Zerodha was once India’s largest stockbroker in terms of number of clients, but it’s now slipped to third place.
Angel One has overtaken Zerodha to become India’s second-largest stockbroker by active clients, according to National Stock Exchange (NSE) data for October. It’s the first change at the top of the brokerage pecking order in three years, and it comes at Zerodha’s expense.
Angel One’s active client base rose to 69.98 lakh at the end of October, up from 67.56 lakh in September, after the platform added 2.43 lakh new clients during the month. Zerodha’s active client base, meanwhile, shrank for the second consecutive month, falling to 67.59 lakh from 67.92 lakh — a decline of 5,313 clients.
The swing is a sharp reversal from just a month earlier. In September, Zerodha still held a lead of nearly 36,000 active clients over Angel One, after adding 36,956 clients of its own that month. That cushion has now evaporated entirely, and Zerodha finds itself in third place.
Groww remains comfortably ahead of both at the top of the table. The Bengaluru-based platform added 3.04 lakh clients in October to take its total active client base to 1.38 crore, giving it a 29.4% share of NSE’s active clients, up from 29.2% in September. Groww overtook Zerodha for the top spot back in October 2023, and has only extended its lead since.
Together, Groww, Angel One and Zerodha now account for nearly 60% of NSE’s total active client base. Overall, the exchange’s active client base grew 1.3% month-on-month to 4.67 crore at the end of October, adding 6.15 lakh clients during the month.
The reordering highlights a broader divergence in strategy among India’s top discount brokers. Angel One’s growth has increasingly been powered by mutual fund investors, a segment that has helped it claw back share after losing around 10 lakh active investors through 2025. Zerodha and Angel One have traditionally leaned more on traders than on mutual fund distribution, but Angel One’s push into that space appears to be paying off faster. Zerodha lost close to 11 lakh investors over the same period last year, and its decline over the past two months suggests that pullback hasn’t fully reversed.
For Zerodha, long seen as the bellwether of India’s discount broking industry, slipping to third place is as much a symbolic blow as a numerical one. The company remains India’s most profitable broking platform by a wide margin, but active client count — the metric NSE tracks and the industry watches closely — now tells a different story about where new investors are choosing to sign up.