I Tried 10 Crypto Tax Software – Only 1 Was Accurate

Before writing this review, I put these crypto tax platforms through a real-world stress test using my own 2024 transaction history. You could call me a semi-regular crypto trader.

The results were eye-opening and ultimately shaped how I ranked each one.

My portfolio activity included roughly 850 transactions across the year: yield farming on three different protocols, about 40 NFT purchases and sales on OpenSea and Blur, regular trading on Uniswap and Jupiter, staking positions on Lido and Rocket Pool, and numerous transfers between my hardware wallet, MetaMask, and Phantom wallet as I moved assets across chains.

I started with CoinLedger since it claimed the most users. The initial import seemed promising, but when I reviewed the categorization, problems emerged quickly. My liquidity pool deposits were classified as simple swaps, which would have drastically miscalculated my cost basis. The platform tagged several NFT sales as “transfers” rather than disposals, which would have left taxable events unreported. After three hours of attempting manual corrections, I was only halfway through fixing the errors.

Koinly was next. The import process took longer, and the interface required more clicking around to verify transactions. The bigger issue came with my cross-chain bridge transactions. When I moved ETH from Ethereum mainnet to Arbitrum, Koinly saw it as a sale on one chain and a mysterious appearance of new assets on the other. The cost basis was completely broken. Their help documentation didn’t address this scenario clearly, and recategorizing these transactions individually would have taken hours I didn’t have.

ZenLedger presented a different challenge entirely. The software itself was confusing to navigate, with transaction details buried under multiple menus. It did pull in most of my transactions, but the categorization was worse than CoinLedger. Several of my DeFi reward claims were marked as “unknown,” and when I tried to bulk-edit them, the interface became unresponsive. The platform also double-counted some transactions where I’d given both wallet addresses and exchange API keys, inflating my gains artificially.

CoinTracker handled my exchange transactions well enough, but completely fumbled the on-chain activity. My NFT transactions appeared in the system but weren’t properly categorized for tax purposes. The staking rewards from Lido showed up as deposits with zero cost basis, which would have resulted in overpaying taxes significantly. When I reached out to support about the staking issue, I was directed to their forum where similar questions had gone unanswered for weeks.

TokenTax’s expensive pricing gave me high expectations, but the software disappointed. While it imported most transactions, the reconciliation tools were clunky. I found duplicate entries that had to be manually removed, and several wallet-to-wallet transfers were treated as taxable events rather than non-taxable movements. For a platform charging premium prices, the accuracy didn’t justify the cost.

Bitcoin.Tax felt outdated from the start. It only pulled in my centralized exchange transactions and a fraction of my Ethereum activity. My Solana wallet wasn’t even supported, which meant manually entering hundreds of transactions. I abandoned the test after realizing it couldn’t handle my actual portfolio.

Finally, I tried Awaken. The difference was apparent within the first 15 minutes. After connecting my wallets, the platform pulled every transaction I could verify against my blockchain history. More importantly, the automatic categorization was accurate. My liquidity pool deposits were correctly identified, complete with the entry and exit prices. The NFT sales were properly marked as disposals with accurate cost basis calculations. Bridge transactions were recognized as transfers rather than taxable events.

The real test came when I compared the final tax summary across platforms. CoinLedger showed $12,400 more in capital gains than Awaken due to miscategorized transactions. Koinly was off by $8,700, primarily from the bridge transaction errors. ZenLedger’s number was unreliable due to duplicate entries I couldn’t fully resolve. Awaken’s calculations matched my own spot-checks and aligned with what I expected based on my trading activity.

I spent about 6 hours total testing the other platforms, most of that time attempting to fix categorization errors. With Awaken, I spent maybe 45 minutes reviewing everything before feeling confident in the accuracy. For anyone with meaningful on-chain activity, that time savings alone justifies choosing the right platform from the start.