Our ranked list of top online sportsbooks in Canada.
The Canadian legal sports betting industry is still in its infancy – but explosive growth is coming. And that means plenty of competition in the near future, not only with regard to Canada sports betting sites, but with where to find the best and most useful guidance on where to sign up. And sportsbook promos in Canada, too!
You need a site you can trust to provide the most comprehensive and transparent look at the sportsbook industry, and your place in it. And here at Sportsbook Review, we serve as a one-stop shop both for new players looking to sign up for their first sportsbook, and existing bettors interested in trying a new sports betting site.SBR has been reviewing online sportsbooks for more than two decades, and we were nominated for 2021 Sportsbook Affiliate of the Year at the SiGMA Gaming Awards.
Please play responsibly. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem and wants help, call 1-866-531-2600 or visit Connex Ontario. Persons under 19 are not permitted to engage in online sports wagering in Ontario. Users must physically be located in Ontario to place wagers.
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Easy transfers from DFS to sportsbook
Caesars is proving to be one of the most aggressively expanding brands in sports betting. Unfortunately, like all major U.S. sportsbooks, they are quick to limit you if you go on a tear and their odds boost promos offer low maximum bet limits.
BetMGM is one of the top-rated sportsbooks in the U.S. offering some of the best live betting odds in the industry. They’re also the largest iGaming operator across the U.S.
FanDuel reigns supreme right now as the No. 1 betting site in America. And it has largely earned that spot on the strength of superior brand recognition, an easy-to-use product, an overwhelming number of markets for North America’s most popular sports, and representation in every state in which it is permitted to offer legal sports betting.
DraftKings had a solid reputation as the leading DFS provider in the country, so the shift to legal sports betting felt natural. They offer one of the most voluminous collections of ongoing promos and odds boosts in the industry as they cater to the beginner crowd. However, their reputation has dwindled as outspoken CEO Jason Robins leads the charge of the anti-profitable bettor mentality that runs rampant amongst sportsbooks that are quick to limit winning players.
bet365 is one of the largest and most popular sportsbooks globally. With a well-received mobile app, popular same-game parlays, and a wide variety of sports leagues to bet on it’s no wonder 80 million sports bettors worldwide continue to use bet365.
Online since: 2015
PointsBet’s innovative nature shows that they don’t want to just be another book you place typical bets. Unfortunately, they are quick to limit bettors on a hot streak and limit the number of promos you’re able to take advantage of, making it necessary for you to shop at other books regularly.
With a large variety of ongoing promos and contests featuring Barstool personalities, Barstool Sportsbook is a solid option available for casual bettors.
While this book won’t wow you with its design, you won’t find many apps easier to navigate – or with the sheer volume of sports markets Betway offers. And although you'll find more generous signup offers elsewhere, Betway remains a strong global sports betting brand that deserves to be mentioned among the second-tier sportsbook options in the U.S.
🇨🇦 Legal Regions | 13 (10 provinces, three territories) |
📱 Online Betting | ✅ Yes (nine provinces) |
🎰 Retail Betting | ✅ Yes (10 provinces, three territories) |
₿ Cryptocurrency | ✅ Yes |
🌎 Population (2022 est.) | 38.7 million |
Don't see the sportsbook you want? Check out our best Canada sports betting site.
We will never take shortcuts in our efforts to highlight the best sportsbooks in the business. We create accounts, interact with customer service, deposit money, navigate the site, place bets, and make withdrawals. This allows us to gain first-hand experience of the customer experience offered by each site. We are then careful to cross-check our findings with trusted colleagues and the community of nearly half a million sports bettors that use our Sportsbook Review Forum.
Only then will we assign a rating to a site. This is an ongoing process: a sportsbook can be downgraded if it starts to fall short of our strict standards. It can also be upgraded, but the sportsbook must demonstrate a significant improvement over a prolonged period of time if it is to do so. The majority of upgrades or downgrades center around bonus offers, customer service performance, and whether a sportsbook changes its bet limit policy (for better or worse).
The bottom line is that we play at the sites we recommend. Whether it be betting for NFL, Super Bowl, World Cup, MLB, NBA, or March Madness, we've been there. We have also played at the sites we do not recommend, and we can confidently warn you against using them. The sportsbooks featured on our top sportsbooks list are all safe and reliable, and we can vouch for them based on personal experience. Our stamp of approval gives you the utmost confidence when signing up with an online sportsbook.
