CoinTracker vs. Koinly

Which crypto tax app is better, Koinly or CoinTracker?

Looking for a crypto tax calculator that does everything you need? If you’re stuck between Koinly and CoinTracker, we’ve put together a simple guide to help you compare the two. 

Integrations

If you're like most investors, you'll need a tax tool that seamlessly integrates with all your wallets, exchanges, and blockchains. Skipping even a single platform can tilt your tax calculations, either bumping up your bill or saddling you with the tedious task of manually creating and uploading CSV files to import your transactions.

When comparing CoinTracker with Koinly, Koinly is ahead on the integration front, supporting more than 800 integrations, compared to CoinTracker's 526. It's worth noting though CoinTracker mainly focuses on manual imports - not automatic. CoinTracker supports only 97 automatic integrations, and only 69 custom CSV files (meaning the CSV files you'd export from an exchange). In all other instances, you'll need to format your CSV file to a CoinTracker custom CSV file - which can take some time and finesse.

Meanwhile, more than 300 of Koinly’s integrations are automatic, so you'll connect using either API keys from your exchange or your public address for wallets and blockchains. As well as this, the vast majority of Koinly’s CSV files can simply be exported from your exchange and uploaded straight to Koinly, with no manual edits required.

As well as this, Koinly helps investors learn how to use Koinly, with more than 195 support videos that explain the ins and outs of connecting platforms, importing transactions, and finding the right CSV files or API keys, while CoinTracker only offers 43 marketing-style videos on its channel.

Portfolio tracking

Both Koinly and CoinTracker function as crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers - but many of CoinTracker's features are stuck behind paywalls and only available from $59 a year and up. Both products feature a dedicated dashboard to help you easily view and better understand your portfolio, on a macro and a micro level - although only one of them is free. As well as this, Koinly offers a dedicated NFT dashboard - which we'll cover in more depth below.

DeFi, NFTs, margin trading, and derivatives

Both Koinly and CoinTracker feature outstanding support for the various different types of transactions available to crypto investors. While transactions like mining and staking should be supported as standard by crypto tax software, other crypto tax software providers don’t support calculations for more complicated transactions like DeFi, margin trading, futures, options, and lending.

While both options offer support for all these transactions, Koinly makes DeFi tax easier for users with automatic import for more popular L1 blockchains and improved support for DeFi protocols - meaning you'll spend less time going through and manually uploading or reviewing transactions. Many users also report that CoinTracker fails to check contract addresses and remove spam tokens leaving users to resolve potentially thousands of transactions manually, while Koinly does this automatically in most instances (but if we ever miss a spam token, flag it with us, and we'll get a fix added). As well as this, Koinly offers a dedicated NFT dashboard, that helps you manage your NFTs and view unrealized gains and losses.

Free plan

Both Koinly and CoinTracker offer a free plan, but with Koinly, you get a lot more 

On a free plan, CoinTracker lets you import your transactions, view your transactions, and view a dashboard, but with a limited asset overview. To preview your tax summary or access a tax loss harvesting tool, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan.

Meanwhile, these features are all available at no cost on Koinly’s free plan. On Koinly you can import and view your transactions in detail, as well as use the dashboard to get a detailed understanding of asset performance. Plus Koinly offers a dedicated dashboard for your NFTs.

Koinly users also get a free preview of their tax liability, including capital gains, losses, income, and more (excluding Canadian users). And you can also use Koinly’s free tax loss harvesting feature to get a better understanding of your tax liability and simulate trades to see how they’d impact your tax bill.

As well as this, while CoinTracker locks some cost basis optimization methods behind a paywall, Koinly offers optimized HIFO for US investors and the ability to lock transactions and switch cost basis methods each year, free of charge.

Paid plans

When it comes to paid plans, Koinly also stands out as the better option - as excluding the cheapest CoinTracker plan, other CoinTracker plans are nearly double the price. A comparative premium plan on each platform that covers 1000 transactions works out at $99 on Koinly and $249 on CoinTracker. 

It is worth noting, however, that CoinTracker plans include all tax years, as opposed to one individual tax year like with Koinly and other crypto tax software.

Usability and features

It’s important that your crypto tax tool makes it as easy as possible to file your taxes - and both Koinly and CoinTracker offer a number of features to make this as simple as possible. 

Once your transactions are imported, both platforms allow you to easily filter by wallet, transaction type, currency, and more, to find what you’re looking for, as well as offer tags to help you categorize different kinds of transactions and income. 

As well as this, Koinly and CoinTracker both feature automatic error detection, which can help you find and resolve any errors in transaction data that may be impacting your taxes. With Koinly, this gets flagged with an icon next to your wallet, as well as warnings above your tax summary, and you’re offered a wealth of links to help guides make it easy to resolve these errors correctly. Meanwhile, with CoinTracker, you’ll have to filter your transactions by ‘needs review’, and search through their help content separately to resolve any issues.

Perhaps most importantly, as CoinTracker doesn’t let you preview your full tax summary (i.e. gains, losses, income, expenses, and more), if you do have issues with your transactions that are impacting your tax bill, you won’t know (or be able to contact customer support) until you have a paid plan. Whereas at Koinly, our customer support team will be happy to help you, free of charge, every step of the way, and you can preview your tax liability before buying a plan to make sure you’re happy with the numbers before you commit. 

One of the key complaints CoinTracker suffers from is around tax settings and accounting methods. CoinTracker offers minimal tax settings for those crypto tax gray areas and accounting method changes per year are only available for ultra users (from $599), while Koinly offers this free of charge.

Customer support

Crypto taxes get complicated and even with automatic error detection and reconciliation, if you’ve got a lot of trades, sometimes your transactions don’t line up as you’d like them to - which is where an amazing customer support team comes in. 

Koinly offers free live chat and email support for all plans, as well as priority support for trader plans with thousands of transactions to navigate. And with more than 1,600 5-star Trustpilot reviews and an average 4.7-star rating, the customer support team has helped hundreds of crypto investors navigate their taxes.

CoinTracker isn’t far off, with an average 4.7-star rating on Trustpilot from just over 1,100 reviews, but customer support is limited to paid plans only, and many reviews mention that even on paid plans the response times can be frustrating. You can read a review firsthand from a user who made the switch from Koinly to CoinTracker:

Reputation and security

Both Koinly and CoinTracker deal with sensitive data - which means security needs to be taken seriously. Koinly is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified and has not suffered any data leaks or hacks to date. Meanwhile, CoinTracker is SOC 1 and SOC 2 certified, but experienced a data leak back in 2022, although fortunately the extent of the data leaked was limited to customer emails.

Supported countries 

Both Koinly and CoinTracker have US investors covered with key tax forms like IRS Form 8949 and Schedule D, plus integration with TurboTax and TaxAct. Canadian investors? You're in luck too, with CRA Schedule 3 reports at the ready. But for the global crypto crowd, Koinly shines, offering specialized reports for places like the UK, Australia, and across Europe. For any country not covered with a tailored report. Koinly’s Complete Tax Report helps users in dozens of countries to file as it includes all the information investors may need about their capital gains, losses, income, expenses, and more.

CoinTracker doesn’t offer tailored reports for countries outside of the US and Canada, and its Koinly-equivalent ‘universal’ reports are limited to CSV files with only capital gains and transaction history. For anyone based outside of North America, CoinTracker isn’t much of an option.

Conclusion: Which is best?

Overall, both Koinly and CoinTracker are solid options for your crypto taxes. But with not only more integrations, but improved automatic integrations, as well as more support for international investors, we think Koinly stands out, and although we might be just a touch biased, we'll keep working hard to keep our product that way.