Formsite vs Tally: Which Should You Pick in 2026?

Tally is the better choice for almost any form that ends at the submit button: unlimited forms and submissions free, logic and Stripe payments included, and an editor anyone can use. Formsite earns its $21 to $209 a month only when you need a HIPAA BAA, four payment gateways, Save and Return, or approval routing.

These two products sit 22 years apart and answer different questions. Formsite launched in 1998, predating most of the category, and still sells the way software sold then: a ladder of tiers metering forms, results per form, storage and the number of people who can log in. Tally launched in 2020 in Ghent, gives away almost everything, and charges $24 a month annually mainly to take its own name off your form. One is a veteran inside a rebranded parent company; the other is ten people shipping in public.

The useful question is not which is better in the abstract. It is whether your work stops at the response, because that line runs straight between them.

The Five Numbers That Decide It

Feature Comparison

The overlap is larger than the 22-year age gap suggests. Both do multi-page forms, branching, calculations, scoring, answer piping, hidden fields and auto-close rules, and both hand those to free users. The divergence is at the edges: Formsite carries the regulated and transactional edge, Tally carries the design and speed edge.

Where Formsite Wins

The only one of the two that can touch health data

Formsite signs a HIPAA BAA on its Enterprise plan at $209/month. Tally makes no HIPAA claim at all, so a clinic intake form, a patient survey or anything carrying PHI is a Formsite job by default. The caveat matters: the BAA is Enterprise-only, so the real price of HIPAA here is $209 a month, not $21. Formsite also adds SLA, two-factor authentication and the Salesforce integration at that tier.

Four payment gateways, and a long history of using them

Formsite accepts Stripe, PayPal, Braintree and Authorize.Net from the Professional plan at $34/month, against Tally's single Stripe connection. Authorize.Net in particular is the one that decides things: plenty of established merchants have a gateway relationship they are not going to renegotiate for a form tool. Formsite says more than $500M has moved through its forms, which is a weight of transactional history Tally has no equivalent for.

Save and Return, and approvals after the submit

Formsite lets respondents save a partially completed form and come back to it, from the Professional plan up, and runs unlimited approval workflows from Business at $59/month. Tally offers neither. For a grant application or a licensing form that takes an afternoon and two people to complete, this single feature is worth more than everything else on the page.

24/7 support on every paid plan

Formsite staffs support around the clock from the $21/month Personal tier upward. Tally is a team of roughly ten answering email, with no phone line, no live chat and no tier you can buy to escalate. Tally's G2 support score of 4.5 is respectable and it is still its weakest sub-rating; Formsite's is 4.2 across 31 reviews, so neither is outstanding, but only one of them will pick up at 2am.

Where Tally Wins

Nothing is metered, including the thing Formsite meters hardest

Tally's free plan is unlimited forms and unlimited submissions inside a published fair use policy. Formsite's entire price ladder is built on the opposite principle: 10 results per form free, 500 on Personal, 1,000 on Professional, 2,500 on Business. A campaign that performs well on Formsite is a billing event. On Tally it is a Tuesday. This is the most generous free plan in the category and it deserves to be called that plainly.

The editor is 22 years newer and it shows

Tally's builder works like a Notion page: type the question, insert a block with a slash command, publish. Formsite's is a field list with its own vocabulary, and reviewers reach for the same word repeatedly, which is aging. FirstSales.io's 2026 review praises Formsite's logic and AI survey generator while flagging the interface and a learning curve built on field terminology. Tally's G2 ease-of-use score is 4.8 against Formsite's 4.3.

Free AI, and assistants that reach in from outside

Tally AI builds, edits, brands, translates and debugs forms from a chat window, and it is free on every plan including the free one. Tally also ships an MCP server, a ChatGPT plugin and a verified Claude connector, so a form can be created or its responses pulled without opening the product. Formsite has an AI survey generator on Professional and nothing beyond it; its product blog last published in May 2024, which is a long silence in a year when AI features became table stakes.

Seats cost nothing, and neither does a second brand

Tally Pro and Business include unlimited team members. Formsite ships one user on Personal and Professional, two on Business, and charges $10/month for each extra sub-user after that. Add the $50/month Results Docs add-on for Word output and $10/month per extra gigabyte of storage, and a five-person team on Business+ is looking at $134/month before growth. Tally at $74/month has no such arithmetic.

