Wag3s vs Koinly: which one actually fits your situation

Koinly is one of the most widely used crypto tax tools, and for good reason. It works well for what it was designed to do. The question isn't whether Koinly is good — it's whether it's the right tool for your specific situation.

Here's the honest version.

What Koinly does well

Koinly was built for individual investors who need to file crypto taxes. If that's you — a few wallets, a couple of exchanges, mostly spot trades — it's a clean, well-built product. The import process is straightforward, the UI is readable without accounting knowledge, and it generates reports for IRS, HMRC, and most other major tax frameworks.

For that use case, it gets the job done.

Where Koinly runs into problems

DeFi complexity. Koinly handles simple DeFi interactions reasonably well, but it breaks down on the more complex stuff — concentrated liquidity positions, multi-step yield strategies, cross-chain bridged assets. These often get miscategorized or flagged for manual review. If most of your activity is on Uniswap v3, Aave, or Curve, expect to spend time fixing errors.

No general ledger. Koinly produces tax reports — PDFs and CSVs formatted for tax filing. It doesn't produce accounting outputs: no general ledger, no trial balance, no chart of accounts, no journal entries. If you're running a company and need to produce financial statements, Koinly is a tax tool that sits next to your accounting system, not instead of it.

No B2B features. There's no multi-user access with roles, no approval workflows, no audit trail designed for external accountants. For anything beyond personal use, you're improvising.

No payroll. If you pay contributors in crypto, Koinly doesn't touch that.

What Wag3s does differently

Wag3s was built for teams and companies, not individual investors. That changes what it prioritizes.

On the individual side (Wag3s Folio), it covers the same ground as Koinly — wallet imports, tax reports for multiple jurisdictions, FIFO/LIFO/HIFO cost basis. The difference is in how it handles DeFi: Wag3s parses each protocol interaction into its component events rather than treating a swap as a single transaction. That matters when you've been active in DeFi.

On the business side (Wag3s Ledger), it's a different product entirely. It connects to your wallets and bank accounts, categorizes transactions with AI, and produces proper accounting outputs — not just tax summaries. It's designed to replace the stack of spreadsheets and manual processes most Web3 teams use to manage their books.

Wag3s HR, launching Q2 2026, handles payroll for distributed teams — crypto and fiat, across 150+ countries. Koinly has nothing equivalent.

The actual comparison

Pricing — side by side

Koinly's pricing tiers are set by transaction count per tax year. Wag3s is currently free during Alpha; post-Alpha pricing has been announced as Starter / Grow / Business tiers, with confirmed pricing once Alpha closes.

The key thing the table doesn't show: Koinly bills per tax year, per individual. If you're a 10-person team that all need their own crypto tax filings, that's 10 separate Koinly accounts. Wag3s scopes by workspace, so the same workspace can produce both individual tax reports and company books from one shared transaction layer.

Three concrete scenarios

Scenario 1 — US individual, 600 trades/year on Coinbase + MetaMask, no DeFi. This is exactly Koinly's audience. The Pro tier handles the volume, the IRS Form 8949 export is reliable, and the $199/year price point is reasonable for the value delivered. Wag3s Folio works too, but Koinly's UX is more polished for this profile and the integrations are deeper. We'd recommend Koinly.

Scenario 2 — UK-based investor, 4k transactions across 8 chains, ~30 active DeFi positions including LP and farms. Koinly handles the volume, but DeFi positions break down regularly — concentrated liquidity gets mis-flagged, rebasing tokens like stETH show ghost income, and Pendle PT/YT splits aren't parsed cleanly. The user spent ~12 hours fixing categorizations last tax year. Wag3s Folio parses each protocol interaction natively, which removes the manual review burden. Time saved: ~10 hours/year. Recommendation: Wag3s Folio.

Scenario 3 — 6-person Web3 startup, Koinly currently used by founders for personal tax, no team accounting. Founders are using Koinly individually for their own tax filings (~$1,200 total annual cost across the team). The company has no general ledger; bookkeeping happens in spreadsheets. They want to consolidate. Koinly doesn't offer a team product or accounting outputs. Wag3s during Alpha gives them Ledger (company books), Folio (individual tax for each founder), and HR (when contributors come on, Q2 2026) for $0. The migration is straightforward: import the same wallets into Wag3s, run a 30-minute reconciliation, and the company moves off Koinly without losing the personal-tax workflow.

Migrating from Koinly to Wag3s

If you're already using Koinly and considering Wag3s for the team / accounting side, the migration path is:

1. Export your transaction history from Koinly as CSV (Settings → Wallets & Exchanges → Export). This gives you the source-of-truth transaction list as Koinly classified it.
2. Connect the same wallet addresses to Wag3s Folio. Wag3s re-parses on-chain history natively — you don't import the Koinly CSV directly, you re-import from the wallets.
3. Reconcile the cost basis for the current tax year. The two tools may have small differences on protocols where Koinly used aggregate parsing and Wag3s uses event-level parsing. Spot-check 5–10 transactions; if they match, you're good.
4. Decide on continuity. You can run Koinly and Wag3s in parallel for one tax cycle to compare outputs before fully cutting over. During Alpha, this is free on the Wag3s side.

The main migration risk is cost-basis methodology drift — different tools occasionally apply FIFO timing slightly differently when transactions land in the same block. Plan a one-hour reconciliation session, not a one-click switch.

Who should use which

Use Koinly if you're an individual investor, your transaction history is mostly exchange-based, and you need tax reports without needing accounting outputs. It's well-suited to this and well-priced for it.

Use Wag3s if you're running a Web3 company or DAO, need real accounting not just tax summaries, have DeFi activity that Koinly struggles with, or need to pay contributors in crypto. During Alpha, it's free — no reason not to try it alongside whatever you're currently using.

The two tools don't really compete head-to-head. Koinly is a tax filing tool. Wag3s is an accounting and payroll platform. The confusion happens because both connect to crypto wallets and both mention tax reports. That's where the overlap ends.

Try Wag3s

Wag3s is free during Alpha — no credit card, no transaction cap. If your situation matches scenarios 2 or 3 above, start a workspace and import the same wallets you have in Koinly. The comparison gets a lot clearer once you've seen both outputs on your actual data.

Further reading

• How to Do Crypto Taxes — taxable events, cost basis, reporting
• Best Crypto Accounting Software for Web3 Businesses (2026) — full comparison hub
• Crypto Tax Loss Harvesting — minimizing tax liability
• Wag3s Folio — portfolio tracking and automated tax reporting for Web3