For more on the standards we uphold in our content creation process, see our Editorial Policy.
Best Sportsbook | 🥇 Sports Interaction |
Best for Live Betting | 🥈 bet365 |
Sports Interaction has gained a reputation as one of the best online sportsbooks in Canada by providing quality service in all aspects of online gambling. It is one of the most accessible sportsbooks for Canadian players to fund, and it appeals to many due to the consistent quality across the board.
That said, SIA still has room to improve. More sports betting promos are a must, as is some sort of loyalty program aimed at giving both new and return visitors a reason to keep coming back. It might not matter as much when the competition level is low, but that won't be the case forever.
Still, it's hard to find much fault with this sports betting site. You can run into some shady bookmakers in what is considered Canada’s “grey market,” but Sports Interaction is not one of those.
Bet365 is great for casual bettors and for people that are just getting into sports betting. With its ability to parlay almost every bet and its same-game parlays, new bettors will love to put a few dollars on an NFL or NBA game for a big payout. The highly regarded mobile app, the early cashout feature, and free bets occasionally offered on marquee events are a big plus.
For more experienced bettors, they will probably be most frustrated by the vig in the ML, spread, and total markets compared to sportsbooks such as Pinnacle. Limits on super boosts can be disappointing, and some could argue that other sportsbooks have overtaken them in the props department.
However, the still wide variety of sports leagues and huge markets to bet on will please both those new to the sports betting space and those already familiar. It always pays to have a bet365 account open and funded.
William Hill has been a leading player in the gambling world for decades, and it’s easy to see why. The company has adapted to an ever-changing gambling scene, introducing numerous new developments and cutting-edge technology to keep ahead of its competition.
The William Hill we see today results from years of innovation and a merger with another industry giant, Caesars Entertainment. That’s why it remains at the top of its game. And while there are ways in which William Hill can make its product even better, we highly recommend this sportsbook - it is hard to beat.
In what is becoming a more competitive space by the day, a sportsbook needs to have a strong mobile sports betting app in order to stand out from the crowd – and William Hill has achieved the rare feat of endearing itself to both iOS and Android users.
The renowned sports betting site has an impressive rating of 4.6 out of 5 based on more than 108,000 reviews on the App Store. That’s among the highest ratings of any Canadian sports betting apps, and speaks to the sustained popularity of the app among the general sports betting public. And it has proven to be almost as popular with the Android crowd, registering an impressive 4.4 rating based on more than 23,000 reviews on Google Play.
The National Football League is king of the sports betting castle in North America, and Sports Interaction gives Canadian bettors access to thousands of available betting markets each week during the regular season and playoffs before ramping up considerably for the Super Bowl.
Sports Interaction offers a wide range of options for NFL betting, including moneylines, spreads, totals, quarter- and half-specific betting options, in-game wagers, and a decent selection of player props each Sunday during the season. And on that topic, SIA has improved significantly in offering a buffet of player props days ahead of the actual kickoffs.
For more betting sites, check out our NFL betting sites guide.
For the Super Bowl, check out our Super Bowl betting sites guide and top Super Bowl betting promos.
The growth of interest in live betting has accelerated faster than anyone expected, making it one of the most competitive elements of any sportsbook comparison. And 888sport has an edge on the competition with one of the best in-game live betting sites experiences out there.
Players can bet in-play on many of the sports offered at 888sport. There are some great odds on in-play betting here too, so if you’re looking for generous odds on matches that are already underway this is a really good sportsbook to check out.
Like many other top sportsbooks, the site provides a number of in-play options, including the option to cash out at pivotal moments in games. We checked the odds on a number of different cash-out offers and found them to be fair and in many cases quite generous in favour of the player.
Quality of odds isn't just an important factor in ranking sportsbooks – it's perhaps the most valuable component of the entire ratings process. And that goes beyond the relative odds themselves: the lower the vig (or "juice") on a standard wager, the more profit you stand to make as a bettor.
Pinnacle has a longstanding history in the sports betting space and has built a solid reputation over the past 20 years. That reputation was built by reducing juice on major markets, and that trend continues today; Pinnacle routinely offers 14-to-16 cent lines on most major North American spreads and totals, and has been known to go as low as 10 cents on occasion.
Pinnacle might not offer welcome bonuses or promos, but Canadian bettors looking for consistently lower vig absolutely have to sign up here.