Where Each One Runs Out

Formsite

• Everything that grows is metered. Results per form, forms per plan, storage per gigabyte, and $10 a month for each additional login.
• The API only reads. It retrieves results and cannot create or edit anything, and it is capped at 50 calls a minute and 10,000 a day.
• No SOC 2. The security page attributes ISO and SOC attestations to its AWS host, which is not a Formsite certification.
• No public roadmap or changelog. No blog post since May 2024, inside a parent that renamed itself from Formstack to Intellistack in June 2025.
• Thin reporting. Basic charts, no drop-off analysis, and an export process reviewers describe as awkward.
• 100+ templates, a small library by current standards.

Tally

• Stripe or nothing, with no coupons, tax rules, invoicing or refunds around the charge.
• No workflow builder and no approvals. Anything past submit-and-notify goes out to Zapier, Make or n8n.
• No save and resume for respondents, which caps how long a form can reasonably be.
• No SOC 2, SSO or 2FA on any tier, including the $89/month Business plan, which is the top plan offered.
• No booking field, no address autocomplete, no guided one-question mode.
• Community templates only, uneven in quality and unmaintained.

See Tally Built From Scratch

Formsite has no independent video reviews worth citing in our source set, so here is the editor that most distinguishes the two.

Pricing Comparison

Tally's top plan at $74/month billed annually costs less than Formsite's Business+ at $84, and Tally's free plan does more than Formsite's Personal plan at $21. The gap is not really about list price. It is about which numbers move: Formsite's bill responds to volume, storage and headcount, while Tally's responds to neither.

What Users Say

Tally rates higher on every public platform: 4.8 on G2 across 97 reviews and 4.9 on Capterra across 41, with value for money at 4.9. Formsite sits at 4.4 on G2 across 31 reviews and 4.5 on Capterra across 44. Tally's Trustpilot score of 3.8 from 22 reviews is the one soft spot, and support capacity is the usual theme behind it. Formsite's praise clusters around reliability, Save and Return and logic without code; its complaints cluster around the interface and the sense that pricing rose while the product did not.

When Neither Answer Fits: Consider Paperform

The choice above forces a trade nobody should have to make: modern and free but stopping at submit, or capable and regulated but metered and dated. Paperform exists for the case where both halves are required at once.

Start with the honest part. Paperform's entry is $59/month, or $49 billed annually, with no tier beneath it, so both products here undercut it. Tally is free and Formsite starts at $21. Paperform is also not HIPAA compliant and signs no BAAs, so if the BAA is why you were reading the Formsite column, Formsite Enterprise remains the answer and nothing below will change that.

What the higher entry price removes is the meter. Paperform Pro includes unlimited submissions and unlimited seats within fair use, so the third colleague who needs a login is free rather than $10/month, and a form crossing 1,000 responses does not push you up a tier. It removes the second and third vendor as well: one subscription covers Paperform forms, Papersign eSignatures and Stepper workflow automation, with 25 signed documents and 20,000 automation credits on Pro, and 100 documents on Business at $149/month, or $124 annually. That replaces the Tally-plus-Zapier-plus-signing-tool stack and the Formsite-plus-DocuSign arrangement with one bill, and it means you stop being the integration between them.

The specifics that separate it from both: five payment gateways with products, subscriptions, coupons, tax and refunds around them rather than a bare charge; Excel-style calculations that decide which questions and pages appear, which confirmation email fires and what each integration receives, not only what a total comes to; a document-style editor where prose, images and fields sit wherever the page needs them; Guided Mode for one question at a time on long applications; 4,000+ integrations and 30,000+ templates; and SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA with SAML SSO on Business, which is the certification neither Formsite nor Tally holds. Paperform has been independent, bootstrapped and profitable since 2016, with a public changelog, which is a different kind of bet from a silent product inside a renamed parent.

Worth reading next: Paperform vs Tally for the design-and-process comparison in depth, Formsite alternatives if the metering is what pushed you here, and the full form builders ranking for the wider field.

The Verdict

For most people reading this, Tally wins and it is not close. If the job is a signup, a survey, a feedback form or a lead capture that ends when someone presses submit, Tally does it better, faster, free, and with an editor a colleague can pick up unaided. Paying Formsite $21 a month for a worse version of that is hard to defend.

Formsite wins on a short and specific list: a HIPAA BAA at $209/month, payments through Braintree or Authorize.Net, respondents saving a long form to finish later, approval routing after submission, and support available at any hour. Those are real requirements and Tally has no answer to any of them.

If your list includes items from both columns, and particularly if it includes payments with pricing logic, a contract to be signed, or a security questionnaire someone else wrote, neither product covers it alone and Paperform is the option built for that shape of work.

Last updated September 22, 2026