CoinLedger vs. Koinly

Wondering which crypto tax app is better, Koinly or CoinLedger? Compare key features, including integrations, portfolio tracking, features, and usability to help you figure out which crypto tax calculator is right for you in 2024.

Let’s compare CoinLedger and Koinly at a glance.

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 250+ integrations. In particular, for those using lesser-known blockchains - Koinly offers API support for more than 200 blockchains compared to Coinledger's 62 - with some notable exclusions from Coinledger including popular and growing chains like Immutable X, Dogechain, ShimmerEVM, and Kava. This difference in platform support makes Koinly the better option for importing a wider spread of crypto transactions.

As well as this, Koinly offers more direct API integrations with exchanges, offering a smoother, speedier integration experience as your data is automatically imported, while Coinledger leans more towards manual imports, where you’ll need to create a custom CSV in order to import your data.

Koinly also supports users with a whopping 195 tutorial videos on YouTube showing how to import your data, compared to CoinLedger's 50.

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 caught up in early 2024, launching its own portfolio tracker, which offers largely the same features as Koinly. It does, however, lack a dedicated NFT portfolio dashboard, which we'll cover in more depth below.

DeFi, NFTs, margin trading, and derivatives

Crypto accounting has gotten complex, particularly for DeFi investors. 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 offers all the tools to deal with futures, margin trading, yield farming, liquidity mining, staking, and lending.

Coinledger comparatively is yet to add support for many advanced transactions including futures and loans, with many users facing frustrations with USDC loans. While the platform supports margin trading now, this support is limited mostly to manual support (meaning you'll have to add every transaction yourself) except Kraken which offers automated import via API. Koinly on the other hand offers both API and CSV support for margin trading (and other leveraged trading including futures) for most major platforms.

When it comes to DeFi, both platforms can handle automatically import DeFi transactions for Ethereum, other EVM-compatible chains, as well as other popular chains like Solana and Cardano. However, when it comes to handling and categorizing these transactions, Koinly can tag and categorize more transactions - like rewards - automatically and accurately. While both platforms offer transaction merging, Koinly's developers have worked hard to ensure that these transactions are handled correctly from a tax perspective for different protocols, making sure your final calculations and reports are more accurate.

As well as this, Koinly has a dedicated NFTs dashboard to help you manage your NFTs, including your realized and unrealized gains and losses. While NFTs are supported by CoinLedger, there’s no dedicated dashboard to help you manage your NFT investments.

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. The big difference is what you get on Koinly’s free plan versus CoinLedger’s.

Koinly lets you do and see more, for free. With Koinly you get a free crypto and NFT portfolio tracker and tax optimization 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.

When it comes to paid plans, both offer comparable price points, with plans starting from $49 per year for 100 transactions through to the top plan of $199 for 3,000+ transactions.

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. 

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 the majority of these transactions automatically, meaning you'll need to add many transactions 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. Coinledger has five settings available, but these are all related to existing tax rules and only available for when tax offices may differ in rules country to country.

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.

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 compared to other competitors. This is according to TrustPilot. Koinly’s 1,600+ reviews give it an average rating of 4.7 stars. while CoinLedger comes in with 1,200+ reviews but with a score of 4.8 stars. From one user's experience firsthand, Koinly offered the superior experience:

While both platforms offer an expert review service starting from $499, Koinly's service has been running since 2019 and is a proven success for users, while CoinLedger only started this service in 2024.

Both platforms offer comparable refund policies, but a quick glance through any CoinLedger Trustpilot review will indicate that many users have struggled to get refunds - even when the tax reports generated have been incorrect due to technical limitations or a bug on CoinLedger's end.

Reputation and security

Both platforms benefit from strong partnerships across the industry, with both platforms partnering with large exchanges and wallets like Binance, Crypto.com, and MetaMask. But Koinly has had more partnerships including with Revolut, Nexo, NEAR, NiceHash, and Wirex to name just a few. As well as this, Koinly partners with tax reporting platforms globally like Weathlsimple and Clear Tax to make filing taxes easier for users worldwide.

As well as this, many Voyager users who were impacted by the collapse of the platform have complained that they were forced into purchasing a plan with CoinLedger due to an exclusive partnership in order to generate their Form 8949 from the platform. Understandably, this left a bad taste in many investors' mouths especially given these users had already faced losses out of their control.

When it comes to security, back before its rebrand to CoinLedger, CryptoTrader.Tax suffered a data breach in 2020 impacting more than 1,000 customers, where personal data from accounts was put up for sale on a dark net forum. Comparatively, Koinly has not suffered any data leaks or hacks to date and is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified.

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 10+ 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: Which is best?

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 automatic handling for transactions like margin trading, derivatives, loans, and more, then, while we may be just a little biased, Koinly is the better option.