While April 4, 2022, will mark a significant shift in the Canadian sports betting landscape with the introduction of regulated sports betting in Ontario, the country's gaming history goes back much farther than that.
Here's a look at the biggest moments and milestones in Canadian sports betting history:
On the heels of Parliament characterizing specific gambling activities as "Offences against Religion, Morals and Public Convenience" in the late-1880s, the federal government enacted the Canadian Criminal Code, which rendered all gambling activity illegal (including raffles and horse racing).
This set the stage for rampant underground gambling and other associated criminal activity, prompting the first in a series of gambling-related amendments made to the Criminal Code which relaxed the restrictions on gambling across a wide variety of sports and games of chance.
Less than 10 years after the Criminal Code was put in place – and due in part to protestations from the public – the federal government eased restrictions on gambling in Canada, allowing organizations to hold raffles or bingo games provided that the proceeds went to charity.
A much more significant development followed in 1910. Following a lengthy inquiry of horse race wagering by the Select Committee House of Commons, the government determined that legal betting could take place exclusively at racetracks.
This decision not only provided Canada with its first licensed and regulated form of sports betting, but it moved the nation's gambling industry more in line with the United States, which had been participating in legal wagering on horse races since the mid-1800s, and Europe, which also had a storied history of horse race betting.
Just as Canadian racetrack betting was beginning to hit its stride, the Great War (World War I) sent everything into turmoil. Following a detailed investigation by the Royal Commission in Racing Inquiry, wagering on horse racing was indefinitely suspended in 1917, having been labeled as "wasteful" and "incommensurate with the war effort."
In 1920, three years after the suspension was first enacted and two years after the end of the war, betting at racetracks was reinstated using a pari-mutuel system that first rose to prominence overseas; a pari-mutuel setup sees the "house" pool all of the wagers together before taking a cut (the vigorish, or "vig") and then dispersing the leftover amount among all successful bettors.
While the racetrack betting industry continued to grow in the decades to follow, there wasn't much progress made elsewhere with regard to legal wagering in Canada.
In 1925, three years after the government made participating in a wide range of games of chance illegal, many of those games were permitted at events like fairs or exhibitions. These games included "wheels of fortune", where participants can wager on which "space" a spinning wheel will land.
In 1938, rules were relaxed further, with certain social clubs permitted to host gambling events provided that those clubs did not take a cut of the money.
The 1950s saw a Special Joint Committee of the House of Commons and Senate convene to discuss the need for legal clarity regarding lotteries; they concluded that lotteries would not be permitted at that time, dealing Canadian gamblers a major blow.
The movement to open up more gambling options for the provinces and territories gained traction in 1967, when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau expressed interest in amending the Canadian Criminal Code to allow for regions to provide and govern their own lotteries.
The original 1968 bill was shelved when Parliament was dissolved ahead of the federal election, but with Trudeau's Liberals re-elected in a majority, an identical bill was tabled and subsequently approved in 1969 – setting the stage for Canadians to have more gambling options than ever before.
It didn't take long for the majority of provinces to implement their own lotteries. Quebec was the first, in 1970, followed closely by Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia; the four provinces joined forces to create the Western Canadian Lottery Foundation in 1974.
Yet, while the provinces eagerly added lotteries to their tax revenue options, the federal government saw potential, as well – creating the Olympic Lottery Corporation to hold lotteries coinciding with the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal. Piggybacking on the success of the OLC, Loto-Canada was formed – and ran in direct competition with the provinces, which rankled many of them.
This became a heated issue across multiple federal elections; the Liberals wanted Loto-Canada to remain in place, while the Progressive Conservatives were willing to turf it in exchange for payments from the provinces. And after winning a majority in the 1984 election, PM Brian Mulroney's team agreed to axe Loto-Canada late in 1985 in exchange for $100 million from the provinces over a three-year period, the bulk of which would go toward the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary.
As great as it was that the provinces were no longer competing with the federal government for lottery revenue, there was an even more significant development late in 1985. The Conservative amendment to the Canadian Criminal Code (Bill 81-C) forever changed the Canadian gaming landscape thanks to a pair of key inclusions:
Despite these significant changes to the Criminal Code, traditional sportsbook operators were still considered illegal – though that didn't prevent them from making their presence felt in Canada as the Internet grew in popularity. The first notable homegrown sportsbook, Sports Interaction, launched in 1999 after registering with Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, a First Nations reserve on the shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec.
