# rotki vs Awaken

> Awaken and rotki both put on-chain activity at the center: DeFi positions, swaps, NFTs, and the messy reality of wallet history. Awaken does this as a hosted service, while rotki does it as a local-first, open-source desktop application that decodes your activity on your own machine.

Awaken and rotki both put on-chain activity at the center: DeFi positions, swaps, NFTs, and the messy reality of wallet history. Awaken does this as a hosted service, while rotki does it as a local-first, open-source desktop application that decodes your activity on your own machine.

## How Awaken works

Awaken is a cloud tool with a strong focus on DeFi and NFT tax handling, and it offers importers to help people move over from other hosted services. You connect your wallets and accounts, and Awaken processes that history on its servers. The trade-off is that your on-chain history is uploaded to the vendor.

## How rotki works

rotki reads your on-chain activity through RPC endpoints you choose and decodes it locally into readable events, with full profit and loss accounting. Everything is stored in an encrypted database on your own computer, and because rotki is open source, you can verify exactly how each protocol is decoded rather than trusting a closed cloud pipeline.

## Privacy and ownership

For on-chain-heavy users this matters a lot: your wallet history is sensitive, and a hosted tool concentrates it on its servers. rotki keeps that history local and self-custodied, so there is no central store to breach and no dependence on a vendor's handling of your data.

## The trade-off

rotki does not offer a one-click hosted importer, and it asks you to connect your accounts, run a desktop app, and keep your own backups. In return it decodes your DeFi and NFT activity locally, with open-source transparency and your on-chain history kept on your own machine. For anyone who wants that history private and auditable rather than uploaded to a vendor, that is the trade worth making, and the reason to choose rotki.