CoinTracker Review - Best Crypto-Tax Software of 2022
- By Zachary Greene
- |
- Updated on September 24th, 2022
CoinTracker is without a doubt the simplest and easiest to use Cryptotax tools in 2022 — not only does it have an easy to use interfaces but when we tested it out ourselves and went through the process to file our taxes this year with CoinTracker — the process was simpler and more straightforward than other crypto-tax softwares, including API key access for basically all platforms (easier than CSV’s).
The entire process from start to finish (including sign-up) took us only 54 minutes to complete and that’s despite us having dozens of exchanges, DeFi wallets, and some P2P transactions we needed to input manually. That’s less than any other platform we tested this year — and we tested basically all of them.
| 💰 Fees & Pricing | Relatively Expensive |
| 💻 Platform Quality | Very Good |
🛠 Customer Service| Above-Average | |
| 🥇 Best For | Typical Investors |
There are some downsides to CoinTracker we’ll go into later on in this article — however these ultimately more or less are regarding their price. CoinTracker costs a bit more than other crypto-tax platfroms, particularly if you have many cryptocurrency transactions you need to report.
Because of this for active traders or people who use crypto-trading bots we’d say TokenTax is also worth considering if you want a premium experience similar to CoinTracker, but with more transactions, and if you really need tons of transactions TaxBit offers unlimited transactions included in all their plans, making them the best budget option currently.
With that being said, if the price isn’t an issue, CoinTracker is our #1 pick for crypto-tax software in 2022 and is absolutely fantastic overall. There are some niche cases where other crypto-tax platforms are better, which we’ll mention below, but overall CoinTracker is the best overall for average users who aren’t price-senstive.
Table of Contents
CoinTracker Unique Features:
While most features across Crypto-Tax Platforms are quite standardized now with all of them supporting general DeFI exchanges and wallets as well as 300+ centralized cryptocurrency exchanges + Lending Platforms, portfolio tracking, and options to choose various accounting methodologies (FIFO, LIFO, etc) which can save you massively on taxes, there are some unique features that CoinTracker has that are simply better.
API Integration Support
While all crypto-tax platforms offer some API integration support most of them don’t provide it for every single exchange/platform that offers it. CoinTracker does seem to offer API support for every single platform — or at least all the big ones we checked and the dozen or so exchanges/platforms primarily, making them the only crypto-tax platform this year that we didn’t need to import a CSV file for whatsoever. Everything was imported automatically with a simple API key input.
Great NFT & DeFi Support
While not all of us do flash-loans and the like CoinTracker seems to work for all DeFi transactions if you have the appropriate plan, including flash-loans and the like. CoinTracker doesn’t advertise this, and also doesn’t mention if it supports NFTs from what we’ve seen, however in our testing everything regarding DeFi and non-custodian wallets is spot-on and works flawlessly, including NFTs and everything related to DeFi.
To Clarify what we mean is that if you traded on DeFi exchanges, did flash-loans, participated in token swaps, or anything else of the sort CoinTracker works perfectly for those transactions — unlike most other crypto-tax platforms literally all you need to do is submit your wallet address and they’ll handle the rest.
Margin Trading Support
CoinTracker is one of the few crypto-tax platforms that support margin-trading exchanges and platforms such as Bitmex — and due to how they calculate your margin trading fees + expenses you’ll have much lower transactions recorded for such accounts than other crypto-tax platforms charge, at least for some of the margin trading exchanges we tested in our reviews of Cointracker and other crypto-tax platforms.
Super Simple Tax-Loss Harvesting
Some platforms are a bit more complicated to do tax-loss harvesting with and don’t have dedicated features to enable you to do so, but CoinTracker does and it’s incredibly easy to use — after connecting your exchanges and wallets you simply go to their tax-loss harvesting page and they present you with easy opportunities to save on your crypto-taxes, specifying how much you can save and where/what needs to be done to get those savings.
This is an absolute must for most investors and generally saves people a few thousand dollars on their tax-bill, making it absolutely worth the extra price the plans with this feature cost. All platforms plans with this start around $175 to $200, but it’s absolutely worth the cost due to the savings the feature brings.