With dozens of online sports betting sites able to operate within Canada (aren't loopholes great?), provincial governments were missing out on tens of millions of dollars in potential annual tax revenue. These "grey market" books were able to operate freely because they were either headquartered outside Canada, or (in the case of Sports Interaction) were licensed on First Nations territory.
The Canada Criminal Code prohibited people from either making bets in a physical location within Canada, or from accepting bets within the country. Since these online sportsbooks were doing neither, they weren't breaking any laws. They were, however, considered "unregulated", which meant that the government would not step in if a player had a dispute over winnings or withdrawals.
NDP Member of Parliament Joe Comartin tabled a private member's bill (C-290) in 2011 which sought to amend the Criminal Code to allow for single-game wagering. The bill passed unanimously through the House of Commons and subsequently landed with the Senate – but staunch opposition from prominent politicians and the four major North American pro sports teams left the bill for dead.
Ipsos polls taken over an eight-year period from 2010-18 illustrate the growing popularity of sports betting in Canada: Just 18% of respondents age 18-34 had placed an online bet in 2010, but that number grew to 32% in 2014 and to 52% in 2018.
Those trends, combined with sagging casino revenues and the U.S. Supreme Court repealing PASPA in 2018 to set legal sports betting in motion south of the border, kicked off a new groundswell of support for single-game wagering in Canada.
Bill C-218 was sponsored in February 2020 by Conservative MP Kevin Waugh, who had backed the previous sports betting bill nearly a decade earlier. And this time, there was considerably more support for the introduction of legal single-game sports wagers.
The bill was no sure thing; for starters, it didn't carry nearly the same weight as a government bill. And with a handful of senators predictably opposed to the bill and what it could mean for the integrity of sports, there was work to do to get it over the finish line.
Yet, despite these challenges (along with delays due to the turmoil surrounding COVID-19), Bill C-218 passed through a third reading and was adopted with ease by the Senate in June 2021. It was given royal assent shortly after, then passed into law by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – formally giving provinces the authority to implement their own single-game wagering legislation.
Ontario was the first province to dive into the single-game sports betting world, officially opening for business April 4, 2022.
Each province and territory within Canada is responsible for determining its own set of sports betting regulations and restrictions. Here are the main governing bodies for the most notable provinces:
Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO)
If you don't live in Canada (outside ON) you can find top online sportsbooks from other regions here:
For those living in the United Kingdom, we have our U.K. sportsbook promos resource for more information.
A handful of online sportsbooks have secured a top rating in our industry-leading guide. These sportsbooks include bet365, Sports Interaction, William Hill and Betway. These are all safe, secure, trustworthy sportsbooks with great odds, interactive bonuses and promos, and above-average features. They all have unique strengths, so you can read the reviews in more detail in order to find your perfect match.
As of October 2022, Ontario is the only region in Canada offering regulated sports betting. The sportsbooks listed on this page operate in what is referred to as the "grey market", which means they can be used by Canadians but are not regulated by provincial or federal governments.
Most Canadian sports betting sites accept a wide range of deposits, including (but not limited to):
Note that some deposit methods (credit card options in particular) might not be available in certain states or with certain cards, while others might come with a fee.
Most Canadian sports betting sites provide several withdrawal options, including (but not limited to):
Payout speeds depend on your chosen method. The best betting sites for withdrawal offer several methods. PayPal is typically within 12-24 hours but can take up to three business days with bank processing included. Only use PayPal to withdraw if you have already made a deposit via PayPal, or you’ll get delayed with ID verification processes. Online bank transfers range from 3-5 business days. ACH e-Check takes about five business days.
There are several reasons why the odds vary at different online sportsbooks. Sometimes the odds compilers at rival sportsbooks have a different opinion on how a game might unfold, so they provide distinctive odds on the outcome. In other cases, one betting site might offer more attractive odds than its rivals in a bid to drum up new business and seize market share from its competitors.
The odds on a sporting event also change to reflect the amount of money wagered on either team, and some sportsbooks are slower to react than others, presenting bettors with the opportunity to quickly gain an edge. It also depends on which sportsbooks outsource odds from a supplier like Kambi or curate their own odds in-house. It’s usually best to look for a sportsbook with in-house odds and technology like Pinnacle for the most flexible options.