Form8949.com vs TradeLog in 2026: Filing Service or Trader Tax Software?
These two are often shortlisted together but they solve different problems. Form8949.com is a pay-per-use web service that takes your broker files and produces a completed Form 8949 and Schedule D, plus a TXF for TurboTax desktop and an OFX for TurboTax Online, with a fee schedule updated in January 2026 that starts at $18 for a single broker file, $9 if you have fewer than 25 transactions, and includes 900 transactions before per-hundred overage rates kick in. TradeLog is annual Windows software that keeps its own tax-lot books across the year and recomputes wash sales itself, at roughly $89 to $199 depending on trade record count. The deciding question is whether you trust the numbers your broker already reported.
Scored head to head
| Criteria | Form8949.com | TradeLog | TXF Converter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accuracy | 8.5 | 9.5 | 8.0 |
| Format / TXF support | 9.0 | 8.5 | 9.5 |
| Ease | 8.0 | 6.0 | 9.5 |
| Speed | 8.0 | 6.5 | 9.5 |
| Price | 7.0 | 5.0 | 10.0 |
| Privacy | 7.0 | 7.5 | 9.5 |
| Overall | 8.1 | 7.5 | 9.2 |
Scores from our full 2026 comparison, out of 10. Between the two, Form8949.com scores higher overall.
Pick Form8949.com if
Pick Form8949.com if your 1099-B is already correct and you just need it turned into filing-ready output, particularly if you have thousands of transactions, since the overage rates fall to pennies per hundred trades and the total often stays under what a TradeLog license costs. It is also the better fit for TurboTax Online users, because Online does not accept TXF and Form8949.com produces an OFX for that path.
Price: ~Tiered per transaction count (as of 2026)
Pick TradeLog if
Pick TradeLog if you need wash sales recalculated across multiple broker accounts, have made or are considering the Section 475(f) mark-to-market election, or want an independent record you can defend line by line. Form8949.com explicitly does not redo broker wash sale accounting and cannot track wash sales across accounts, so anyone in that situation is choosing between TradeLog and doing it by hand.
Price: ~Annual license (as of 2026)
The bottom line
Form8949.com is a formatting and filing service and TradeLog is an accounting product, so the cost difference is not really the story. If your broker's adjusted basis is right, Form8949.com finishes the job cheaply and outputs every format you might need. If it is wrong, or you trade across accounts where wash sales cross broker boundaries, no amount of formatting fixes that and TradeLog is the correct spend. For the narrower case where you only want the trades imported into TurboTax desktop and do not need a completed Schedule D generated for you, our free TXF Converter produces the TXF and a Form 8949 CSV from any broker CSV or PDF without a per-file fee.
- ✓Free to try, no signup
- ✓Outputs TXF for TurboTax desktop plus a Form 8949 CSV
- ✓Reads any broker — foreign and small platforms included
- ✓Files processed in-memory and deleted after conversion
Free, no signup. Or see the full ranking of all 6 tools.