CoinTracker Biggest Pros & Cons:
CoinTracker has quite a few unique features as we’ve covered above, but there’s also some other pros that are not feature-oriented to the platform, so we thought to make a quick bullet list to give you a summary of them all:
- Competent Support
- Great Tax-Loss Harvesting Feature
- Incredibly Simple Polished Interface
- Good Tax-Pro Recommendations/Referrals
- Very Very Easy to Use and has most API integrations
- Supports Margin-Trading & Advanced DeFi Trades
- Offers Discounts for New Users
- Free-Trial/Account Available, but need to pay for filing
However now there are some downsides to CoinTracker that we haven’t gotten into in detail in the article — we’ll go more in detail further in the article, but here’s a brief summary of the cons of TokenTax:
- Cheaper plans do not have adequate transactions
- Overall more expensive than other platforms
- Support can be slow or fast depending on queue
The disadvantages are largely just around price as you can see — if you don’t mind spending a couple hundred dollars to have a hassle-free crypto-tax experience then they’re a fantastic option, however if you’re price-sensitive we’d say it’s worth checking out TaxBit or TokenTax, as they’re a bit cheaper, particularly if you have lots of transactions to record, but also have a ‘premium’ type of feel/experience like CoinTracker does.
CoinTracker Pricing for Average Users:
While we can all read their price list and compare it to the competition and see that CoinTracker is a bit more expensive than other platforms, it’s hard to really know which plan you’ll actually need before signing up and trying to file — so I’ll try to help you estimate which plan you need, and if alternatives would be better for you.
Free Plan ($0/Year)
This plan isn’t a real plan for tax-solutions, but is just a way to lure you into CoinTracker Ecosystem — it provides you a trial of the platform and the ability to test it out and track your portfolio using it, but ultimately Koinly doesn’t allow you to export any useful information or file any forms using the free plan. You will have to upgrade to a paid plan to get any real benefit from CoinTracker.
Hobbyist Plan ($59/Year)
This plan I’d say is only there to make you feel like there’s a cheap plan available. In reality this $50 plan is not useable for really anybody who’s done anything but buy/sell a few times during the year, making it useless for 95%+ of cryptocurrency investors.
If you’re on a budget and don’t want to pay more than you absolutely have to Taxbit has a decent basic plan for $50/year that is suitable for crypto-investors in general, although it lacks tax-optimization that helps those with lots of crypto gains (or losses) optimize their taxes.
Premium Plan ($199/Year)
This is where CoinTracker becomes a reasonable choice, as 1000 transactions is enough for the majority of crypto-investors who didn’t use trading bots or anything like that. It has all the features someone could want in a crypto-tax program, just with the 1000 transaction limitation. Good Support, DeFi, NFTs, and an overall painless user-experience.
There’s no reason to get their unlimited plan unless you have more transactions — and if you do we’d say it’s worth checking out TokenTax, as they offer a similar premium plan for the same price that has a 5000 transaction limit, which covers 95%+ of crypto-investors.
Unlimited Plan ($299+/Year)
The unlimited plan has pricing based off the transactions you do, starting at $299 for 3000 transactions and scaling to as many transactions as you need — however most people who select this plan wouldn’t need more than 10,000 transactions, which would be $399 — above that it doesn’t really make sense and we’d say it’s better to opt for a premium plan with TaxBit, TokenTax, or Cointracking (a different company) due to their lower fees on high-transaction tax situations.
This plan has all the features that the Premium plan does, plus quicker support and the ability to request features and get personal help if there’s something the tool isn’t working for — so basically everything you could possibly need short of a tax-advisor to do it all for you.
CoinTracker's Support Quality:
CoinTracker’s Support is more than adequate — we tested them with a few different made-up problems and they responded quite quickly and competently, solving complex issues in 22 minutes, even with the mid-day support queue wait included, and answering more straightforward questions in around 16 minutes, including the queue wait of course.
Considering how terrible cryptocurrency companies are usually with support we’re very impressed with CoinTracker’s support team, although their response times and wait times are a bit slower than other crypto-tax platforms it’s just by a handful of minutes, so it’s not a big deal.
They’re still doing a good job — they’re likely just bogged down with support queries and that’s why they’re a bit slower than other platforms — after all their careers page has multiple support positions available — they’re hiring, so by the time you read this review they may have already fixed the slight slowness from the new hires.
