Syla vs. Koinly

Which crypto tax app is better, Koinly or Syla?

Looking for a crypto tax calculator that features everything you need to calculate and report your crypto taxes to the ATO easily? If you’re torn between Koinly and Syla, we’ve put together a simple comparison, with everything you need to know about each platform.

With a superior free plan, international support, and more integrations with a cleaner data import, Koinly looks like the better option, but let’s compare the two side by side for a complete comparison.

Integrations

When it comes to integrations, Koinly comes out on top, with more than 800 integrations overall, while Syla sits at a respectable 500. Both platforms integrate with the major exchanges in Australia, including CoinSpot, CoinJar, Swyftx, and more.

However, not only does Koinly offer more integrations, but more automatic integrations via API, meaning it’s easier and quicker to import your data into the app. As well as this, Koinly offers more than 195 YouTube how-to videos, showing you exactly how to import your data into Koinly and get your tax report.

Portfolio tracking

Both Koinly and Syla work as free portfolio tracking tools as well as crypto tax calculators. Both products allow you to import your transaction data free of charge and understand your portfolio performance with metrics like individual holdings, unrealized gains and losses, balance, and ROI on each asset. But Koinly offers more information and a more attractive dashboard for users, with real-time market data on individual assets including rank, price, market cap, and more to give you a better understanding of your portfolio performance at any given time.

DeFi, NFTs, margin trading, and derivatives

Both Koinly and Syla support common, and less common, transaction types - from mining to staking to DeFi. But where Koinly shines is in understanding this data automatically. Koinly can recognize and categorize the vast majority of transactions automatically, while Syla puts the onus on users to tag and categorize their transactions in order to ensure accurate tax reports. As well as this, Koinly offers superior support for NFTs, with a dedicated NFT dashboard that allows you to view your NFTs in Koinly, view your total estimated value, cost basis, and unrealized gains/losses.

Free plan

Both Koinly and Syla offer a free plan with up to 10,000, but with Koinly, you simply get more. Syla locks features like additional reports and tax optimization features behind a paywall, whereas with Koinly, you’ll get access to all features on the free plan to make sure you’re happy with the product before you ever spend a cent. 

Koinly also offers features Syla doesn’t offer on any plan. This includes a rich tax summary where you can preview your tax liability for the year before upgrading to a paid plan to download a report and an NFT dashboard to make managing your NFT investments easier.

Usability and features

Koinly has put users first with a straightforward and user-friendly interface compared to Syla’s app, and it’s better at automatically recognizing different transaction types and tagging these automatically to save you time.

While both offer automatic error detection, support a variety of transaction types, and allow you to filter by transaction type - Koinly offers more. It offers more transaction types so it’s easier to categorize your transactions and find them if you have any data errors to reconcile.

As well as this, Koinly’s automatic error detection is superior. It flags any potential errors (for example, missing purchase history from another data source not being imported) on your transaction dashboard and on your wallet page, with links to dozens of help guides to help you easily resolve common data issues. While Syla does offer automatic error detection, it only flags this on each transaction. You can filter these transactions by those with a potential issue, but you’ll still need to go through every single transaction to resolve errors.

Finally, Koinly offers a number of customizable tax settings, which can help with grey areas of tax legislation - like transfer fees. You can work with your accountant to plan a more conservative or aggressive tax stance on these transactions. It also allows users to pick between a number of allowable cost basis methods in their country to best optimize their tax liability - for example, FIFO, LIFO, and HIFO in Australia. Meanwhile, Syla only allows investors to pick between and account type and investment type, with customizable tax settings only available from $249 a year.

Customer support

Both Koinly and Syla score well on Trustpilot, with a 4.7-star average and 4.3-star average respectively, but Koinly is far more established with more than 1,600+ reviews on Trustpilot while Syla has less than 10 reviews to date. Koinly also offers email support as well as live chat, while Syla only offers a live chat service.

As well as this, Koinly offers an expert review service where a product expert will go through your data and ensure everything has been imported correctly and your transaction data is clean to ensure an accurate tax report. Syla does not offer any such service at the time of writing, so the onus is on users (or their accountants) to ensure transaction data is imported and reconciled correctly.

Supported countries 

Syla only serves Australian investors, while Koinly offers international support with dedicated reports for more than 10 countries, support for popular tax apps like TurboTax and TaxAct, and a variety of other tax reports that can help investors globally file their crypto taxes easily.

When it comes to Australian support - Koinly also comes out on top. Koinly lets Australian users pick between the FIFO, LIFO, and HIFO accounting methods with any plan - all of which are allowed by the ATO for individual investors (not traders - they can only use FIFO). Syla allows this, but only from $249 a year, while Koinly offers it for all users, including those on a free plan.

As well as this, Koinly’s myTax report for Australian investors makes it as simple as possible to file your crypto taxes using the ATO’s free myTax service - with both a written guide and video tutorial on how to file crypto with ATO myTax.

Conclusion: Koinly wins!

Koinly comes out on top compared to Syla, with more integrations and a cleaner data import and reconciliation and a superior free plan. As well as this, while Syla can help Australian investors file, Koinly's the go-to option for international investors around the world.