CoinLedger vs. Koinly

Wondering which crypto tax app is better, Koinly or CoinLedger? Compare key features, including integrations, portfolio tracking, features, and usability.

Are you in the market for a cryptocurrency tax calculator? If it’s a toss-up between Koinly and CoinLedger, here is a roundup of the facts to help you make a great decision. With a generous free plan, international tax reports, a free portfolio tracker, and more integrations, Koinly looks like the best CoinLedger alternative on paper. But is Koinly truly the better option?

Let’s look at CoinLedger and Koinly side by side.

Crypto platform integrations

Why sweat over who's got more integrations? Both Koinly and CoinLedger cover top-tier platforms like Coinbase and Binance. But with 800 crypto platforms, Koinly brings more to the table with an extra 168 integrations, plus more wallet integrations. This difference in platform support makes Koinly the better option for importing a wider spread of crypto transactions. Once all transactions are imported, Koinly automatically detects and differentiates transfers (non-taxable) from trades (taxable).

But it’s the tech powering Koinly’s integrations that sets it apart. To make life easier for crypto investors, Koinly offers more direct API integrations with both exchanges and blockchains, offering a smoother, speedier integration experience as your data is automatically imported. CoinLedger isn't far behind but leans more towards manual imports, where you’ll need to create a custom CSV in order to import your data. In a head-to-head matchup, Koinly's not just bigger in integration numbers; it's also more user-friendly and saves you time.

Bonus comparison: Koinly doesn't just stop at integrations. It supports users with a whopping 195 tutorial videos on YouTube. CoinLedger does a reasonable job, offering 50 videos. 

Portfolio tracking

Koinly isn’t just a crypto tax calculator, it’s also a free portfolio tracker that can help you keep track of your portfolio including:

• Your overall portfolio holdings

• Unrealized gains and losses

• Individual asset balances

• Individual asset ROI

• Individual asset market value 

• Fiat held on exchanges

• A dedicated NFT dashboard with image previews

• Your transactions, in detail, across all imported wallets, exchanges, and blockchains

CoinLedger has finally launched a portfolio tracker in BETA as of February 2024! While many of the features are still in development, you can now view realized and unrealized gains for assets, although other features are still in development.

DeFi, NFTs, margin trading, and derivatives

It’s 2024 and crypto investing has gotten impressively complex. DeFi has well and truly changed the game, but with that comes super challenging taxation rules and loopholes. Relying on a crypto tax calculator that hasn’t built or maintained the features to deal with the complex stuff could mean a serious miscalculation on your taxes. Koinly’s pricing page shows that it offers all the tools to deal with futures, margin trading, yield farming, liquidity mining, staking, and tokens.

As well as this, Koinly has a dedicated NFTs dashboard to help you manage your NFTs, including your realized and unrealized gains and losses. But when looking at CoinLedger’s pricing page, it’s unclear whether or not CoinLedger offers support for more complex transaction types. While NFTs are supported by CoinLedger, there’s no dedicated dashboard to help you manage your NFT investments. And when it comes to margin trading, futures, options, and other CFDs, CoinLedger is yet to add support. As well as this, CoinLegder doesn’t support loan transactions, meaning it’s unable to help users using common lending platforms.

Free plan

Both Koinly and CoinLedger work on the same ‘freemium’ model. While it’s free to import and track transactions, you need a paid plan to download a tax report. In fact, that’s how all of the crypto tax calculators work. The big difference - and it’s a BIG difference - is what you get on Koinly’s free plan, versus CoinLedger’s. Koinly simply lets you do and see more, for free. With Koinly you get a free portfolio tracker and tax loss harvesting tool that can help you identify your unrealized gains and losses, and simulate selling your crypto to see its impact on your tax bill. 

The next major benefit is Koinly’s free tax summary available to all users, excluding Canadian taxpayers. It gives you so much important information that you could almost file your taxes with the summary alone. CoinLedger in contrast keeps the details locked behind a paywall, so you won’t be able to check if you’re happy with your tax calculations until you’ve upgraded to a paid plan. Koinly's setup is a true 'try before you buy' experience.

