CoinTracking Review - Reasonable Prices, Unique Features [2022]
- By Zachary Greene
- |
- Updated on September 24th, 2022
CoinTracking is one of the more complex feature-rich Cryptotax tools in 2022 — and is priced fairly, but is a bit more complex to use. When we tested it out ourselves and went through the process to file our taxes this year with CoinTracking the process was a bit more complicated than with other crypto-tax platforms taking around 20% longer to complete than with other crypto-tax platforms.
CoinTracking is a pretty good choice when it comes to filing your crypto-taxes, and overall if you’re looking for a good all-in-one platform that offers lots of data-analytic features then CoinTracking is great, albeit a bit more complicated to use than some other crypto-tax platforms.
| 💰 Fees & Pricing | Slightly Expensive |
| 💻 Platform Quality | Powerful, but Complex |
🛠 Support Quality| Average | |
| 🥇 Best For | Non-US Investors |
If you have used crypto-trading bots, or have staked/yield-farmed a lot of different coins you likely have too many transactions to reasonably use CoinTracking (at a reasonable price), so we’d recommend checking out our review about TaxBit if that’s you — they offer unlimited transactions vs CoinTracking which offers a limited number (covered below).
If you’ve done margin-trading or ‘advanced-defi’ transactions like flashloans then TokenTax is better for it, as CoinTracking doesn’t fully support such transactions, at least without manual inputs and modifications, which can be very complicated. You can read out entire review on TokenTax by clicking there, but in-short it’s more expensive but has more DeFi/NFT-related features that are needed in those specific cases.
With all that being said, CoinTracking is a great choice for the average crypto-investor who has a few hundred or few thousand transactions and just wants a fair-price platform with great charts and data tools to analyse your portfolio.
Table of Contents
CoinTracking Unique Features:
Most Crypto-Tax Platforms have many of the same features now with all of them supporting general DeFi transactions, exchanges, and wallets as well as 300+ centralized cryptocurrency exchanges + Lending Platforms, portfolio tracking, and options to choose different accounting methodologies (FIFO, LIFO, etc) which can save you massively on taxes, there are some unique features that CoinTracking has that are simply better than the competition. We’ll go over them below.
Great International/Expat Tax-Filing
Most platforms have decent international tax support and allow you to use the platform as a non-US person, but most aren’t as good as CoinTracking and none of them currently offer professional crypto-tax expert guidance/aide in as many countries as CoinTracking does.
If you are a non-US person then you may also want to check out Accointing and Koinly as well, as they both are pretty good for international tax-filing, however they don’t offer dedicated country-specific tax professional help (for an extra price) like CoinTracking does.
Unique Interface
You can see a small snippet of how CoinTrackings Dashboard/Interface looks above, and well it’s unique…I wouldn’t say it’s particularly good or bad though. It’s not as polished and user-friendly as other platforms like TokenTax or Taxbit, but it’s useable and have more features to it, such as the charts (which are custimizeable) and pie-charts, which can be modified to be very complex and provide interesting information.
If you’re looking for a ‘turbotax’ type of interface then other crypto-tax platforms are likely better, but if you don’t mind a bit ‘outdated’ looking interface that offers more detail and analysis-tools then CoinTracking has a unique and great interface for that in particular.
Discounts for New Users
While this isn’t really a platform feature it is something unique to CoinTracking, as most other crypto-tax platforms do not offer hidden discounts — CoinTracking on the other hand does offer discounts for new users at least. CoinTracking reached out to us and let us know about this promotion for this tax year and all you have to do is sign-up through this link and you should receive 10% off whatever package you purchase with them.
Great Tax-Guidance & Professional Review
CoinTracking has the most comprehensive network of crypto-tax professionals of any crypto-tax platform currently — they have connections to hundreds of tax-professionals around the globe due to being the first crypto-tax platform to really exist, being around since 2014/2015 while most other platforms were started after the bull-market of 2017.
