier, against effectively 0% on idle cash at most brokers

Cons

• The 1.5% CAD/USD conversion is the same as Questrade's. A USD account (CAD 10 a month on Core, free on Premium from CAD 100,000) removes it on the US trades themselves but not on the CAD you convert into it, which still costs 1.5% per transaction under CAD 10,000 and falls to 0% only from CAD 100,000; journalling at CAD 9.95 is the other way round it
• Crypto costs 2.0% per trade at the Core tier — a round trip is 4% — and the advertised 0.05% requires CAD 10 million of 30-day volume; staking takes 30% of rewards before validator fees
• No bonds, no GICs and no mutual funds anywhere in the self-directed account, so a fixed-income allocation has to be built entirely from ETFs
• No desktop platform, no Level 2 depth, no API and no paper-trading account; the research stack is news and basic charts rather than screeners and analyst coverage
• The crypto assets themselves sit outside CIPF protection and are held in trust instead — only the cash balance in a crypto account is covered, and the cold-storage insurance cited is USD 75 million per custodial partner, not per client
• Meaningful benefits are gated behind CAD 100,000 and CAD 500,000 balances, so the sticker price a small account actually pays is the least attractive version of the offer