Empower Alternatives for Canadian Investors: How to Track Your True After-Fee Return in 2026

I work with data for a living, and for years I still could not have told you what my own accounts were actually doing month to month. Not because the statements were missing. Because they were built to be glanced at, not understood. The balance was there and the holdings were there, but the one number I actually wanted, what I was really earning after everything it cost me to hold, was nowhere on the page.

That number has a name, your true return after fees, and surfacing it is the whole reason portfolio trackers exist. So when people go looking for a tool to show it, they tend to land on the same suggestion: Empower, the popular US dashboard that used to be called Personal Capital. If your money is in Canada, that suggestion is a dead end. Empower’s own support page says it only links US financial institutions in US dollars. Point it at an RRSP holding XEQT at a Canadian broker and it sees nothing.

Here is the size of what stays hidden while you go without a tool that works here. Say you hold $50,000 in a broad Canadian ETF with a 0.24% MER, the management expense ratio, which is the slice of your money the fund quietly keeps each year. That fee alone is about $120 a year, taken inside the fund before it ever reaches a statement. Add a currency conversion or two and a few brokerage fees, and the return you think you earned drifts from the return you actually kept by more than most people would guess. This is an illustrative example on fixed assumptions, not a guarantee. The point is only that the gap is real, and you cannot manage a number you never see.

So I did the obvious thing and set up a sample portfolio in a tracker that does work north of the border, to see exactly what it surfaces that a brokerage screen leaves out. It showed more than I expected, with one honest catch I will get to.

This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or platform endorsement.

ETF examples are provided for educational purposes only and are not investment recommendations or endorsements. Comparable products from other providers may exist.

Contents

1. Why Empower does not help you in Canada
2. What a portfolio tracker actually does for a fee-focused investor
3. Where Sharesight fits, and what it shows you
4. What Sharesight costs in Canada
5. Where Sharesight falls short
6. Canadian alternatives worth knowing about
7. Who this actually suits
8. FAQ

Why Empower does not help you in Canada

The block is total, not a workaround you can toggle off. Empower, which retired the Personal Capital name in a February 2023 rebrand and now runs as the Empower Personal Dashboard, links your accounts through a network of US institutions. There is no Canadian version behind a setting, and no “link a foreign account” option. A Canadian bank or brokerage is simply not on the list.

What stings is that Empower is genuinely good at the job you came for. Its free dashboard includes a fee analyzer, the exact tool a cost-conscious investor would reach for, alongside a net worth tracker and a retirement planner. Every bit of it sits behind the US-only wall.

And the gap bites harder here than a missing app would in most places, because the Canadian account structure is the whole game. A TFSA, a tax-free savings account, and an RRSP, a registered retirement savings plan, are taxed in almost opposite ways, and a tracker that cannot even see them cannot help you reason about either. “Just use Empower” is advice written for someone else’s country.

What a portfolio tracker actually does for a fee-focused investor

The missing number from the top of this piece has a mechanical fix, and this is it. A portfolio tracker is not a broker and does not hold your money. It reads your trades and holdings, then does the arithmetic your brokerage app quietly skips. The output you want is a true return, your gain after the things that eat into it: the fees you paid, the dividends you received and when they landed, and the currency movement on anything held in US dollars.

The reason a brokerage screen cannot give you this is a piece of jargon worth defining, because it is where these tools earn their keep. A money-weighted return is the return that accounts for the timing and size of every contribution you made, not just the price at the start and the price at the end. Put a few thousand dollars in right before a good stretch and a bit more right before a bad one, and the simple “up 8%” figure your account shows can be meaningfully wrong about what your money actually did. A tracker gets it right, and it is close to impossible to eyeball once you have been contributing every payday for a few years.

Does it Calculate How Much MER Dollars Does the Investor Pays?

One honest limit, so the tool does not get oversold. A fund’s MER is already baked into the fund’s price, so any tracker showing your ETF’s return is showing it after that fee, whether or not it prints the fee on its own line. A tracker will not hand you a tidy “you paid $118 in MER this year” number. What it gives you is the outcome of that fee, your real net return, plus the explicit costs it can see, like brokerage commissions and conversion charges. That is still a far clearer picture than the one you start with, and it is the picture Empower would have handed you if it worked here.

