The Best Koinly Alternative for Australian Crypto Investors
If you are looking for a koinly alternative australia filers can actually lodge from, the question is narrower than a feature list. An Australian return turns on parcel-level holding periods for the 50% CGT discount, on a cost base kept in Australian dollars, and on staking and airdrop receipts being separated from capital gains. This page compares CryptaTax and Koinly on those points. Koinly is a capable product; comparison points are framed *as of June 2026*, and anything tied to Koinly's current plans should be verified on its own site.
General information provided as of June 2026, not tax advice. Koinly is a trademark of its respective owner; verify its current features and pricing on its official site. Australian tax treatment depends on your circumstances, including whether you are an investor or a trader, so confirm your position with a registered tax agent.
Why Australians look for a Koinly alternative
Most people do not go shopping for a koinly alternative because a tool stopped working. They go looking because something in the output did not survive contact with an Australian return: a parcel that should have qualified for the 12-month discount was not tracked as a parcel, a transfer between their own wallets was booked as a disposal, or staking rewards ended up mixed in with capital gains instead of sitting in the income section where the ATO expects them.
Those are the failures that cost money in Australia specifically, because the Australian rules are unusually sensitive to *when* and *how* each unit was acquired. A tool that is broadly correct globally can still be wrong here if it loses acquisition dates across a transfer. So the useful comparison is not "which product has more integrations" but "which one still has the acquisition date of every parcel when it comes time to apply the discount".
CryptaTax vs Koinly side by side for ATO reporting
The table sets out the dimensions that decide an Australian filing. The CryptaTax column describes how CryptaTax is built. The Koinly column is deliberately not filled in with claims: vendor capability and pricing move, and we would rather send you to the source than assert something that goes stale.
| For an Australian return | CryptaTax | Koinly |
|---|---|---|
| 50% CGT discount | Holding period tracked per parcel; discount applied where the parcel was held more than 12 months | Confirm how parcels and acquisition dates are tracked |
| Cost base currency | Australian dollars throughout, valued at the time of each event | Check the reporting currency and how it is converted |
| Self-transfers | Both legs matched automatically, so a move between your own wallets is not a disposal and does not reset the parcel | Verify how transfers between your own accounts are treated |
| Crypto-to-crypto swaps | Treated as a CGT event on the asset disposed of, with a new parcel opened for the asset received | Verify swap handling |
| Staking and airdrops | Separated as ordinary income at receipt, not folded into capital gains | Check how rewards are classified |
| Output | Capital gains and income figures in AUD, ready for myTax or your registered tax agent | Match against the outputs you need to lodge |
| Audit trail | Every figure traces back to a source transaction | Check traceability |
| Pricing | Published, and scales with transaction volume | Check current plans at your real volume |
50% CGT discount tracking on assets held over 12 months
Hold a crypto asset for more than 12 months before you dispose of it and, as an individual, only half the capital gain is added to your taxable income. Held for 12 months or less, the whole gain is. That single rule is the largest legitimate lever in an Australian crypto return, and it is decided parcel by parcel rather than coin by coin.
Which is where software either helps or quietly costs you. If you bought the same token on four dates and sold part of your holding, the discount depends on which parcels the disposal drew from and how long each of those had been held. A tool that keeps only a running average, or that loses the original acquisition date when a token moves between your wallets, cannot answer that question. CryptaTax tracks the acquisition date of each parcel and carries it through transfers, so the discount is applied where it is actually due.
One detail that catches DeFi users: wrapping or unwrapping a token is a CGT event, and it resets the 12-month clock for the new asset. If your history includes wrapped assets, check that whichever tool you pick reflects that rather than treating the wrap as a non-event.
AUD cost base with FIFO and specific identification
Your cost base has to be in Australian dollars, converted at the time of each acquisition and each disposal. If you traded on an offshore venue in USD or in a stablecoin, that conversion happens on every leg, not once at the end of the year, and getting it wrong shifts every downstream number.
CryptaTax values every event in AUD as it happened and supports more than one method of matching disposals to acquisitions, so the result reflects the approach you are actually applying rather than the only one the software offers. Read the mechanics in the cost basis guide. When you evaluate Koinly, confirm which methods it supports for an Australian filing and how it sources its AUD rates.
Crypto-to-crypto swaps and other CGT events the ATO taxes
In Australia a disposal is not just selling to cash, which is why active traders usually have far more taxable events than they expect. Reconstructing those events, rather than the arithmetic on them, is what takes the time. Three cases account for most of the surprise:
Swapping one crypto asset for another
A swap is a CGT event on the asset you gave up, valued in Australian dollars at the time of the swap, with a new parcel opened for the asset received. Thinking of it as "staying in crypto" does not change that. If your history is mostly swaps, the number of disposals to reconstruct is closer to your trade count than to the handful of times you cashed out.
