A century ago, trading seemed as simple as going to an exchange and yelling out “buy” or “sell” based on instinct. But of course it was more complicated than that. Stock trading gurus like Jesse Livermore took meticulous notes of every price movement in the stocks they followed and performed complex calculations on a piece of paper.
Thankfully, those days are long gone, and now we have several contenders for the best free crypto charting software, with many sophisticated tools to analyze and trade just about any asset, including any trading tool crypto community could hope for. Let’s review some of the most popular categories of crypto trading tools along with a few examples of the best crypto.
Best Charting Tools
All trading is based on the anticipation of the asset’s price going either up or down over a certain period of time, often relative to other assets or the market as a whole. The most common way to visualize that is by placing past price movements on the chart and trying to extrapolate future movements based on observed historical price movement patterns. Charting could get quite complex once you account for all those patterns and indicators, and that’s where charting tools come to the rescue. So when looking for trading tools bitcoin or altcoin, start with charting tools, which are the best tools for crypto trading trends.
TradingView
Ask anyone what the best crypto chart website is and you’ll probably hear about TradingView. The undisputed crypto chart tools king and the best crypto charting tool is TradingView, which is used by over 30 million traders of all kinds of assets, from AAPL to SHIB to get their best charting for crypto. TradingView offers live charting and more technical indicators than most traders could ever need. There are plenty of free chart types, making TradingView a great option for those seeking free crypto charting tools. Of course, for its best chart types, you will have to pay a premium fee. (Kattana decided to break with that tradition and give our users all the TradingView-quality advanced charting for free — making Kattana, in our humble opinion, the best free crypto charting software provider out there.)
Cryptowat.ch
There are also a number of less popular charting tools that are specific to crypto. Some are even owned by exchanges, like Kraken’s Cryptowat.ch, one of many such crypto chart tools. Sure, it won’t be called the best crypto chart website anytime soon. But just because it’s affiliated with an exchange doesn’t mean it can’t be one of the best cryptocurrency trading tools. It’s all really about trying a crypto charting tool out and seeing how it compares to other crypto charting tools, especially if you’re already using Kraken to trade crypto.
Trading terminal tools
Pro traders value ease of excess and execution. If they can do all of their research and trading from the same place, they are happy to pay a premium price and use that platform daily. This was the secret behind the Bloomberg Trading Terminal that every traditional finance trader has been using for decades now. Kattana brought the same concept to crypto. As mentioned above, Kattana developed crypto charting tools to rival the best of them. And because we firmly believe in the win-win nature of DeFi, we made our advance charting offerings free for all Kattana users, which makes Kattana the best crypto charting tool for many. And why not offer free crypto charting tools as part of the one-stop trading terminal? Offering the best crypto charts is only part of the appeal, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.
Market Watching Tools
Needless to say, your charting will be useless if you don’t have up-to-date (ideally, real time) market data at your fingertips that works together with your crypto charting tools. Even though crypto has only received media attention in 2017 and gone anywhere near mainstream no earlier than 2020, there are already a number of quality sources for current crypto data. These are cryptocurrency tools used by millions daily.
CMC
CoinMarketCap was the community favorite for years until being bought by Binance’s CEO, CZ. It is still the most used site for checking crypto prices and trading volume. And even has a robust API. But its implicit association with one of the largest crypto exchanges makes some crypto users nervous no matter how much Binance swears that the two have no common governance. Regardless, CMC has a lot of great data, making it one of the best tools for crypto trading.
CoinGecko
Thus, more independent price checking tools like CoinGecko are popular among decentralization-minded traders. Why use something that could at least theoretically be tainted by an association with an exchange where you can use an independent tool that appears as effective and accurate as anything out there? Plus, it’s possible that CoinGecko may drop a token at some point in the future, making interaction with it (including collecting candies for clicking on the candy jar at the top of the site daily) a potentially fruitful endeavor.
LiveCoinWatch
Track crypto prices in real-time over 120 exchanges with LiveCoinWatch. Not a fan of seeing prices in USD all the time? LCW can show it to you in one of 30+ fiat currencies. Then use your best crypto trading tool to act on the info.
Crypto Projects Calendar Tools
Even with stocks, when a company has an earnings call or a product release, there is a lot of anticipation among traders who may want to “buy the rumor, sell the news” or run some other milestone-based strategy. In crypto, there are so many projects and even more events that a proper event calendar is a very important tool that will help you figure out good cryptos to day trade.
Coindar
Even the best charting for crypto is only part of the picture if you don’t know what’s actually happening with a project’s pipeline. With a service like Coindar, you can not only view events but also sort them by category, importance, market cap of the project, exchange it’s trading on, and so on. It’s clearly an actively updated calendar since it publishes right on its front page how many events are happening in the future, how many were added so far, and even how many were added today.
CoinMarketCal
Another such service is CoinMarketCal, where you can see upcoming events, search for what’s happening with your coin of interest, see coin rankings, receive updates via a newsletter and much more. You can even exclude the coins you don’t want to follow, clearing your dashboard from overhyped stocks or memecoins, for example.
