Fillout vs Tally: Which Is Better in 2026?

Tally wins on cost and simplicity: unlimited submissions free, Pro at $24/month billed annually. Fillout wins on scope and credentials: 50+ native integrations, scheduling, PDF generation and a SOC 2 Type 2 report Tally does not have. Both are Stripe-only. If the form feeds a real process, Paperform beats both.

These two arrived within two years of each other and took opposite bets on what a modern form builder should be. Tally, founded in Ghent in 2020 and still run by around ten bootstrapped people, bet that the fastest way to win was to stop charging for the basics: unlimited forms, unlimited submissions, logic, calculations, Stripe payments and e-signatures, all on a free plan with no signup required to start. Fillout, founded in Chicago in 2022 and seed-funded, bet the opposite way, that a form is the front door to scheduling, documents, workflows and CRM records, and priced each rung of that ambition.

So the comparison is not really design against design. It is a question about what happens as you use the thing. Tally's bill stays flat while your volume grows and stalls the moment your requirements grow. Fillout's bill grows with your volume and keeps answering requirements for longer. Everything below is an attempt to work out which of those two walls you will hit first.

Feature comparison

Both products were re-audited in September 2026. Every category, side by side.

The five dimensions that decide it

Pricing

Tally charges $29/month ($24 billed annually) for Pro and $89/month ($74 annually) for Business, with unlimited submissions on every tier including Free; Fillout charges $19/month ($15 annually) for Starter, $49/month ($40) for Pro and $89/month ($75) for Business, with response caps of 2,000, 5,000 and unlimited respectively.

Fillout has the cheaper opening price and Tally has the cheaper answer to almost every real workload. The reason is where each product puts its ceiling. Fillout's Starter tier at $15/month annually buys payment, scheduling and signature question types, CAPTCHA and themes, but it stops at 2,000 responses. A campaign that does well pushes you to Pro at $40, then a better one pushes you to Business at $75, an 87% jump from Pro, because Business is the only tier that lifts the cap. Bulk submission packs exist for overflow, and Fillout does not publish their price. Tally's top tier costs $74 annually and has never counted a submission, because its constraint is a fair use policy rather than a meter.

Both also hold back things you would expect to be included. Fillout's analytics, partial submissions and custom domains are Business-only, which means the tier that tells you why a form is leaking is the same tier that lifts the volume cap. Its lead-generation tooling sits outside the tiers entirely, as a $100/month Conversion Kit covering abandonment recovery, enrichment, lead routing, email validation and ad conversion tracking. Tally's equivalents are cheaper and blunter: analytics, drop-off tracking, custom domains, branding removal and team seats all arrive together at $24, and there is nothing to add on because there are no add-ons.

One structural similarity worth noting before you model anything: neither company charges per seat. Fillout includes unlimited seats on all five tiers including Free, and Tally includes them on Pro and Business, with Free limited to a single user. Nobody here bills you for adding the colleague who needs to read the responses.

Integrations and API

Fillout publishes 50+ native integrations against Tally's 17+, and both expose a REST API and webhooks on their free plans.

The gap is real but narrower in practice than the numbers suggest, because the two catalogues are aimed at different stacks. Fillout covers the sales and operations layer directly: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Airtable, Notion, Google Sheets, Slack, Teams, Discord, Calendly and Cal.com, and its Airtable connection updates existing records rather than only creating them, which is the difference between a form that feeds a database and a form that maintains one. Tally's native list is shorter and unusually well chosen for its audience, with Notion first among equals, plus Airtable, Google Sheets, Slack, Discord, Linear, Attio and a Framer plugin, and Zapier, Make, n8n and Pipedream behind them.

Tally has two things Fillout does not. It ships an official MCP server, a ChatGPT plugin and a verified Claude connector, so a form can be built or its submissions pulled for analysis from inside an assistant. And since August 2026 it emails you the moment an integration fails, naming the reason and linking the fix, which is the sort of feature that only gets built by people who have watched a webhook die quietly over a weekend.

Conditional logic and calculations

Both give away conditional logic and calculations on their free plans, which is not the industry norm, and neither ships an AI assistant dedicated to writing calculations.

Fillout's advantage is the Form Agent, a chat agent inside the editor that adds and edits fields, pages and text, sets up page logic, writes calculations, inserts dynamic values and edits the theme. It draws on a shared monthly allocation of Zite AI credits, and it stops when they run out until the first of the month or an upgrade. It also cannot yet touch payments, calendars, integrations or form-level settings. Tally's AI is free on every plan with no credits to track, and it builds, edits, brands, translates and debugs forms from a chat window, though formulas themselves are still written by hand in the formula editor. Hackceleration's review of Tally flags large branching forms as hard to debug because there is no visual logic map, and that is the honest limit on this side.