Spending or gifting crypto
Using crypto to pay for goods or services is a disposal, valued in AUD at the time, and so is gifting it. Neither produces cash you can see in a bank statement, which is exactly why they are the events most often missed when a history is rebuilt by hand.
The personal use asset exemption
There is a limited personal use asset concept in Australian CGT that can, in narrow circumstances, exempt crypto used to buy personal items. It requires the crypto to have been acquired for under $10,000 and used for that purpose. It is much narrower than people hope, and it is not a general small-transaction exemption. Treat it as an exception to check with an adviser, not a planning strategy.
Staking and airdrops treated as ordinary income
Staking rewards and airdrops are generally ordinary income at the value they had when you received them, and that amount also becomes the cost base of the units received. Two things have to happen for that to come out right: the receipt has to land in the income section rather than in capital gains, and the value at receipt has to carry forward so that a later disposal is not taxed twice on the same amount.
CryptaTax separates reward receipts as income and carries the receipt value through as the cost base of those units. This is the area where mixed classification is most common across tools, so it is worth testing on your own data rather than taking any vendor's word for it, ours included. The Australian crypto tax guide sets out the treatment in full.
myTax-ready capital gains and income reports
You declare crypto in your annual tax return, through myTax or a registered tax agent: capital gains in the capital gains section, reward income as ordinary income. What you need from software, then, is not a form template but figures that are right and that you can defend if asked.
CryptaTax produces the capital gains and income figures in Australian dollars, with the discount applied where the parcel qualifies, and with each number linked back to the transaction it came from. See how crypto capital gains work in Australia for what goes where. When you compare, check the outputs Koinly provides today against what you actually have to lodge.
Pricing compared for Australian filers
Pricing is the fastest-moving part of any comparison, so check Koinly's current plans, transaction limits and add-ons on its own site rather than relying on a figure quoted second-hand. CryptaTax's pricing is published and scales with transaction volume rather than penalising it.
Compare at *your* real volume. The entry tier of any tool rarely reflects what an active portfolio actually pays once a year of DeFi activity is imported, and volume-based pricing is where the difference usually shows up.
Switching from Koinly before the 31 October deadline
If you lodge your own return, the deadline is 31 October for the income year ending 30 June. Through a registered tax agent it is generally later. Either way, the work is easier before the deadline than during it, because the part that takes time is reconstructing history, not lodging.
- Export your history from Koinly, along with any manual adjustments you made there, so you have a record of how prior years were treated.
- Connect the same wallets and exchanges to CryptaTax and let it rebuild the cost base from source data.
- Compare the overlap year, and look specifically at the parcels that crossed the 12-month line, since that is where a difference would matter most.
- Investigate any gap before you lodge. A difference is usually a classification disagreement on a specific transaction, and finding out which is the point of the exercise.
Because both tools read the same blockchain and exchange data, a clean migration should reproduce your history rather than rewrite it. Where Koinly needed a manual adjustment, keep the note so the same treatment can be applied.
Related comparisons and Australian guides
Weighing other tools too? See the general Koinly alternative comparison for the jurisdiction-neutral view, the best crypto tax software roundup for the full shortlist, or the Australian crypto tax guide for the rules themselves. For the other two markets with the same regional depth: Koinly alternative for the UK and Koinly alternative for Canada.
FAQ
It depends on what your history looks like. For an Australian return the deciding factors are whether parcel-level acquisition dates survive transfers (which is what the 50% CGT discount depends on), whether the cost base is kept in AUD at the time of each event, and whether staking and airdrop receipts are separated as income. CryptaTax is built around those three. Compare it against Koinly on your own data rather than on a feature list.
Yes. CryptaTax tracks the holding period of each parcel and applies the discount where an individual held that parcel for more than 12 months before disposing of it. Because the discount is decided parcel by parcel, the acquisition date has to survive transfers between your own wallets, which CryptaTax carries through rather than resetting.
Yes. Both tools read the same underlying blockchain and exchange data, so CryptaTax rebuilds your history from source rather than depending on an export. Export your Koinly history and any manual adjustments first so you have a record of how prior years were treated, then compare the overlap period before you rely on the new figures.
A swap is treated as a CGT event on the asset you disposed of, valued in Australian dollars at the time, with a new parcel opened for the asset received at that same value. That is why active traders often have many more taxable events than they expect, and why reconstructing them is usually the slow part of an Australian return.
Staking rewards and airdrops are generally ordinary income at their value when received, and that value also becomes the cost base of the units received. CryptaTax separates them as income and carries the receipt value forward, so a later disposal is not taxed twice on the same amount. Treatment can depend on your circumstances, so check anything unusual with a registered tax agent.
If you lodge your own return, 31 October, for the income year ending 30 June. Lodging through a registered tax agent generally gives you longer. The reconstruction of your transaction history is the part that takes time, so starting well before the deadline is worth more than any tool choice.