Passiv alternatives for Canadian investors

A disclosure before anything else: Luum is a portfolio analytics product, so this comparison is not neutral. What follows is an attempt to be accurate about what each tool is for, including where ours is the wrong choice. Judge it accordingly, and check current features and pricing yourself before deciding. They change.

What Passiv is actually for

Passiv is a rebalancing tool. You define a target allocation, it reads your brokerage positions, calculates the trades that would bring you back to target and, with supported brokerages, can place them.

That last step is the product. Passiv's distinctive capability is turning "my allocation has drifted" into executed orders without manual arithmetic and manual entry. For a Canadian couch-potato investor running a fixed allocation across a handful of ETFs, that is a well-matched tool, and it is popular for good reason.

It is also tightly coupled to brokerage support. What Passiv can do for you depends heavily on which brokerage you use.

Where people outgrow it

The common reasons, in rough order of how often they come up:

Tax records. Rebalancing tools are oriented around current positions and targets. They are not built to maintain an adjusted cost base across a decade of partial sales, reinvested distributions and return-of-capital adjustments. Come tax time that gap is felt sharply.

Accounts it cannot reach. A tool that works through brokerage connections cannot see a defined-contribution pension, a manually held asset, or an institution it does not support. For someone whose accounts are spread widely, the covered portion may not be the interesting portion.

Analysis beyond drift. Drift against a target is one question. Fee drag, look-through concentration across funds, income and yield, and how contributions compare to a goal are different questions, and a rebalancing tool is not obliged to answer them.

None of that is a criticism of Passiv. A focused tool that does one job properly is usually better than one that does five badly. It is a statement about fit.

The realistic alternatives

Wealthica aggregates broadly across Canadian institutions and is strong at the "everything in one place" problem, with an add-on ecosystem. If aggregation breadth is your binding constraint, look there first.

A spreadsheet remains genuinely competitive, and is free. It handles arbitrary account types, arbitrary assets, and any rule you are willing to encode. It costs you maintenance time and it fails silently when you make an entry error.

Your brokerage's own tools are improving and cost nothing extra. Their structural limit is that they can only ever see one institution, which rules them out for cross-account allocation and for a correct ACB.

Luum, ours, is a tracking, analysis and tax-record layer over accounts you keep elsewhere. It reads holdings and computes things from them: returns that account for contribution timing, an adjusted cost base pooled across non-registered accounts, drift against targets you set, fee drag, and fund look-through. It connects read-only and cannot place trades.

When Luum is the wrong choice

If your main need is executing rebalancing trades, Luum will not do it. Connections are read-only by construction, and that is a deliberate design decision rather than a missing feature. Passiv is the better fit.

If you have one account with three ETFs, the cross-account consolidation, pooled ACB and concentration analysis that justify Luum are solving problems you do not have. Your brokerage's own summary is sufficient.

If you want advice on what to buy, no tool in this comparison provides it, and any that appears to is worth scrutinising. Luum explicitly does not.

The honest summary

These products are less substitutable than a feature grid suggests. Passiv answers "what trades bring me back to target, and can you place them." Wealthica answers "what do I own, everywhere." Luum answers "what do I actually own across accounts, what is it really costing me, what did it really return, and what is my cost base."

The right question is which of those you are actually asking. Several people end up using more than one, which is a reasonable outcome rather than an admission of defeat.

Three products deliberately left out of the list above, because each answers a different question again. Sharesight is built around dividend and tax reporting across many markets rather than around rebalancing. Start there if your holdings reach well beyond Canada. Greenline is Canadian and recent, and takes the opposite view of brokerage connections: you enter your own data, deliberately. Wealthfolio is free and open source and keeps everything on your own machine, which is the right answer for some people and worth knowing about.

For the wider field rather than just Passiv's alternatives, see portfolio trackers in Canada, compared, which is organised by which job you need doing rather than by product.

Common questions

Is this comparison written by a competitor?

Yes, and that is disclosed at the top of the page. Luum is one of the products discussed. Read it with that in mind, and treat the places where it says a competitor is the better choice as the parts most worth checking.

What does Passiv do best?

Rebalancing. It calculates the trades that bring your portfolio back to your targets and can place them where the brokerage supports it, and its free tier is genuinely usable. Nothing in this comparison is an argument that it does that job badly.

Do any of the alternatives place trades?

Very few, and Luum does not. Most tools in this category measure and report; placing orders requires a different kind of brokerage integration and a different regulatory posture. If executing trades is what you want, that narrows the field sharply.