Canadians are switching brands at the grocery store. Quaker gets swapped for Made Good, Beyond Meat for Gusta, American chicken for Canadian chicken. Grocery stores mark Canadian products on the shelf and shoppers look for the marks.
Software has not gotten the same attention. Businesses and consumers who have changed their grocery list because of the trade war are still paying American companies every month for their email tool, their payroll, their VPN, their ticketing, and their food delivery. People want to switch. Nobody has published the list.
Part of the problem is that software has no country-of-origin label, and a company’s website rarely says where it is headquartered. A lot of Canadian software companies sell to the whole world, so their marketing does not mention that they are based in Ottawa or Winnipeg or Vancouver.
So here is the list. Every one of these is a Canadian company positioned as a reasonable alternative to an American incumbent, sorted by what it replaces. Where a switch is a bigger project (payroll, accounting, your storefront), treat this as a shortlist to evaluate, not a reason to cancel anything tomorrow. Where it is a small one (VPN, password manager, delivery app, where you buy tickets), you can do it this week.
Payments and money
Lightspeed over Square. Montreal-based point of sale and payments for retail, restaurants, and golf.
Wealthsimple Tax over TurboTax. CRA and NETFILE certified, with a pay-what-you-want basic tier.
Float over Ramp or Brex for corporate cards and spend management.
Selling and storefront
Shopify over BigCommerce, Wix, or Squarespace. The most obvious one on the list, and still the one plenty of Canadian shops skip.
TouchBistro over Toast for restaurant point of sale.
Amilia over Mindbody or ActiveNetwork for rec programs, registrations, and memberships.
Zeffy over GoFundMe or Givebutter, and CanadaHelps over Classy, for fundraising.
Back office
FreshBooks over QuickBooks or Xero for invoicing and accounting.
Payworks over ADP or Paychex for payroll. Rise People over Gusto for HR and payroll together.
Certn over Checkr for background checks.
Maximizer over Salesforce or HubSpot at the SMB end of CRM.
Cyberimpact over Mailchimp. It is built around CASL consent rules, which is the actual reason to switch.
1Password over Roboform or LastPass for password management.
Security and privacy
Sync.com over Dropbox. Data stays in Canada, with zero-knowledge encryption.
Windscribe over NordVPN or ExpressVPN. Owned entirely by its founders and staff, with no outside investors.
Field Effect over CrowdStrike or Huntress for managed security at small and mid-size teams.
Work tools
Fellow over Otter or Fathom for meeting notes.
Vidyard over Loom for recorded video.
Hootsuite over Sprout Social or Buffer for social media scheduling.
Ada over Intercom or Zendesk for support automation.
Coveo over Algolia for site search.
Industry software
Clio over MyCase, PracticePanther, or Filevine for law firm management.
goHeather over Harvey for AI contract review and drafting. Toronto-based, and built for companies and legal teams that review contracts in volume.
Jane over SimplePractice or Mindbody for clinics.
Jobber over ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro for trades and home services.
D2L Brightspace over Canvas or Blackboard for schools. Docebo over Cornerstone for corporate learning. Thinkific over Teachable or Kajabi for selling courses.
Consumer
Skip the Dishes over UberEats for delivery.
AdmitONE over Eventbrite for finding things to do and for selling tickets to your own events. We are an event ticketing platform based in Toronto and we compete with Eventbrite and Ticketmaster for small, mid-size, and large events, so we have an obvious interest in you making this particular switch. The rest of the list we put together because we went looking for it ourselves and could not find one.
How to check if a company is Canadian
The fast way is the footer of the website or the “About” page, which usually names a head office. If that fails, LinkedIn lists headquarters for almost every company. Ownership is harder to pin down, since some Canadian-founded companies have been bought by American ones and some American-founded ones have moved north, but headquarters is a reasonable place to start.
If we missed a category or a company, tell us and we will add it. The list is only useful if it stays current.