They can partner you up with tax pros In dozens of countries — however keep in mind this service is quite expensive and comes at a premium. If you’re on a budget it’s definitely not for you, as it generally at least doubles the price of filing your crypto taxes, and can cost much more than double if your situation is complicated.
FBAR & Semi-Complicated Tax Situation Support
Cointracking is one of the only platforms that offers full margin trading support as well as FBAR tax-form support natively on the platform, which is essential for US-people who have complicated tax situations and traded large amounts on foreign exchanges such as Huobi.
You may also want to check out TokenTax, as they are the other exchange that excells in this category — they also have FBAR support natively and great margin trading support, as well as NFT and advanced-defi transaction support (think: flashloans).
CoinTracking Biggest Pros & Cons:
CoinTracking has many unique features as we’ve covered above, but there are 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:
- Includes FBAR & Complex Tax Forms
- Lots of Data-Analytic tools
- Tax Expert Review + Audit Support (extra fees)
- Supports margin trading and Defi, albeit a bit complex
- Has Free Plan that’s actually useful for some
- Works for most countries around the world
However now there are some downsides to CoinTracking that we haven’t gotten into already in the article — we’ll go more in detail further in the article, but here’s a brief summary of the cons of TaxBit:
- Doesn’t work very well for some margin exchanges
- Limits Transactions on different plans
- Interface is a bit complicated compared to other platforms
- Doesn’t include in-house tax-pro review/audit support with any plans
- Flashloans and other advanced DeFi requires manual input in many cases
CoinTracking Pricing for Average Users:
While we can all read their price list and compare it to their competitors and see that CoinTracking is about the same price as most 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)
Cointracking is the only crypto-tax software with a functional ‘free’ plan, all the others we’ve tested do not allow you to export any transactions or do anything useful on them — but rather just offer a ‘free’ way to get a feel for how the platform works. CoinTracking allows you to export up to 200 transactions completely for free, allowing people who only did a few crypto-trades/investments to clear up their crypto-taxes completely for free.
However for most of us we’ll have around 2000-4000 transactions, meaning this plan isn’t really adequate for most of us — at least beyond taking advantage of the portfolio tracking/analytics functions if that interests you.
Pro Plan ($132/Year)
CoinTracking’s Pro Plan is really their ‘sweet-spot’ and where the platform actually makes sense for some people. 3500 transactions is enough for most crypto-investors — pretty much anyone who didn’t do daytrading or lots of staking/lending of cryptocurrencies should be more than covered by this plan. It includes all the features that really matter, and for a reasonable price similar to the competition — even a little cheaper.
For comparison Koinly’s similar plan is $179/year and doesn’t really have much more to offer, and TokenTax’s similar plan is $199/year and while it has more features most cryptocurrency investors don’t need them (advanced-defi flash-loan tax support, advanced NFT & DeFi Support, and better margin trading support). TaxBit has a similar plan that’s much cheaper though, coming it at only $50/year — however it doesn’t have good analytics data or tax-loss harvesting unless you pay more.
Expert Plan ($204/Year -> $330/Year)
Cointracking’s Expert Plan is decent for daytraders and active investors with lots of trades, however it’s a bit overpriced compared to TaxBit’s Plus+ plan which offers all the same features (minus FBAR support) with better customer service (faster) and a more user-friendly interface. For reference Taxbit’s plus+ plan is $175/year and comes with unlimited transactions, which means it’s cheaper than all of CoinTracking’s Expert Plan options — unless you prefer the analytics tools CoinTracking has and need FBAR-Support (Americans only, in special circumstances).
This isn’t to say the plan is bad — if you’re used to CoinTracking the Expert Plan is a decent option — it’s just for this tax year we’d rather opt for the Taxbit plan we mentioned above, after testing both platforms this year to file our crypto-taxes with.
Unlimited Plan ($660/Year)
This will be short and simple — don’t bother with this plan. It’s what’s called in marketing as a ‘anchor,’ to make the other plans seem cheaper. It doesn’t offer anything substantial over the previous “Expert Plan” despite it being at least double the cost — with the exception of it including unlimited transactions.