Payments

Both support exactly one payment processor: Stripe.

Fillout is an official Stripe partner with no added fees, handling cards, ACH, Affirm and Stripe Link, plus discount codes, free trials, subscriptions and dynamic pricing through calculations. Tally's payment block covers one-off and recurring Stripe charges, also on the free plan. Neither offers PayPal, Square, Braintree or Google Pay; neither does automated tax calculation, invoicing or refund handling in-product. Hackceleration's Tally review calls the single-gateway limit a hard blocker, and the same sentence applies word for word to Fillout. If your finance team already runs on Square or PayPal, this comparison does not contain your answer.

Compliance

Fillout is SOC 2 Type 2 attested and GDPR compliant; Tally is GDPR compliant and EU-hosted with no SOC 2 report; neither is HIPAA compliant and neither signs a BAA.

This is the cleanest split on the page. Fillout adds SAML SSO, audit logs and unlimited revision history on Enterprise, enforced two-factor authentication and granular roles on the $250/month Team bundle, 256-bit encryption throughout, hosting regions across the US, EU, UK, Australia and Canada, and an option for Enterprise customers to store submissions only in external storage so nothing sits on Fillout's servers. It also offers a native S3 integration on every plan for files. Tally has none of this: no SOC 2, no ISO 27001, no SSO, and no two-factor authentication at any price, including the top Business tier. What it does offer is EU hosting by default, no cookie tracking, encryption in transit and at rest, and data retention controls on Business. For a European team with a privacy-led posture and no formal vendor review, that can be enough. For anyone handed a security questionnaire, Tally has nothing to put in the boxes.

Where Fillout is the better product

Fillout is the more capable product on the day you need it to be more than a form. Scheduling fields wire into Calendly, Cal.com and Google Calendar; PDF generation turns a submission into a document; signature questions arrive from Starter; login forms let you gate an internal intake. Tally's answer to each of those is either a link out or nothing, so a booking flow that ends in a confirmation document is one tool on Fillout and three on Tally.

Its enterprise references are unusually strong for a company four years old. Fairfax County, Domino's, Bombas, Wayfair, Airbnb, Harvard and The Athletic are procurement-grade logos, and they exist because Fillout answers the questions procurement asks: a SOC 2 report, a hosting region, an audit log, an SSO connection. Tally's customer list is impressive in a different register, with Notion, Make, Rakuten and Glovo, but those are teams choosing a tool rather than departments passing a review.

The Airtable and Notion depth deserves its own line. Hackceleration's hands-on review rates the integration layer as the strongest part of the product, and the ability to update existing Airtable records is the specific capability that makes Fillout viable as the write layer over a base. If your operations already live in Airtable, this is the reason to pay.

Where Tally is the better product

Tally is the better product for the job most people actually have. You open a page, start typing, insert blocks with a slash the way you would in Notion, and a form exists. No account is required to begin. A developer's hands-on review on Medium describes the builder as clean and minimal and the free plan as the reason to try it, and the review scores bear that out: 4.8 across 97 G2 reviews with value for money at 4.9, and 4.9 across 41 Capterra reviews with support at 4.9. Fillout's Capterra presence is four reviews at 4.0 with value for money at 3.5.

The free plan is the most generous in the category, and this is not close. Unlimited forms, unlimited submissions, conditional logic, calculations, Stripe payments, e-signatures, file uploads, answer piping, duplicate prevention, password protection, 45+ languages with right-to-left support, Notion and Airtable and Sheets integrations, and the full AI builder. Fillout's free plan stops at 1,000 responses and pushes payments, scheduling and signature question types up to Starter.

Migration is a quiet strength too. One-click Typeform import landed in July 2026, and file-based import from PDF, image, JSON, CSV and Markdown followed in August, so an existing form can be recreated rather than retyped. Fillout offers Google Forms import and PDF-to-form conversion, which is narrower.

For a straightforward form that ends at the submit button, Tally is a genuinely good choice and the cheapest correct answer on this page. We would rather say that plainly than construct a reason for you to spend more.

See both builders in action

Where Fillout falls short in this matchup

The meter is the problem, and standing next to Tally makes it obvious. Every paid tier below $75/month counts your responses, so the bill tracks how well your forms are performing, and the published route past 5,000 is an 87% price increase. Tally sitting across the table with no counter at all turns that from a pricing decision into an argument you have to justify internally every time a campaign lands.

