Koinly alternative for UK investors, the comparison in full
On this page
Before the argument, the shape of it. Koinly is excellent cloud software with per-tax-year pricing, so each year of reports is bought separately. gains.tax computes the same UK rules in your browser, free under 1,000 transactions with downloads included, one £39 fee above that, forever. What follows is the fair version of that fight.
If you are searching for a Koinly alternative, you probably do not hate Koinly. You hate one specific moment, the one where the number you came for sits on screen and the download button asks for money, again, for a tax year you already paid to compute last time you filed. This comparison is written for that moment, and it plays fair, because we would rather you trust the parts where we win.
What Koinly genuinely does well
Credit first. Koinly’s integration coverage is enormous, its free tier tracks up to 10,000 transactions with a capital gains preview, and its portfolio views are polished. If you want a cloud dashboard that follows you across devices and syncs itself while you sleep, Koinly is good software, and nothing below pretends otherwise.
The comparison is not about whether Koinly works. It is about two structural choices Koinly made, and what they cost you.
The two structural differences
Where the computation happens. Koinly computes on Koinly’s servers, which means your complete transaction history, every wallet, every trade, every balance, is uploaded to and stored by a company. gains.tax computes entirely in your browser. Your history stays on your machine, and you can verify that in the network tab while the app runs. This is not a privacy preference so much as a different architecture, a server-side product cannot offer it, and it changes the economics too, which is the second difference.
Who pays for the computation. Koinly’s paid plans are labelled per tax year. Their own FAQ puts it plainly, a plan lets you download reports “for the tax year that your plan is valid for”. File three years, buy three plans. Every future April, another plan. gains.tax reports are free under 1,000 transactions because computation on your machine costs us nothing, and above that a single £39 fee covers 1,000 to 9,999 transactions for every tax year, past and future, once.
The numbers, from their page and ours
The comparison below is of billing models rather than amounts. Koinly’s own figures move, and are priced by transaction tier on their pricing page, so read them there rather than trusting a number copied into a blog post. The scenario is a UK investor with 1,000 transactions.
| gains.tax | Koinly | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan needed for 1,000 transactions | Free tier | Hodler, priced per tax year |
| One tax year, reports downloaded | £0 | One purchase |
| Three tax years | £0 | Three purchases |
| Every future year | £0, or one £39 fee above 1,000 transactions | Another purchase, every year |
| Report downloads on the free tier | All of them | None |
| Where your data lives | Your machine | Their servers |
Koinly’s tiers above 1,000 transactions cost more, rising by transaction count and charged again each tax year. gains.tax’s one £39 fee covers up to 9,999 transactions across all years, and beyond that we simply do not support you yet and say so.
What switching actually involves
This is the part where alternatives usually go vague, so here is the concrete version. Koinly lets you export your transaction history. gains.tax imports both Koinly export shapes, including the full account export, and proves the import on screen, the row count from your file reconciled against what the app read, with any refused row shown and explained rather than guessed at. The migration walkthrough covers it step by step, and the worked example inside the app lets you rehearse the whole flow with sample data before touching your own.
Your history, once imported, is recomputed from scratch under HMRC’s matching rules, same day under section 105, 30-day under section 106A, then the section 104 pool, with the applied rule named on each disposal. That gives you something genuinely useful even if you keep Koinly, a free second opinion on the number you are about to file, computed independently from the raw history.
The free tier difference, spelled out
Both products have a free tier, and they are opposites. Koinly’s free tier is a preview, track up to 10,000 transactions, see your gain, and pay when you want the report, which is the moment the number becomes useful. gains.tax’s free tier is the product, everything under 1,000 transactions including every download, permanently. The honest way to say it is that Koinly’s free tier exists to convert you and ours exists because computation on your machine costs us nothing to give away. Above 1,000 transactions we convert too, once, at £39, and you will notice that is half of one Koinly year.
Reasons to switch, ranked by who you are
If you file one modest year at a time, the arithmetic is one purchase against £0, repeated annually. If you have several unfiled years, the gap compounds, three years of catch-up is three Koinly plans against £0 or one £39 fee here, and the past years never expire. If you are privacy-motivated, the difference is architectural rather than contractual, no server ever holds your history, and you can watch that be true. And if you are an accountant preparing crypto clients, the accountant pack hands you the disposal-level working with the statutory rule named per line, which is the document you actually need for the file.
Where Koinly still wins
Honesty cuts both ways, so choose Koinly over gains.tax if these matter more to you. Multi-device sync with no file handling, your data follows your login. Coverage breadth, Koinly supports more exchanges and chains than our current importer list, which covers the four major tax apps’ exports, Coinbase, Kraken and Binance statements, any plain CSV, on-chain scanning for Bitcoin and six EVM chains, and read-only API sync for Kraken and Binance. And non-UK tax reports, Koinly covers many countries, gains.tax currently computes UK rules only and will not pretend otherwise until the US engine ships.
If what matters most is the bill that stops arriving, the working shown on every line, and a transaction history that never leaves your machine, that is the trade we built. Launch the app, import your Koinly file, and compare your own numbers, it costs nothing and nothing is uploaded.
This page is general information, not personal tax advice. Competitor prices are the vendor’s published figures on the dates shown and may change. If your affairs need a human, the vetted professional directory is one click away.