Koinly Review 2022 - Truly Simple Crypto-Tax Software
- By Zachary Greene
- |
- Updated on September 24th, 2022
Koinly is one of 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 Koinly the process was simpler and more straightforward than other crypto-tax softwares, taking a bit over an hour to complete and that’s despite us having dozens of exchanges, DeFi wallets, and some P2P transactions we had to input manually.
Koinly is a great choice when it comes to filing your crypto-taxes, and overall if you’re looking for a simple easy to use platform and haven’t engaged in any margin traing, ‘advanced-defi’ transactions like flash-loans, or used any crypto-trading bots, then Koinly is a fantastic choice.
| 💰 Fees & Pricing | Average |
| 💻 Platform Quality | Very Easy to Use |
🛠 Customer Service| Questionable | |
| 🥇 Best For | Simple Tax Situations |
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 Koinly, so we’d recommend checking out our review about TaxBit if that’s you — they offer unlimited transactions vs Koinly which offers a limited number (covered below), making them the better choice for such tax-situations.
If you’ve done margin-trading or ‘advanced-defi’ transactions like flashloans then TokenTax is better for it, as Koinly doesn’t entirely 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 features that are needed in those specific cases.
With all that being said, Koinly is a great choice for the average crypto-investor who has a few hundred or few thousand transactions and just wants a simple platform at a reasonable price that simply works. Koinly is perfect for them.
Table of Contents
Koinly Unique Features:
While most features across popular Crypto-Tax Platforms are quite standard 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 Koinly has that are simply better than the competition. We’ll go over them below.
International Tax-filing Support
Koinly is one of the two crypto-tax platforms that offer proper international tax-filing options for Europeans. While most platforms can handle international-taxes for crypto you usually need to do some migration of the data into your tax forms or get some help from an accountant, but with Koinly you can file directly with the forms provided on-platform, meaning you don’t need any outside help.
Koinly supports the USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden fully — other countries can use Koinly as well but will need to plug the data into their countries forms on their own. With the above countries they’ll give you the correct form to file, such as K-4, rf1159, and other country-specific tax-forms, as well as of course general capital-gains forms for each country.
Fantastic Tax-Educational Resources
Koinly isn’t as good when it comes to customer service, not including very good customer service in cheaper plans — however they make up for this with the best-in-class educational resources related to crypto-taxes. If you’re interested in optimizing your taxes and ensuring you’re not only compliant, but can take advantage of certain tax-saving strategies such as tax-loss harvesting then Koinly has a fantastic education section that can teach you all you need to know about such topics.
They have guides for all the big countries they support, as well as most big countries on earth — including USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, India, Sweden, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and South Africa.
Tax-Accounting Optimizations
While most platforms offer FIFO and LIFO, most don’t offer other forms of accounting — Koinly does, they offer both FIFO and LIFO as well as HIFO and ACB accounting options. Keep in mind these may not be available in your jurisdiction if they do not allow these type of accounting methods, however generally they’ll be available for everyone from our understanding and experience.
You may not be familiar with tax-accounting and how different methods can benefit you, but essentially they can save you drastically on taxes and they’re definitely worth looking into. Generally LIFO is better if you try to capture long-term capital gains only, while FIFO or HIFO is better if you want to pay the least capital-gains taxes and don’t have many long-term capital gains (most people don’t).
Koinly Biggest Pros & Cons:
Koinly has many unique features as we’ve gone over above, but there are some other pros that are not feature-oriented to the platform, so we wanted to make a quick bullet list to give you a summary of them all:
- Clean User-Friendly Interface
- Free Portfolio Tracking
- Fantastic International Support
- Supports DeFi & NFTs
- Competent Customer Service
- Great Educational Resources
- Extra Accounting Methadologies
However now there are some downsides to Koinly that we haven’t gotten into already in the article — we’ll go in detail further in the article, but here’s a brief summary of the cons of Koinly:
- Doesn’t work very well for some margin exchanges
- Limited Transactions on all plans
- Lacks (Included/Free) FBAR Support
- Flashloans and other advanced DeFi requires manual input in many cases
- Customer Service isn’t as good as other platforms on cheaper plans
Koinly Pricing for Average Users:
While we can all read their price list and compare it to the competition and see that Koinly 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.
