What to Look For in a Crypto Tracker

You are choosing where you will look at your money for the next several years, and probably where you will keep hand-entered records that exist nowhere else. Most comparison content ranks trackers by feature count, which is close to useless, because the features you never open cost you nothing and the one gap that matters costs you the whole product. If every account you hold sits on a single exchange, weigh a standalone tracker against your exchange's own portfolio view first.

Here is the checklist that actually determines whether a tracker works for you. It is written so it stays useful if you finish it and pick someone else.

Does it cover the venues and chains where your money actually is?

Do this part before you install anything. Write down every account you hold: each exchange, each wallet, each chain those wallets sit on, and any cold storage you have not thought about since 2021. Then check that list against the tracker's published integrations, one by one.

A headline number is not a substitute for that check. Three hundred supported exchanges is irrelevant if your particular regional exchange is the one they skipped, and a long chain list means nothing if the L2 holding a third of your net worth is absent. Coverage is binary at the level of each individual account you own.

Then ask the harder version of the same question: what happens to positions that are not simple token balances. Staked assets frequently appear as a liquid staking token rather than the underlying. Liquidity positions appear as an LP receipt whose composition shifts as the pool trades. Lending appears as an interest-bearing receipt token that may or may not be priced. A tracker resolves these automatically, shows you the raw receipt token, or shows you nothing at all, and the difference between those three outcomes is enormous if DeFi is where your money lives. Tracking assets locked in staking, LPs and vaults covers what each position type looks like from the tracker's side.

Being straight about our own position here: The Crypto App reads 100+ exchanges and 15+ chains and prices 10,000+ assets, and it is built around the holdings view rather than a position ledger. Products that specialise in on-chain depth have invested more engineering in complex DeFi resolution, and the CoinStats comparison says so directly. If you run lending, farming and vault exposure across a dozen protocols, weigh that honestly.

How deep do the alerts go?

Price alerts are table stakes and every product has them. Three things separate the alert layers that matter.

Condition types. A price level is the simplest possible trigger and often the least useful. What you frequently want is a percentage move over a window, a volume spike that indicates something happened before you knew it, a market cap crossing a threshold, or a transaction landing in a wallet you watch. Price alerts vs. percentage alerts explains why the second kind survives volatility better.

Count. Alert allowances are almost always tiered. The Crypto App allows 100 on Free, 150 on Pro and 200 on Pro+, with the advanced condition types reserved for the paid tiers. Whatever product you pick, find the number before you build a strategy that depends on having more.

Delivery. An alert that fires reliably at 3am is a different product from one that fires eventually. This is the hardest thing to evaluate before committing, and the only real test is running it for a couple of weeks on conditions you can verify independently. When alerts do not arrive covers the failure modes worth checking for.

What can the app see, and what can you take with you?

Two questions that sit together, because both are about the boundary between you and the software.

On access: a portfolio tracker should be strictly read-only. You generate an API key on the exchange with trading and withdrawal permissions switched off, and the tracker gets exactly the visibility that key permits and nothing else. It reads balances and history. It cannot place an order, cannot withdraw, and cannot authorise anything. What a tracker can see covers the boundary in detail, and read-only API keys covers generating one properly. Any app that requests withdrawal permission, or that asks for a seed phrase under any framing at all, has told you what it is. Delete it.

On exit: check that export exists, and check what it contains, before you have years of data inside the product. This is a genuinely differentiating feature and the industry is uneven on it. CoinStats documents CSV export from both web and mobile, letting you choose transaction history or balances. Delta documents export through Settings, with a caveat worth reading closely: standard exports include only active transactions, so anything you deleted from your records will not appear in the file. Read the export documentation of any tracker you are seriously considering. It tells you how the company thinks about your data.

How is it priced, and what does the free tier hold back?

Two pricing models dominate, and they suit different people.

Metered plans constrain quantity and let you use everything. CoinStats' published free plan gives 10 portfolios and a 20,000-transaction allowance but limits you to 10 daily syncs per portfolio, with Premium at $13.99 a month raising that to 200. Delta's free plan permits 10 assets in one portfolio, with PRO from $4.49 a month billed yearly and PRO+ from $8.99 a month billed yearly lifting the ceiling.

Feature-gated plans give you unlimited use of a smaller set. The Crypto App's Free tier includes unlimited manual positions and 100 price alerts, with Pro at $8.99 a month adding advanced alert types and advanced charts, and Pro+ at $14.99 a month or $174.99 a year removing the connection cap.

Neither model is better in the abstract. What matters is which axis you personally sit at the edge of, which you will not know until you have used a free tier for a month. Free vs. paid crypto trackers works through which constraints bite for which kind of holder.

Will the company still exist in three years?

This is the criterion nobody puts on a comparison table, and it has already cost people more than any feature gap on this page.

Blockfolio was the default mobile crypto tracker for most of a decade. It had passed 6 million downloads when FTX announced its acquisition in August 2020 for a reported $150 million. In July 2021 the app was renamed FTX. In November 2022 FTX blocked customer withdrawals and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Anyone with years of hand-entered transaction history sitting inside that app had no reason to anticipate that outcome when they installed a portfolio tracker.

The lesson is not that acquisitions are bad. It is that a tracker holding your records is a dependency, and dependencies deserve the questions you would ask of any other one. Who owns the company. How it makes money, and whether that model is visible and boring. Whether the tracker is the product or a customer-acquisition surface for something else, because a tracker attached to a trading venue inherits that venue's risk. Whether you can export today, without asking anyone. And whether the app has been shipping steadily or has gone quiet, which the release notes will tell you in about thirty seconds. What Blockfolio users should look for in a successor goes through this in more depth.

Run the seven checks against two or three candidates and one of them will fail on something you care about, usually coverage or export. Then install the survivors, connect the same accounts read-only to each, and use them side by side for a fortnight. The app you open without deciding to open it is the answer, and no checklist, this one included, predicts which that will be.

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Competitor pricing and feature claims above were verified in September 2026 from each provider's own documentation and pricing pages. Plans change — check current terms before deciding.