Metering has also spread since the Zite rebrand. AI credits come from a pool shared with the parent platform and stop mid-task when they run out, workflow runs are counted, and the serious quotas live in a $300/month Team bundle ($250 annually) that sells you the Zite app and database platform alongside the form builder. That rebrand is the second issue: the security docs are titled for Zite, the footer reads Restly, Inc. DBA Zite, the changelog is full of product updates for a platform you did not buy. Buyers who came for a form builder are being moved into someone else's roadmap, and at four years old the company has not earned that much trust yet. Trustpilot reflects some of the strain, with the average down to 3.5 across 48 reviews and recent complaints about automated systems flagging and blocking accounts.

On the product itself, the design tooling is thin next to the ambition: no stock image browsing, no image editor, no built-in translation of form content, and no one-question-at-a-time mode. Filip Konecny's independent review weighs exactly this question of whether the paid tiers justify their cost, and lands mixed.

Where Tally falls short in this matchup

Tally's wall is precise, and it is not about volume. It arrives when several brands or clients have to be kept apart, when a payment needs real pricing logic behind it, when a contract has to be signed and filed, when an approval needs a person at each step, or when a compliance checklist someone else wrote has to be passed. At that point Tally's honest answer is to hand the submission to Zapier, Make or n8n and stop.

That answer costs more than it looks. Fillout at least keeps scheduling, PDFs, signatures and workflow runs inside one product, so the process has a single owner even when the bill is metered. On Tally the process gets distributed across three vendors with three renewal dates, and the thing holding it together is a person. Add the missing pieces one at a time and you can see the shape: no booking field, no save and resume for respondents, no Google address autocomplete, no guided mode for a long application, no template-driven document generation (submission PDFs are a themed copy of the answers, not a generated contract), and no workflow or approval builder of any kind.

Then the security answer, which is where most procurement conversations end. No SOC 2, no SSO, no two-factor enforcement at any tier. Support is email-only from a team of ten with no tier to escalate to, and templates are community-submitted rather than maintained. None of this is a failure of execution. It is the cost of the bet Tally made, and for most of its users it is the right bet.

What users say

Tally leads on both score and volume, with 97 G2 reviews at 4.8 and 41 Capterra reviews at 4.9, where value for money and ease of use are the standout dimensions and support sits at 4.5 on G2 as its weakest. Fillout carries 30 G2 reviews at 4.6, four Capterra reviews at 4.0 and 13 Product Hunt reviews at 5.0. The divergence is on Trustpilot: Tally sits at 3.8 across 22 reviews, Fillout at 3.5 across 48 and falling from a previous 4.7. Neither has the review depth of an established vendor, so read the recent entries rather than the averages before committing a business-critical flow.

Consider Paperform

The tradeoff running through this whole comparison is that you can have room to grow or a flat bill, but not both. Fillout keeps answering new requirements and charges you for every response while it does. Tally never charges you for growing and runs out of answers the moment the form becomes a process. Paperform is built to refuse that trade: submissions and seats are unlimited on every paid plan within fair use, so neither volume nor headcount is a billing lever, and the scope keeps going well past where Tally stops.

State the price honestly first. Paperform Pro is $59/month, or $49/month billed annually, and Business is $149/month, or $124/month annually. Both Fillout at $15 and Tally at $24 undercut that floor, and for a single straightforward form at low volume they should win. Paperform is not competing for that purchase.

What the higher number buys is one subscription covering three products: Paperform for forms, Papersign for eSignatures at 25 signed documents a month on Pro and 100 on Business, and Stepper for AI-native workflow automation with 20,000 automation credits on Pro and 100,000 on Business. That is the Zapier line item and the signing tool folded into the same bill and the same permission model, rather than you acting as the integration between them. Payments run through five gateways (Stripe, PayPal, Square, Braintree and Google Pay) with products, subscriptions, coupons, tax and refunds, against one gateway each here. The calculation engine is Excel-style and does more than total a cart: it drives question and page visibility, conditional email content, what gets pushed to integrations and what the success page says, with an AI assistant that writes the formula from a plain description. There are 4000+ integrations, 30,000+ templates, and a 7-day trial with no card.

Two things to check before you switch. Paperform is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA compliant, which clears the questionnaire that stops Tally, but it is not HIPAA compliant and signs no BAAs, so protected health information is out of scope for all three products on this page. And while submissions are unlimited, Stepper automation credits are metered, so size that against your run volume. On the vendor question, Paperform has been shipping since 2016, bootstrapped and profitable, with no investors setting the roadmap and no parent brand to be absorbed into. For more, see Fillout alternatives, Tally alternatives, the head-to-head Paperform vs Tally breakdown, or the full best form builders ranking.