Cointelligence
What if you don’t know any stealth projects about to 100x? Then you may want to check out one of thousands of crypto conferences around the world. But first, do your research with Cointelligence.
Portfolio Management and Tracker
With all the drops, promising alts, LPs, and coins one Crypto Twitter influencer or another suggested, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of your portfolio without a portfolio management tool to let you know which cryptos to keep and which are good cryptos to day trade.
Zerion
One of the best tools for crypto trading users to track their portfolio is Zerion. It keeps track of your regular crypto and LPs across multiple blockchains. You can even connect multiple wallets to it to track them all in one place. Zerion recently launched a wallet too. And it is so far without its own governance token, sparking drop rumors.
Blockfolio
Another popular portfolio tracker is Blockfolio. In fact, it is the largest tracker and one of the oldest, being pretty much the main such tool used in the bull market of 2017. Famous for its sleek interface, Blockfolio has a number of cool features and benefits. Its relevance got a huge vote of confidence when it was acquired by FTX.
CoinStats
Connect unlimited portfolios from exchanges and wallets to CoinStats and track them on desktop or mobile. And yes, they have their own swap.
Portfolio Rebalancing Tools
While every investor heard about the importance of diversification, not everyone knows about the follow up rule: as different assets grow and fall in price, they end up constituting a bigger/smaller part of your portfolio, throwing it off-balance. You can rebalance your portfolio manually every week/month/year with some sort of trading tool crypto platform. But there are plenty of tools that will do it for you automatically, the kinds of trading tools bitcoin holders love.
3commas
3commas (referring to a billion having three commas) operate over 18 major exchanges and has a number of tested bots that will rebalance your portfolio. You can set up automatic rebalancing with take profit/stop loss considerations. You can also trade automatically, 24/7 based on set parameters. All these functions make 3commas the best crypto trading tool for those wanting to run rebalancing bots in many different strategies.
Shrimply
While 3commas is a paid product, Shrimply allows you to automate your trading for free, which makes it one of the great free tools for crypto. You can also historically backtest your strategies, copy other traders, and more.
Quadency
You can also use a crypto asset management platform with rebalancing built in. Quadency gives you exactly that and more. They have a bot that promises to autobalance for you, in addition to other bot strategies. As expected, some of the best cryptocurrency trading tools are the ones that provide multiple functions.
Mining Tools
Naturally, when someone sells you a product, they will do so above cost, often with a very healthy profit. With crypto, if you don’t want to pay the premium, you can mine it yourself. PoW mining requires ever more expensive mining rigs. But there are plenty of options that don’t, such as cloud mining and various pools.
WhatToMine
Before you start mining, it’s a good idea to figure out what to mine. Luckily, there are tools to show you the current profitability of all kinds of mining, such as WhatToMine. It can show you optimizations for GPU mining, ASIC mining, etc. IYou can even compare different miners to see which one may be worth it for you.
NiceHash
NiceHash is a marketplace of hash power, connecting miners and those wanting to rent out the production of their rigs for a certain period of time. Why would miners rent out their rigs? Because mining is unpredictable, so they may prefer to get a stable rent payment and leave the risk to others.
CGMiner
Ready to mine? CGMiner is one of the top mining software solutions out there. It’s open sourced and works on all major OS’s and hardware too (ASIC, GPU, etc.). And scaling is instant when you’re ready to level up.
Best Exchanges
Trading crypto usually starts with a crypto exchange. There are hundreds of Centralized (CEX) and Decentralized ones, some tied to specific geographic locations and others barring them. Which to choose depends on how much custody and privacy you’re willing to give up in exchange for liquidity and security.
Coinbase
For US and Canadian users, the Coinbase CEX is perhaps the most popular community crypto trading platform to bring money into or out of crypto. But it also boasts a powerful trading platform. The features previously reserved for Coinbase Pro are now available to regular Coinbase users. The exchange’s prestige is evidenced by price jumps that usually accompany rumors or announcements of a particular crypto to be listed there. If you’re a U.S. citizen and want to trade cleanly with full compliance with US regulations, Coinbase may be your best platform to trade crypto.
Binance
Globally, Binance is currently the dominant centralized exchange, with trading volume exceeding that of many other leading CEXs combined. Thus it is the best platform to trade crypto if you have a large volume of trading to execute. Binance was one of the first exchanges to have a launchpad for new projects and has a robust marketing arm. Naturally, it has a powerful trading tool crypto capacity for spot trading, margin, and more. In general, Binance is one of the best crypto trading sites.
FTX
Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange is emerging as a powerhouse, with ambitions to take on not just Binance and Coinbase but the big legacy firms of traditional finance. With over one million users, FTX is popular for regular spot trading, leveraged trading, and more. And it’s on a spree of building an entire portfolio of crypto projects to include into its ecosystem. Thus, it is vying to be one of the best tools for day trading crypto as well as for longer term investing.
