Greenline vs Passiv

Passiv is a popular tool among Canadian self-directed investors, especially those who use Questrade. It connects to your brokerage, lets you set target allocations, and helps you rebalance with one-click trades. It takes the manual work out of maintaining your portfolio.

Greenline does something different. It doesn’t connect to your brokerage and doesn’t make trades. It’s a tracking and understanding tool that shows you the full picture across all your accounts.

These two tools overlap less than you might think. In fact, they complement each other well.

What Passiv does well

Passiv solves a specific problem: keeping your portfolio on target. If you’ve decided you want 25% Canadian equity, 50% US equity, and 25% international, Passiv monitors your allocation and tells you when it’s drifted. When you add new cash, it calculates exactly what to buy to bring everything back in line.

The one-click trade feature is genuinely useful. Instead of logging into your brokerage, calculating how many shares of each ETF to buy, and placing individual orders, Passiv does the math and queues up the trades for you. You review and confirm.

For investors who use a model portfolio approach (like a classic three-fund or all-equity ETF strategy), Passiv saves real time and removes the risk of making math mistakes during rebalancing.

What Passiv wasn’t designed for

Passiv is a rebalancing tool. It’s focused on getting your trades right, not on giving you a broader view of your finances.

Single brokerage focus. Passiv connects to Questrade (and a few other brokerages). If you have accounts at multiple institutions, Passiv only sees the one it’s connected to. Your group RRSP at work, your spouse’s accounts, or an old RRSP at your bank won’t show up.

Limited tracking and reporting. Passiv shows your current holdings and how they compare to your targets. It doesn’t provide detailed performance history, fee analysis, net worth tracking over time, or deep breakdowns of what’s inside your ETFs.

No tax context across accounts. Passiv can help you rebalance within an account, but it doesn’t give you a cross-account view of your tax situation. It doesn’t track your adjusted cost base across brokerages or help you understand your total allocation across TFSAs, RRSPs, and non-registered accounts.

Trade-focused, not insight-focused. Passiv answers “what should I buy next?” Greenline answers “what do I actually have, and how is it doing?”

How Greenline compares

Greenline is built for the tracking and understanding side of portfolio management.

• Multi-account dashboard combining every brokerage and account type into one view.
• Holdings deep dive that breaks down your allocation by region, sector, and asset class, including what’s inside each ETF.
• Fee analysis showing your total cost across all investments.
• Performance tracking based on your actual transaction history.
• Net worth tracking that shows your full investment picture over time.
• ACB tracking for tax season, calculated across all your accounts.
• Daily email summary covering your entire portfolio.

Greenline doesn’t make trades or rebalance. You upload your data through CSVs, PDFs, or screenshots. No brokerage connection required.

Using them together

If you use Passiv for rebalancing at Questrade and Greenline for tracking everything, you get the best of both.

Passiv handles the mechanics of keeping your Questrade portfolio on target. Greenline shows you the broader view: how that Questrade account fits alongside your other accounts, what your total allocation really looks like, and how your full net worth is trending.

After you rebalance with Passiv, export your updated data and upload it to Greenline. Your full picture stays current, and you can see how your latest trades fit into the bigger picture.

For Canadian self-directed investors who want both precision in their trades and clarity in their tracking, using Passiv and Greenline together covers the full workflow.