Vanguard's U.S. stock funds fees average $18, according to Morningstar.
Despite their higher costs, just 14 percent of active broad-market, large-cap stock funds beat their passive counterparts over 10 years through 2016.
American Funds defended its strategy. Low-fee shares of its largest fund, the $155 billion Growth Fund of America, beat most of its peers over five years, according to Thomson Reuters' Lipper unit.
"We are and will always be an investment management company first, run by people with deep expertise and phenomenal track records - enabled by some of the world's leading next-generation technology," an American Funds spokeswoman said in a statement.
Fidelity said individual active managers continued to beat the market.
"The active/passive debate usually focuses on the industry as a whole and the performance of the average active manager, but as with every industry there are some that are better than others," a Fidelity spokesman said in an email.
Will Danoff, one of Fidelity's best stock pickers, experienced one of his worst years as a portfolio manager in 2016 when his $107 billion Contrafund trailed the S&P 500 Index by nearly 9 percentage points. But so far in 2017, Danoff is working the magic that has been the rule during his nearly 27 years managing investor money. Contrafund's year-to-date total return of 10.3 percent is easily beating the S&P 500 by nearly 4 percentage points.
T. Rowe Price declined to comment.
For its part, BlackRock's actively managed equity business posted $20.2 billion in outflows last year, according to its earnings report. Its move to a quantitative focus underscores the eroding confidence in the ability of humans to pick large-cap stocks that outperform benchmarks such as the S&P 500.
Analysts say, however, the industry will have a chance to prove its worth if there is a stock market correction.