Usability and features

When it comes to tracking your crypto portfolio to report your crypto taxes, the tool you need depends on the complexity of your transactions. Both CoinLedger and Koinly allow you to browse your complete transaction history across all imported wallets, exchanges, and blockchains, and filter your transactions by wallets, transaction type, date, currency, and more. 

Next, let's look at how the two platforms allow you to view your imported transactions. Both automatically tag transaction types where the imported data is provided and allow users to tag transactions manually where it is not.

While CoinLedger is an ideal solution for novice investors, the transaction types - and their tags - are limited compared to Koinly, in particular for those involved in more complicated transactions like margin trading, futures, options, or derivatives where only the realized PnL is taxable, CoinLedger is unable to handle these transactions even manually, while Koinly can do it automatically in most instances.

Of course, we all want to know that our tax reports are correct. To help, both platforms feature automatic error detection, with extensive documentation and troubleshooting guides on how to resolve common transaction errors. But Koinly might just have the edge with a dedicated discussion forum and subreddit with strong community support to help guide you through less common errors. 

Finally, let's look at customizable accounting settings. Both platforms will give you standard settings based on your country and the specific tax guidance there, but we all know crypto tax is far from simple. Many tax offices like the IRS simply haven’t clarified specifics yet on transactions, for example, transfer fees, liquidity transactions, and crypto cashback all remain tax grey areas for investors. It goes without saying you should always speak to an experienced accountant before deciding how to treat these transactions, but Koinly allows you to pick between a more conservative stance by treating these transactions as taxable, or a more aggressive stance, by treating these transactions as non-taxable, while CoinLedger has no settings available for these transactions.

Moreover, in countries like France or Austria where crypto to crypto trades are not taxable, or in Germany where you’re required to use wallet-based cost tracking, CoinLedger does not take this into consideration in your calculations and there are no options in your settings to amend this.

As well as this, Koinly supports more cost basis methods internationally, ensuring your crypto taxes are calculated correctly, and how your tax office requires. Koinly supports FIFO, LIFO, HIFO (including optimized HIFO), ACB, the DGFiP’s approved PVCT (or PFU) method, the HMRC’s Share Pooling method, and Canada’s Adjusted cost basis method, while CoinLedger only offers FIFO, HIFO, LIFO, and ACB.

Koinly has put usability first- and it seems like they get it right, with more than 1,000,000 happy users worldwide.

Customer support

Crypto tax can get complicated, so it makes sense that you’d want to be able to reach out to a help desk when you need it. Fortunately, it’s good news all round with both Koinly and CoinLedger offering excellent customer support. This is according to TrustPilot. Koinly’s 1,500+ reviews give it an average rating of 4.8 stars. CoinLedger comes in with only 900+ reviews but also has a score of 4.8 stars.

Supported Countries 

If you’re based in the US, then both Koinly and CoinLedger are a good option with dedicated IRS tax reports, as well as TurboTax and TaxAct reports Additionally, CoinLedger provides custom reports for TaxSlayer & H&R Block.

Internationally though, is where Koinly jumps ahead. While CoinLedger provides custom reports for Australia’s ATO and Canada’s CRA, other international users are limited to generic CSV exports for capital gains, income, end-of-year positions, and an audit trail report.

Meanwhile, Koinly generates custom reports not only for the USA, Australia, Canada, and the UK, but also for Sweden, France, Finland, Denmark, and Switzerland. As well as this, Koinly can generate 13 specialized tax reports for all users worldwide. This makes Koinly a far better option for crypto investors in Europe, particularly. 

And for anyone else, Koinly offers a Complete Tax Report PDF for just about any country. This is a universally relevant report, covering both capital gains and income calculations plus a lot of added details. CoinLedger doesn't offer a comparative universal report, unfortunately.

Conclusion: Koinly wins!

Overall, if you’re in the US and you only want a crypto tax calculator that supports the major exchanges, wallets, and blockchains, CoinLedger may suit your needs. But if you’re looking for a free portfolio tracker and tax calculator, without features hidden behind frustrating paywalls, and with superior support for integrations and transactions like margin trading, derivatives, loans, and more, Koinly comes out on top.