Figure: Sample Portfolio Performance Report made in Sharesight

Where Sharesight fits, and what it shows you

Sharesight is the tracker I set up that sample portfolio in, and it is one of the more established options that works properly in Canada. It is used in more than 100 countries, prices in Canadian dollars on its Canadian site, and connects to major Canadian brokers including Questrade, CIBC Investor’s Edge, and RBC Direct Investing, alongside hundreds more. You can also import trades from a file or by forwarding your trade-confirmation emails, which helps on the days a broker’s direct connection is patchy.

What it surfaces is the part a fee-focused reader came for, and the sample made it plain. It calculates your true return after fees, taxes, and currency, tracks dividends and dividend reinvestment on their own, and on the paid plans it produces tax reports, including a taxable-income report that splits your local and foreign income. For a Canadian holding US-listed funds, that foreign-income split is genuinely useful, because it is exactly the cost and tax detail a plain balance screen never shows. It is the number the intro said was missing, finally sitting on one page.

Figure: Sample portfolio built in Sharesight to show the report layout. Not a real portfolio, and not investment advice.

That is the honest case for it. There is also a catch, and the next section is where I keep the promise from the top to name it.

ETF examples are provided for educational purposes only and are not investment recommendations or endorsements. Comparable products from other providers may exist. Brokerages are named only to show which platforms Sharesight imports from, not as recommendations.

What Sharesight costs in Canada

Sharesight runs a free plan plus three paid tiers. Annual billing saves roughly 25% over paying monthly. Here are the current Canadian prices, taken from Sharesight’s Canadian pricing page.

Sharesight Canadian plans, as of August 2026 (CAD)

Plan	Annual (per month)	Monthly	Portfolios	Holdings	Tax reports
Free	$0	$0	1	10 (including closed)	No
Starter	$9	$12	1	30 (including closed)	Yes (basic)
Standard	$23.25	$31	4	Unlimited	Yes (advanced)
Premium	$29.25	$39	10	Unlimited	Yes (full)

Prices in CAD, taxes may apply, and they change. Verify on Sharesight’s Canadian pricing page before you rely on any figure here. The free plan does not include tax reports.

The free plan is a real plan, not a teaser, but the 10-holding cap is the catch, and I will get to why in a moment. The paid tiers are priced per how many separate portfolios you run and how many holdings you hold, not per feature you unlock one at a time, which is a cleaner model than some rivals use. If it sounds worth a look, you can start on Sharesight’s free plan and only move up a tier if you outgrow it.

Where Sharesight falls short

Here is the promised catch, and for someone arriving from a free US tool it is the one that lands first: Sharesight is really a paid product. There is a free plan, and it is a real plan, but the version that does the fee-and-tax reporting this whole article is about is a subscription. If you came looking for a free Empower replacement, that is the honest news to sit with before you get attached.

The free plan’s own limits make the point. It caps at 10 holdings, and it counts every unique security you have ever held against that number, including ones you have already sold. A buy-and-hold investor who has swapped funds a couple of times over the years can hit that ceiling without owning 10 things today. The free plan also does not include tax reports at all. So the “there is a free tier” reassurance is true, but thinner than it sounds, and it nudges you toward a paid plan sooner than the headline implies.

Does Sharesight handles Canadian Securities?

The second catch is that Sharesight is a global product, not a Canada-first one. It handles Canadian dollars, Canadian securities, and Canadian broker imports, but its tax machinery was built for many countries at once, and its capital-gains calculator is labelled for Australia. The taxable-income report is useful at Canadian tax time, but if your priority is adjusted cost base tracking built strictly to Canadian rules, a Canada-native tool may fit better. Adjusted cost base, or ACB, is the running tax cost of a holding that the Canada Revenue Agency expects you to track, and it gets fiddly once you have reinvested dividends for a few years.

And it is not a broker, which is the correct design for a tracker but worth saying plainly. You cannot deposit, trade, or withdraw through it. If all you actually want is a quick glance at a single balance, Sharesight is more tool than you need, and a simpler free app will do the job.

Canadian alternatives worth knowing about

Sharesight is not the only tool that works here, and the honest move is to point at the others. I have not run my own money through these, so treat this as a map of the options rather than a hands-on verdict, and check each one’s current pricing yourself, because it moves.

How the Canadian options compare

	Works with Canadian accounts	After-fee return and fee visibility	Canadian tax and ACB	Account updates
Empower	No	Yes, but US-only	No	Automatic
Sharesight	Yes	True after-fee return	Taxable-income report, not CRA-native ACB	Automatic plus import
Wealthica	Yes	Net-worth view, basic	Limited	Automatic, aggregator
Greenline	Yes	True return plus MER analysis	ACB to Canadian rules	Manual upload

Capabilities only, not a quality ranking, and pricing is left out on purpose because it changes too often to print. Verify current terms on each tool’s own site.