But as we covered in the Expert Plan section TaxBit’s plans come with unlimited transactions for $175/year with similar features, as discussed in our review of Taxbit, meaning this Unlimited Plan just makes no sense at all — for this price they should really include a session with a tax-pro or something similar.
CoinTracking Support Quality:
CoinTracking’s Support is adequate, however unless you pay for the extremely overpriced unlimited plan it’s not very quick and ultimately it makes it where if you have a problem or two when filing out your taxes you’re unlikely to be able to complete them same-day like with other crypto-tax platforms.
With that being said, Cointracking’s customer support team is competent from our engagements with them, however they took significantly longer to resolve the issues we made-up specifically to test them — but not because they didn’t have the answer, but simply because of the delay/backlog they likely have when it comes to their non-priority support queue.
If you are looking for better support we’d recommend checking out TaxBit or TokenTax, as they have very quick support for all their paid plans, however in many cases their plans cost a bit more than CoinTrackings, likely part to pay for the extra support costs.
CoinTracking vs Competitors:
CoinTracking is a suitable platform for regular cryptocurrency investors and they’re one of the most feature-rich as other crypto-tax platforms, however their interface/user-experience isn’t as good and using the platform isn’t as easy. It’s not like using Turbotax for example, it’s not very straightforward and easy, albeit not difficult by any means.
CoinTracking is not a bad option at all, however we’d say TaxBit is worth considering if you have thousands of transactions as they’d be cheaper and with similar features and TokenTax is worth considering if you want an ultra-polished interface and easy to use platform and a more ‘premium’ experience overall.
If you want a direct comparison of CoinTracking vs their competitors check back soon, as 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 CoinTracking:
I’ve tested filing my taxes on most of the cryptotax softwares this year and CoinTracking was arguably the most complicated platform to use. It took me significantly longer to complete the process from sign-up to being able to export the final tax documents — this is mostly due to us wanting to test their support out and them taking a long time to respond though. Excluding support-wait times it took me around 20% longer than other platforms, or about 10 minutes longer.
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 good advice that would have solved the problems if they actually existed. These issues took hours to resolve however due to the slow response times we experienced with their non-priority support.
CoinTracking Review FAQ's:
Is it safe to use CoinTracking API Import Feature?
Yes Cointracking 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 CoinTracking Support Staking & Lending?
Yes CoinTracking 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 CoinTracking offer any sign-up bonuses?
Yes -- CoinTracking offers a 10% discount on any new purchases or upgrades (basically a discount), to get this bonus/discount you can simply sign up through this link. After you've created an account through that link you can purchase a package for a 10% discount according to what CoinTracking told us.
Is CoinTracking Worth It?
Absolutely — if you invested in cryptocurrency then Cointracking is definitely worth it — it’s 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.Their portfolio analysis features allow you to tax-loss harvest quite efficiently, potentially saving you thousands of dollars on your tax-bill.
What Countries Does Koinly CoinTracking?
CoinTracking can be used for most countries around the world, including the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, United Kingdom, Germany and most Western European (and EU) countries. You may also want to check out TaxBit or Koinly as they support many countries as well.
CoinTracking also can support most developing countries, but only in so far as preparing a compiled document you can hand to your local accountant. Alternatively as mentioned above CoinTracking can connect you to local accountants in your country who can help you properly file even if you're in a developing country.
Our overall Cointracking rating
3.7
Bottom Line:
Cointracking has some unique features that no other platforms offer, such as best-in-class international tax support, especially for folks in the EU, however the platform isn’t particularly cheap or easy to use compared to other crypto tax platforms.
Ultimately there’s nothing wrong with Cointracking, it’s just the platform’s interface isn’t as modern and easy to navigate as most other platforms so we don’t believe most people would be better off using them — unless they’re from outside the US/UK/Canada and need some of the unique features Cointracking offers.