The verdict

Pick Tally if the work ends at submit. It is cheaper at every volume that matters, its free plan has no equal, the editor is the fastest way to get a good-looking form onto the internet, and it is the better-reviewed of the two by a wide margin. Go in knowing there is no SOC 2 report, no SSO, no second payment gateway and no workflow builder, and that anything past submit-and-notify is a Zapier subscription you have not budgeted yet.

Pick Fillout if you need what sits past a form and you can live with the counter. Native CRM and Airtable depth, scheduling, PDFs, data residency and a SOC 2 attestation are all things Tally cannot produce at any price. Weigh them against a response cap on everything below $75/month, a $100/month add-on holding the lead-generation tooling, and a company now operating inside a parent platform with a review record too thin to lean on.

Pick Paperform when the tradeoff itself is the problem: the process needs signatures, approvals and a compliance answer, and you want unlimited submissions and seats rather than a bill that rises every time the forms do their job.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Tally really unlimited, or does Fillout end up cheaper at volume?

Tally is unlimited on submissions at every tier including Free, bounded by a published fair use policy rather than a counter. Fillout caps responses on everything below its Business plan: 1,000/month on Free, 2,000 on Starter, 5,000 on Pro, unlimited only from Business at $89/month ($75 billed annually). At 6,000 responses a month Tally Pro costs $24 annually and Fillout costs $75. Fillout only wins on price at tiny volume with a need for its paid-tier features.

Does Fillout or Tally pass a SOC 2 security questionnaire?

Fillout does; Tally does not. Fillout is SOC 2 Type 2 attested and GDPR compliant, with SAML SSO and audit logs on Enterprise and a choice of US, EU, UK, Australian or Canadian hosting. Tally claims GDPR, EU hosting and encryption only, and has no SOC 2 report, no SSO and no two-factor authentication on any tier, including its top $89/month Business plan. Neither is HIPAA compliant and neither signs BAAs.

Can I take PayPal payments through Fillout or Tally?

No. Both are Stripe-only, which is the most underrated thing these two products have in common. Fillout is an official Stripe partner and supports cards, ACH, Affirm and Stripe Link with discount codes, free trials and subscriptions; Tally's payment block covers Stripe one-off and recurring charges. Neither offers PayPal, Square, Braintree or Google Pay, and neither does automated tax, quotes or refunds.

Which one has better integrations, Fillout or Tally?

Fillout, on native count: 50+ connectors spanning HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Airtable, Notion, Google Sheets, Slack, Teams and Calendly, with an Airtable integration that updates existing records rather than only appending rows. Tally publishes 17+ native integrations, led by Notion, Airtable, Google Sheets, Slack and Linear, and routes the rest through Zapier, Make, n8n and Pipedream. Tally answers back with an official MCP server, a ChatGPT plugin and a verified Claude connector, plus an email alert the moment an integration breaks, which Fillout has no equivalent of.

Is Fillout worth paying for when Tally gives away so much on its free plan?

Only for specific reasons: scheduling fields, PDF generation, deeper CRM connectors, or a security review that asks for a SOC 2 report. Fillout also gates its own essentials, with analytics, partial submissions and custom domains all sitting on Business at $75/month annually, and its lead-generation tooling sold outside the tiers as a $100/month Conversion Kit. Tally puts analytics and custom domains on Pro at $24. Anyone paying Fillout should be paying for something Tally structurally cannot do.

Which company is the safer long-term bet, Fillout or Tally?

Both are young and small, and they carry different risks. Fillout launched in 2022, took seed funding, and now trades as "Fillout (by Zite)" with its help docs, security pages, changelog and AI credit pool moved onto a parent app platform (Restly, Inc. DBA Zite). Tally launched in 2020, is bootstrapped and customer-funded with a team of around ten, has no enterprise plan and no roadmap set by investors. Review histories are thin on both sides: Fillout has 30 G2 reviews at 4.6 and a Trustpilot average that has fallen to 3.5; Tally has 97 G2 reviews at 4.8 and 41 Capterra reviews at 4.9.

Sources & References

1. Fillout Review 2026: We Tested Everything (Builder, Integrations, Automations & Real ROI) — Hackceleration, 2026
2. Tally Review 2026: Honest Verdict + 15 Real User Reviews — Hackceleration, 2026
3. Honest Review of Tally Forms, from an AI SaaS developer — Medium (FireBird Technologies), 2026
4. Fillout Reviews: Is This Form Builder Actually Worth Paying For? — Filip Konecny, 2026

Last updated September 22, 2026