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

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.