CoinTracker vs Competitors:
While I think I’ve done a pretty good job explaining the differences and demonstrating if CoinTracker is better in a category or not so far, there are some things I haven’t mentioned quite yet.
You can of course read our reviews of TaxBit or Koinly in detail, but basically we’d say CoinTracker has better support at the small-medium levels than the other platforms and they have significantly more features, however their lower priced package isn’t really competitive when compared to their competitors. All of their interfaces are good, but CoinTracker is a bit more user-friendly and responsive. They all are user-friendly and easy to use, but due to CoinTracker having more API integrations we’d say filing with CoinTracker is a bit easier and user-friendly overall.
If you want a direct comparison of CoinTracker vs their competitors check back soon — we’ll be writing articles comparing them up and down to each of their competitors where it matters — namely features offered, pricing, support quality, and our overall experience using each of them.
Our Experience Testing CoinTracker:
When I tested filing my taxes on most of the cryptotax softwares this year and CoinTracker was the most hassle-free due to it’s API integrations and one of the quickest overall. It took me 54 minutes to complete the process from sign-up to being able to export the final tax documents — this is likely a bit longer than it will take you as I had to link up around a dozen different exchanges one-by-one as well as manually enter in around 30 p2p transactions, and around a dozen self-custodied wallets that I used for DeFi and staking this year.
While I didn’t have any troubles using the platform I wanted to test support out — so I made up two problems to see how they’d resolve them. The problems I made up were regarding missing transactions due to losing exchange 2fa and an issue with the cost-basis around NFTs/DeFi.
Both made-up problems were responded to appropriately with sound-advice that would have solved the problems if they actually existed. Both of these issues took 35 minutes in total to resolve, comprising the majority of the time it took us to complete the test of CoinTracker.
CoinTracker Review FAQ's:
Below we’ll cover the FAQ’s we’ve been asked, or encountered, or even had asked ourself about CoinTracker when we first were checking them out — If you have other questions feel free to contact us and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can — and possibly even add our answer down below.
Is it safe to use CoinTracker's API Import Feature?
Yes CoinTracker is a legit and reputable company and the API feature doesn’t give them access to move or trade on your account — it simply gives them read-only access to allow them to import your transactions as well as the interest you’ve made from lending/staking/saving crypto assets.
Does CoinTracker Support Staking & Lending?
Yes CoinTracker supports both staking and lending cryptocurrencies and they’ll automatically calculate your tax-obligations related to them when you either connect your exchange API to their software, connect read-only access of your self-custody wallet to them, or simply import a .csv file of your staking/lending rewards.
Does TokenTax offer any sign-up bonuses?
CoinTracker offers 10% off when you sign up with a promotional link -- you can receive the discount by signing up through this link -- you shouldn't need to enter in any code or do anything else to receive the discount, CoinTracker reached out to us and told us you simply need to sign-up through that link and you'll get the discount. They don't offer any other sign-up bonus offers as far as we're aware though -- just the discount mentioned above.
What Countries Does CoinTracker Support?
b>CoinTracker can be used for most countries around the world, but is particularly good for use in the USA, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom — this is where they focus on doing business in and ensuring they fulfil the reporting requirements of the countries. They have fairly good support for Germany and most Western European countries, however at this point we’d say using Accointing or Koinly is better if you live in Europe.
CoinTracker also supports most developing countries, but only in so far as preparing a compiled document you can hand to your local accountant — at this point they do not support filling out tax-forms for most developing countries, unfortunately.Is CoinTracker Worth It?
Absolutely — if you invested in cryptocurrency then CoinTracker is absolutely worth it — using their tax-loss harvest tool can save you thousands a year in capital gains taxes, and without them it’d be completely unreasonable to fill out your tax forms as traditional tax softwares generally do not support cryptocurrency transactions and require you to input them all manually — which is simply not feasible for most of us.
Our overall CoinTracker rating
4.1
Bottom Line:
While Cointracker is without a doubt the best crypto-tax platform for the average crypto investor their pricing structure is a bit twisted in our view, making it only the best platforms for people who don’t care if they pay an extra $50 for having a slightly quicker and better experience.
For most folks who want a similarly simple yet powerful crypto tax platform, and don’t have any special circumstances (10k+ transactions, flash-loans, etc) we’d say CoinLedger is probably the better choice and the best price/quality for the average crypto investor.