The Best ETFs of 2025: Award Announcement Coming Soon!

It should come as no surprise most of us around here think ETFs are pretty swell, and the best way for most investors to access almost any kind of investment, anywhere in the world. ETF.com has been giving out awards for well over a decade at this point, and we're always looking to celebrate how the ETF market continues to grow and evolve, solving real problems for real investors. 

With two weeks left, 2025 has been a record breaking year.  By my count, we have 1,060 new ETFs, with net flows of $66 billion, against a backdrop of 4,796 total funds with total flows of over $1.3 Trillion!  For perspective, the ETF industry crossed $1 Trillion in total assets in 2007.  It took 14 years to get to that mark from SPY's launch in 1993. Another 20 years, and we've increased assets 13-fold:

There aren't enough superlatives available to really express how shockingly huge these numbers are, for someone who's been kicking around this industry the whole time.  And given the change in the industry, it seems fitting we change the purpose and scope of the venerable ETF.com Awards.

Innovating With the Industry

At times, awards can get a bit over-inclusive. After all, we're covering the whole investing world at once.  So as the editorial crew sat down to reinvent awards the first change was obvious.

Scope: 

Awards categories are only for actual ETFs.  There are no issuer, service provider, index, legal, exchange, market maker or other awards categories. While these groups play a vital role in the ETF ecosystem and deserve recognition in their own right, our focus for this program is squarely on the products themselves and the investors who use them.  While we enjoy a good party as much as anyone else, the point of ETF.com's awards are to highlight great products that investors and advisors might want to consider using in their actual portfolios. 

Eligibility: 

U.S. listed ETFs launched in calendar year 2025 (inclusive of conversions and share-classes, exclusive of name/strategy changes)

The big change here is that all awards are just for new products.  Yes, that limits the scope dramatically -- after all, only 5% of the monstrous new flows into ETFs went into freshly minted product.  But on the other hand, you don't need to see an award to know which ETFs pulled in all the money (big, cheap beta) or where the hot-dot performance was (inevitably some ETF levered to a high-vol single stock).  

Based on these two principles, we've pared the categories for awards down to:

Asset Class Awards
•    Best New U.S. Equity ETF
•    Best New International/Global Equity ETF
•    Best New U.S. Fixed Income ETF
•    Best New International/Global Fixed Income ETF
•    Best New Crypto/Digital Asset ETP
•    Best New Commodity ETF

Strategy Awards
•    Best New Active ETF
•    Best New Options Income ETF
•    Best New Thematic ETF
•    Best New Multi-Asset/Allocation ETF
•    Best New Alternatives ETF

Overall Awards
•    Best New ETF — Overall excellence across all criteria
•    ETF Innovation of the Year — Most innovative methodology, structure, or approach

We think this captures where all the real development has been happening in ETFs: it feels like it would be a mistake not to acknowledge the rise of Active management, alts, or the explosion of options income products.  Of course, there are always issues around what funds end up in which bucket, so if you're curious:

• Buffered products live with their non-buffered counterparts (equity or fixed income).
• We're excluding all raw-leveraged products, such as 2-3X single stock and index ETFs.
• We assign "stacked" or capital efficient leverage to the Alts bucket.
• All New ETFs are eligible for the Overall categories.

When you apply those filters, we're left with 756 ETFs to consider.

Nomination and Voting

So, what do we DO with those 756 ETFs?

Historically, ETF.com (and many other media companies) conducted a public nomination process, where anyone with an email address could say "I like SPY!" and it would get a nomination.  This is problematic for a few reasons.  First of all, there are 183 issuers with new products this year. Any public nomination process would include each firm (who's paying attention) flooding an email box with nominations for their funds. This helps nobody.  

Worse, it turns nominations fundamentally into a social media competition.  Got an engaged audience? You get a nod.  2 folks in a garage with a great idea? No chance anyone's going to flood the zone to get you on the list.  This is largely an intractable problem with any online, public system.  So the first fix is:

• Nominations:  The Editorial Team at ETF.com will nominate ~5 ETFs in each category based on the following criteria:
  • Merit: Does this ETF represent genuine innovation, and does being an ETF add clear value?
  • Market Position:  Is this fund a first-mover or clearly best-in-class within its category?
  • Utility: How easy is the ETF for retail investors to understand and use appropriately? How easily can an advisor explain the ETF's portfolio purpose to clients?  
  • Staying Power: Will this fund still matter in three or more years?

Yes, these are subjective -- but any analysis of 750 ETFs covering every aspect of investing is going to inherently be subjective.  It requires some small level of trust from you, the reader, in the folks making the judgements -- we, the editorial team.  I'd like to think we've generally earned that trust over the years, but you'll have to make your own call.

For our part: we have and will continue to spend significant blocks of time reviewing every single one of those 750 ETFs as a group to highlight both the obvious big movers in 2025, and a few hidden gems you might have missed.  

Nominations will be announced on January 1st, and public voting will commence.

These awards are, ultimately, your awards, constant reader.  While our editorial team will put together the nominations (and publish an article for each category explaining why each fund was included), it's ultimately ETF.com community members who get to vote.  All you'll need is to be logged in with a free ETF.com account (I personally just link my Gmail), and you'll be able to vote for your picks starting Jan 1.  

Voting ends on January 31st.

#Winning!

Winners will be announced live at Future Proof Citywide in Miami on March, 2026.

ETF.com will be at Future Proof Citywide in Miami in force this coming March 8-11. We're hoping to have chill spaces, good tunes, and a steady diet of interesting conversations on stage and on camera. While we're there, we'll make a grand announcement about the award winners there, drop the press release, and celebrate this ridiculously innovative year in ETFs with friends and colleagues from across the industry.  

Our goal isn't just to create a PR opportunity and buy some Lucite trophies... it's to actually help investors find cool new ideas they might not have considered.  We think that's something worth doing, and something worth celebrating. 

Next Steps

Over the coming few weeks, you'll hear more from us about all of this: from the nominations to what we have planned for Future Proof Citywide in March.  We welcome your feedback, and more importantly, we welcome your votes!