Wealthica

Wealthica is the closest thing to Empower’s aggregation. It is a Montreal-based aggregator that connects to dozens of Canadian institutions and pulls your banks, brokers, and even real estate into one net-worth view. If what you missed about Empower was the single-pane picture of everything, this is the replacement. The trade-offs: it does not compute adjusted cost base as deeply as a tax-first tool, and its pricing has swung over the years, from a free tier to paid-only and back to a free-plus-paid structure, so confirm what today’s free plan actually includes before you count on it.

Greenline

Greenline is built Canada-first, and it is the one that leans into fees. It tracks TFSA, RRSP, and FHSA accounts natively, calculates adjusted cost base to Canadian rules, and runs an MER analysis across your holdings so you can see what you are paying, which is squarely the point of this whole site. Its founder is upfront about the catch: there is no automatic bank-linking, so you upload a fresh file each time you want current data, a few minutes rather than zero. If you value tax and fee accuracy over convenience, that is a fair trade. If you want it to update untouched, it is not for you.

Passiv

Passiv is a different animal, more a rebalancing companion than a pure tracker. It shows where your allocation has drifted and where your next contribution should go to bring it back without selling. Its free version handles multiple accounts, and its full version comes free with a Questrade account. Worth knowing if rebalancing, rather than reporting, is your actual chore.

And if you would rather not pay anyone, a spreadsheet with a community adjusted-cost-base template still does the job. It is free and endlessly flexible, and it costs you a few hours of setup and the discipline to keep it current.

This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or platform endorsement. Tools are described from their published features, not from personal use, and brokerages are named only as integrations, not recommendations.

The point is not that one of these is the winner. It is that “just use Empower” has several genuinely Canadian replacements, and the right one turns on what you care about most: holistic aggregation with Wealthica, Canadian tax and fee accuracy with Greenline, rebalancing with Passiv, or the true-return and dividend reporting Sharesight does well.

Who this actually suits

I can tell you the value of seeing that number, because of what happened the one time I made myself look. Years ago I held a set of advisor-recommended bank mutual funds, the kind nobody quite talks you out of. When I finally sat down and added up the fees, they ran somewhere between 1.5% and 2.5% a year, which on a balance around $50,000 worked out to roughly $750 to $1,250 leaving my account annually. Those are illustrative figures on a fixed balance, but close enough to the truth to sting. That was the moment fees stopped being an abstraction and started looking like what they are, reverse compound interest, quietly working against me instead of for me. I moved the money, not because a rule said to, but because I could finally see the cost.

That is the person Sharesight suits: someone who wants the number in front of them, because seeing it is usually what turns intention into action. More concretely, it fits if you hold more than a handful of funds, care about your real after-fee return rather than a headline balance, and want dividend and tax reporting you are not rebuilding in a spreadsheet every March. It fits especially well if you hold anything in US dollars, where currency and foreign-income effects are exactly where a spreadsheet quietly lies to you.

It is probably overkill if you own one or two all-in-one ETFs, never plan to sell, and just want to watch the balance climb. In that case the free plan, or a simpler app, is genuinely enough, and there is no shame in that being the honest answer.

ETF examples are provided for educational purposes only and are not investment recommendations or endorsements. Comparable products from other providers may exist.

FAQ

The one thing to take away

Empower is a good tool aimed at the wrong country, and Sharesight is one honest answer for this one, with real limits and a few genuine rivals. If you take a single thing from all of this, though, do not let it be a tool name.

Let it be the habit. The problem at the top of this piece was never a missing app, it was a number you could not see: what you actually kept after fees, in your own accounts, in your own currency. A tracker is just the fastest way to put that number in front of you. Once a quarter, look past the headline balance and check what your money truly earned after costs, and when you want to see what a fee does to that number over the decades, run it yourself instead of trusting a marketing figure.

Measuring what you kept is one half of the job. Watching the market is the other, and a different tool does that one. But the half that decides your outcome is this one. Get in the habit of seeing your real, after-fee number, with Sharesight or a spreadsheet or whatever you will actually keep using, and you stop hoping your fees are reasonable and start knowing. That is the whole game.

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