Network and Crypto Ecosystem
Network analysis tools are some of the most underrated cryptocurrency tools out there. News and project websites will only take you so far in learning about what’s really going on with projects. Since most blockchains are public and the teams value transparency, it’s pretty easy to check what code is being developed and to what extent.
Chainalysis
The absolute leader in blockchain analytics is Chainalysis, clearly one of the best crypto analysis tools out there. It’s used by individual investors, banks, businesses, and even government agencies to analyze just about anything on the blockchain. This makes it one of the essential tools for crypto analysis and research.
CryptoMiso
CryptoMiso tracks commits for the most popular cryptos on GitHub, the most popular code repository. See what the projects are really working on. Gauge the activity of the entire industry or specific blockchains.
APY.Vision
APY.Vision has carved out a spot for liquidity pool (LP) and yield farming analysis. Because who can keep track of every farm? Use its extensive stats to find the best farming opportunities, which are a useful subset of your crypto trading tools.
Trading Platforms
With crypto’s meteoric growth over half a decade, it’s surprising that there aren’t many good crypto trading platforms, which are, after all, the best tools for day trading crypto. But this is changing, with platforms becoming some of the best crypto tools overall.
Kattana
This is one place where we can’t be shy since Kattana was created specifically to address the lack of professional trading terminals in DeFi, requiring Kattana to create one of the best day trading tools. If you’ve used Kattana before, you already know how it earned the moniker of “The Bloomberg Terminal of DeFi.” Advanced charts, trading via many CEXs and DEXs, complex order types, lighting-fast executions, and many more professional trading features make Kattana the go-to place to trade crypto. It’s what a DeFi community crypto trading platform was meant to be.
DefiHelper
There are many platforms that combine trading and yield farming, such as DefiHelper. It promises an easy way to create strategies for buying cryptos across DEXs in addition to presenting lucrative farming opportunities. This also makes DefiHelper one of the best tools for crypto trading trends and one of the best tools for day trading crypto.
dYdX
For derivatives trading, the demise of BitMex left a wide-open field, with many trading platforms vying for dominance among crypto day trading tools, including FTX and dYdX. The latter is liked by many traders for offering high margins and rewarding trading volume with its governance token claims. Being decentralized doesn’t hurt its reputation either.
Best Decentralized Exchange
Not your key – not your crypto. For those unwilling to deposit their crypto into a wallet controlled by a centralized exchange, a multitude of DEXs exist where they can trade any pair, releasing their funds only in the process of the transaction itself.
Uniswap
The first AMM (Automatic Market Maker) to get widespread use as the Ethereaum’s community crypto trading platform is still popular today, already on its third version. Note that it’s not one of suitable trading tools bitcoin users should employ since it only currently works on Ethereum and a few other chains that does not include Bitcoin. Uniswap pretty much started the free token drop craze, liquidity pool rewards culture, and much more. It’s been cloned multiple times, with SushiSwap’s vampire attack being one for the history books. Granted that AMMs are not the best tools for trading professionally as they tend to lack advanced order types (hence why you need trading terminals like Kattana). Still, Uniswap’s app remains one of the most popular and arguably best crypto trading sites to this day.
KyberSwap
KyberSwap too traces its roots to even before the 2017 bull market. It’s a multi-chain DEX aggregator. And by aggregator, it means finding the best price out of over 60 DEXs. It also has liquidity pools, a launchpad, and much more. This makes KyberSwap one of the best day trading tools, especially since the best day trading cryptos are not all on the same DEX, so having 60 of them to choose from is a big advantage.
Curve
If you want something with a horribly ugly interface but very efficient exchange rates, look no further than Curve, which keeps its trading pairs to similarly-behaving assets to make trading a lot more accurate. As such, Curve is not the best day trading cryptos solution, but rather an efficient swap for deeper blockchain activity.
Trading Bots
Why trade crypto yourself when you can program a bot to analyze the market at lightning speed and swoop in for the right pick at the right time? Or you can just buy/subscribe to one someone else built. Bot builders use crypto analysis tools to find opportunities for automatic trading.
Coinrule
Want to just pick and go? Coinrule has 150 automated trading strategies to choose from. Of course, you won’t get them all for free (only maybe 7). With paid packages, you get all sorts of extras, like advanced charting, and other useful crypto trading tools.
Pionex
Targeted at high-volume traders, Pionex is an exchange with a focus on trading bots too. It has boasted monthly trading volume of $5B with 100k monthly active users. As such, it is certainly one of the more popular crypto day trading tools and is competitive in including the best crypto analysis tools in its toolkit.
NAGA
Not ready to play with real money? Get a free demo account with NAGA. Copy other traders, learn, and perfect your trading. Their autocopy feature does exactly what the name says.
The above are some of the crypto trading tools that will help you fine-tune your strategy and automate some of the work. The rest is up to you.