The differences in what tools they will offer to traders is not clear. WAVES plans on doing margin trading and lending in addition to straight buys and sells. The real difference between the two will come from the underlying technology. Komodo sends its blockchain onto the bitcoin blockchain using special types of transactions. They do this through a system of notary nodes but exactly what type of transactions these are is unclear. They will be using the Equihash algorithm which is the one ZCash employs while WAVES is using Scorex. Komodo is also borrowing the zero-knowledge proofs from ZCash for anonymous transfers. I haven't seen any documentation on how their trading engine is supposed to operate.

From the looks of it Komodo doesn't seem to have much transparency. They've promised some things that sound good but when you go their website it seems very, very sketchy. The lead developer was working on the SuperNET project which did an ICO in 2014 and has yet to deliver anything functional. The lead GUI dev is some guy named "Boogieman" and I can't tell who he is from the cartoon drawing of him. Who is he? You can't make this stuff up. https://komodoplatform.com/#tab-id-2

The whole project looks like a joke or a scam. Though WAVES development has been far from perfect at least I know who in the hell is working on it. They have a real team in a real office that is really working on something. Komodo presents as though it could be pulled off by a single lead developer who hired a graphic artist for a couple days to make some logos and a website before paying for a few articles and ads on some cryptocurrency news site. The ideas behind it sound intriguing but the track record of the one person attached to it whom I can actually identify plus the total lack of transparency is really bad. I'm certainly not ready to get cozy and go all in with WAVES, but at the same time I won't be touching any Komodo with a ten foot pole.