Crypto tax software UK, prices, privacy and how to choose

We build one of these tools, so read this the way you would read any vendor’s comparison, with the prices checked and the claims testable. Everything below is verifiable, each figure carries the date we checked it, and where a competitor is better at something we say so, because a comparison that concedes nothing is an advert.

The UK field, prices as verified

Koinly and CoinTracking prices verified 21 August 2026, Recap and CoinLedger re-verified 25 August 2026 on their pricing pages. Tiers rise with transaction count everywhere, so place yourself honestly before comparing, an active year moves you up a band. The full three-year arithmetic, tier by tier, lives in our cost comparison.

What genuinely separates them

Integrations. Koinly’s catalogue of exchange and chain connections is the broadest in the field and it is not close. If your history spans obscure chains and dead exchanges, that breadth is worth real money and hours. Concession made, and it is the main one.

UK depth. Recap is built by a UK team for UK rules and it shows in the details. CoinLedger and CoinTracking are internationally competent but visibly centred elsewhere, US forms first, UK a supported region, and we take that difference apart tool by tool in the CoinLedger alternative for UK investors and the CoinTracking one.

Architecture, the quiet difference. Every subscription tool works the same way underneath: you connect exchanges or upload files, your complete financial history goes to their servers, and the computation happens there. Recap deserves credit for encrypting that data end-to-end, the strongest privacy stance among the cloud tools. gains.tax removes the question instead of encrypting it, the import, the pooling, the matching and every report happen in your browser, and what a server never receives it can never leak, sell, or be compelled to produce.

Proof. Every tool on this page claims HMRC-correct rules. One lets you check: the gains.tax engine’s test suite is published, every matching rule proven against HMRC’s own worked examples, in public. We think that should be table stakes for software whose output goes on a legal document. Today it is a differentiator.

Economics. The subscription tools charge per tax season, because their costs run per season, servers, storage, your data living on their machines. A tool with no servers to feed can charge once, which over the several years most crypto holders end up filing changes the total by hundreds of pounds. The reasoning is laid out in why crypto tax apps charge every April.

Choosing in one paragraph

History scattered across many exotic platforms and chains, and you want maximum hand-holding: Koinly, and pay each year for the breadth. UK specialist with cloud convenience and strong encryption: Recap. Data-heavy trader who lives in spreadsheets: CoinTracking. If you want your full UK computation, every disposal citing its rule, without your financial life leaving your machine, and you would rather pay once than annually: try gains.tax free, no signup, free under 1,000 transactions, and moving later costs nothing because your data was never locked in anyone’s cloud, including ours.

One closing fact that outranks every feature table. Since January 2026, exchanges report your identity and transactions to HMRC regardless of which software you choose. The choice you actually control is how many additional companies hold a copy of your financial life on the way to a correct return. The right answer can be zero.