Essential Features Plan ($0/Year)
This plan isn’t a real plan for tax-solutions, but is just a way to lure you into Koinly’s 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 must upgrade to a paid plan to get any real benefit from Koinly.
Just Getting Started Plan ($49/Year)
This plan is what’s called ‘anchoring’ in marketing — it’s there only 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.
Taking it Easy Plan ($99/year)
This is where Koinly starts to become a reasonable choice — 1000 transactions is suitable for many people and as long as you didn’t do trading or lots of crypto-lending or staking you likely would be fine with this plan. It offers everything most people need in a crypto-tax software.
I must warn it doesn’t come with. very good support — as they do not include dedicated email support with this package, meaning you’re largely on your own with this package — if that’s not okay with you you’ll likely want to go with another crypto-tax software or go with Koinly’s premium plan below.
Hustling Like a Pro Plan ($179/$279 per Year)
This plan has two-tiers depending on the number of transations you need — 3000 is enough for 80%~ of cryptocurrency investors, so most folks would only need to pay $179 per year for this plan. It includes dedicated email support, so you won’t be completely on-your-own when doing your crypto-taxes.
Keep in mind the dedicated support provided with this plan, while good and responsive, is NOT audit support or a review of your tax-report by a tax-professional, it’s just support to help guide you or resolve problems you may encounter when completing your crypto-taxes.
Koinly's Support Quality:
Unfortunately this where Koinly really falls short — they do not offer dedicated customer service for all but their most expensive plan, while most competitors offer it for every single one of their plans or all but their cheapest plans. Koinly’s support with the highest package is quite good and competent, albeit a bit slower than other crypto-tax platforms and at a higher price.
Considering how bad crypto companies are usually with support Koinly’s isn’t all that bad, although their response times and wait times are a bit slower than other crypto-tax platforms, and we really think they should include it in their Taking it easy (mid-level $99/year) plan as well, if not all their plans.
Koinly vs Competitors:
While Koinly is a suitable platform for regular cryptocurrency investors they’re not particularly cheaper or feature-rich as other crypto-tax platforms, so while they’re not a bad choice if they fit your needs investors who have a more complex tax situation, or want a more premium experience, likely would prefer TokenTax, and people who want a cheaper platform TaxBit is likely the better option.
But to be clear — Koinly is not a bad option at all, we just feel the need to specify the benefits of alternatives in certain circumstances. If you don’t need the extra features or transaction limits that other platforms offer, and just prefer a simpler easier platform Koinly is more straight-forward to use and you may prefer them.
Our Experience testing Koinly:
I’ve tested filing my taxes on most of the cryptotax softwares this year and Koinly was arguably the simplest platform to use. It took me 84 minutes to complete the process from sign-up to being able to export the final tax documents — this is likely much 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 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 good advice that would have solved the problems if they actually existed. Both of these issues took 47 minutes in total to resolve, comprising more than half the time it took us to complete the test of Koinly.
This includes waiting in the support queue twice, meaning it took approximately 23 and a half minutes to solve a relatively complex problem via support — which is quite slow compared to other platforms, however they were competent and solved the issues, so I wouldn’t knock them much for it.
Koinly Review FAQ's:
Is it safe to use Koinly's API Import Feature?
Yes Koinly 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 Koinly offer any sign-up bonuses?
No, unfortunately Koinly doesn't offer any sign-up bonuses or discounts as far as we're aware of, however you can sign up through this link to support us and we'll get 10% of your purchase or so -- thanks for that.
Does Koinly Support Staking & Lending?
Yes Koinly 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.
Is Koinly Worth It?
Absolutely — if you invested in cryptocurrency then Koinly 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.
What Countries Does Koinly Support?
Koinly 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 Accointing as they support many countries as well.
Koinly also can support 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 any country other than the USA, however for most countries you can still use the platform to figure out your crypto-taxes. You’ll just need to get a tax advisor to help you fill out your local countries forms if you’re not in the USA.
Our overall Koinly rating
3.9
Bottom Line:
Koinly is one of the simplest Crypto-Tax platforms and is great for people who have simple crypto tax situations (no flash-loans or advanced Defi shenanigans), however they’re very pricey if you conduct tons of transactions — for most folks Koinly is more than adequate, however if you have done lots of trading and want to save a little money you may want to consider Coinledger or Taxbit which offer similar simpleness, but cheaper pricing for people with tons of transactions.