FormAssembly vs Tally: Regulated Intake vs Free Simplicity in 2026

FormAssembly wins on compliance and Salesforce: HIPAA with BAAs, PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 2 and FedRAMP High, plus the deepest Salesforce connector in the category. Tally wins on cost and speed, with unlimited free forms and a $24/month Pro plan. Choose FormAssembly for regulated intake, Tally for everything that ends at submit.

These two products barely occupy the same market. FormAssembly has been selling secure data collection since 2006 to Southwest Airlines, CVS Health and Harvard, through a sales team and a procurement process. Tally is ten people in Ghent who shipped a form builder you can use without creating an account. The comparison is still worth making, because a surprising number of teams end up holding both: Tally for the marketing page, FormAssembly for the thing the compliance officer signs off on.

Five Facts, Before Anything Else

Feature Comparison

Every category, side by side, from the September 2026 audit of both products.

Where FormAssembly Is the Right Answer

A compliance list nobody else can match

FormAssembly holds HIPAA with BAAs, PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA, FERPA, GLBA, 21 CFR Part 11 and Section 508 accessibility, with a FedRAMP High authorised Gov Cloud environment available on top. Tally publishes GDPR and EU hosting. For patient intake, a clinical trial record, a student financial aid application or a federal agency form, that difference decides the evaluation in the first five minutes, and no amount of Tally's polish changes it.

Salesforce as a first-class destination

FormAssembly's connector writes one submission across multiple standard and custom Salesforce objects, prefills a form from an existing record, and handles parent-child relationships and dynamic picklists on the Team tier. Tally has no native CRM connector of its own beyond Attio; Salesforce means a webhook or an automation platform, and the mapping logic then lives outside the form. Twenty years of building for Salesforce admins is real, and it is the main thing customers are buying.

Process, not just capture

Approval processes, identity authentication, multi-signer eSignatures and template-driven document generation are all in FormAssembly's product, from Atlas Team upward. Tally has none of them. Southwest Airlines and Harvard did not buy a form; they bought the routing and the audit trail behind it.

Where Tally Is the Right Answer

Nothing to negotiate

Tally's free plan gives unlimited forms and unlimited submissions within a published fair use policy, and it includes conditional logic, calculations, Stripe payments, e-signatures, file uploads and 45+ languages. That is the most generous free plan in the category, and it is genuinely good software rather than a trap. FormAssembly has no free plan and, since the September 2026 pricing change, no public price either. If the choice is between starting today and booking a call, Tally has already won.

The editor gets out of the way

Tally's Notion-style block editor lets you type questions as though writing a document and insert fields with a slash command. FormAssembly's builder, by contrast, carries a 4.1 out of 5 ease-of-use score on G2 across 425 reviews and generally assumes a Salesforce admin sits between the business and the form. Tally scores 4.8 on the same measure. A developer review on Medium and Hackceleration's 15-user roundup both land in the same place: the speed from idea to live form is the product.

AI and connectivity for nothing

Tally AI builds, edits, brands, translates and debugs forms from a chat window, free on every plan including the free one, and Tally ships an MCP server alongside official ChatGPT and Claude connectors. FormAssembly's Fai is also included on every tier and is arguably more ambitious, generating whole branded workflows and offering compliance guidance while you build. The gap is in reach: Tally connects to Notion, Airtable, Slack, Zapier, Make, n8n and Pipedream out of the box, while FormAssembly's roughly 20 connectors exclude Zapier and Make entirely and now appear as a paid add-on on every plan.

Where Each One Runs Out

FormAssembly: the bill is the product

Seats are capped at 1, 3, 5 and 5 standard users across Explorer, Team, Enterprise and Gov Cloud. Explorer includes three active workflows; unlimited workflows, single-signer eSignature, the Analytics Suite and the integrations themselves are add-ons. Team's included document merges dropped from 1,000 a year to 250 during 2026. None of this is visible until a salesperson tells you, and the direction of travel over the last three audits has been consistently toward unbundling. Reviewers describe the design output fairly: it looks like an intake screen wired to a CRM, which is fine internally and expensive when it is the first thing a donor or applicant sees.

Tally: the wall after submit

Tally's limits are not about volume. They arrive when the form stops being the whole job: several brands or clients to keep separate, payments with real pricing logic behind them, a contract that has to be signed and filed, an approval chain with a person at each step, or a compliance checklist someone else wrote. There is no workflow builder, no approval routing, no template-driven document generation (submission-to-PDF is a themed copy of the answers), and no save-and-resume for respondents. Payments are Stripe or nothing. The top tier at $89/month still offers no SOC 2, no SSO and no 2FA, so there is nothing to put in a security questionnaire and no way to enforce login policy across a team.

Pricing Comparison

Tally publishes every number and FormAssembly publishes none. Tally is free, $29/month for Pro or $24 billed annually, and $89/month for Business or $74 billed annually, with unlimited team members on both paid tiers. FormAssembly's four Atlas tiers all advertise unlimited forms, responses and storage, and all route to "Request a Trial" or "Book a Demo".

What Users Say

FormAssembly sits at 4.4 on G2 across 425 reviews and 4.5 on Capterra across 103, with praise concentrated on the Salesforce connector and the compliance posture, and complaints concentrated on the learning curve, the dated design and the gated pricing. Tally rates 4.8 on G2 across 97 reviews and 4.9 on Capterra across 41, with a 4.9 value-for-money sub-score that is close to the ceiling. Read the volumes as well as the scores: FormAssembly has four times the review base, and Tally's Trustpilot page sits at 3.8 across 22 reviews, which is a small sample pulling in a different direction.

The Verdict

If a regulator, a hospital or a federal agency is on the other side of your form, buy FormAssembly and accept the procurement overhead; nothing else in this category carries FedRAMP High and PCI DSS Level 1. If the form is a form, use Tally and spend the saved money elsewhere. The two products rarely compete for the same buyer, which is why choosing between them usually means admitting you are somewhere in the middle.

Consider Paperform for the Middle Ground

Most teams reading this comparison are not a federal agency and are not running a single contact form. They run several brands or clients, take payments with actual pricing rules attached, need a contract signed and filed, and have a security questionnaire to answer that stops short of HIPAA. Paperform is built for that position. Pro is $59/month, or $49/month billed annually, with unlimited submissions and unlimited seats within fair use, and Business is $149/$124 with SSO, 10 workspaces and the Business API. Those numbers are published, which is the first difference from FormAssembly, and they do not rise when a campaign lands, which is the argument against metered platforms generally.

The second difference is scope. One subscription covers Paperform for forms, Papersign for eSignatures and Stepper for workflow automation, so the approval chain and the countersigned contract that Tally hands to Zapier, and that FormAssembly quotes as add-ons, sit in the same account. Paperform reaches 4000+ integrations, takes Stripe, PayPal, Square, Braintree and Google Pay with subscriptions, coupons, tax and refunds, and drives all of it from Excel-style calculations that decide which questions appear, which conditional emails fire and what an integration receives. Support is in the seat price rather than an enablement fee, and the company has been bootstrapped and profitable since 2016.

Be clear about the trade. Tally's Pro tier at $24/month undercuts Paperform's $49 by half, and FormAssembly may quote you above or below either depending on seats. Paperform is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA compliant, but it is not HIPAA compliant and signs no BAAs, so protected health information belongs with FormAssembly. For everything between those two poles, start with the Paperform vs Tally breakdown, the FormAssembly alternatives roundup, or the wider best form builders list.

Last updated September 22, 2026