Nextforms vs Tally: the alternative with workflows built in

Let’s be fair first: Tally is a good product. Unlimited forms and submissions on the free plan, a lovely editor, and honest pricing, with no dark patterns and no response meter.

Nextforms is for the moment collecting isn’t enough: when a submission needs to go somewhere: an approval, an email to the person who submitted, a notification with follow-up. Here’s the honest comparison, including the places Tally is still ahead.

Where Nextforms differs

Emailing your respondent is free here. On Tally, respondent email notifications are a Pro feature, and the mail goes out through Tally’s sender; Pro adds a custom sending domain on top of it. On Nextforms you connect your own Gmail, Outlook, SMTP, SES or Mailgun on the free plan, so the mail leaves from your infrastructure and your reputation, not ours.

A workflow engine, not just integrations. Tally’s native integration list is genuinely good: Google Sheets, Slack, Notion, Airtable, webhooks and more. What it doesn’t have is an engine to decide what happens: Nextforms gives you visual workflows with conditions, branching, routing and delays on the free plan, and multi-step approvals with reminders, escalation and send-back-for-correction loops on Pro. An integration sends every submission to the same place; a workflow decides where each one goes.

Full version history. Tally caps form-version restore at 7 days free, 30 on Pro, 90 on Business. Nextforms keeps your complete history: every published version, forever, on every plan.

What Tally keeps for Business. Tally’s Business plan ($74 a month billed yearly, or $89 month to month) adds automatic deletion of old responses, email verification and 90 days of version history. On Nextforms, deleting responses after a set time is free on every plan, email verification is part of Pro ($25 a month billed yearly), and version history is complete on every plan.

Respondents can change their answers. Send a respondent a link that reopens their form, from a step in the workflow or by hand from any response. What they resubmit becomes a new version of the same response, not a duplicate. On Tally, letting respondents edit their answers is one of the most-voted requests on its feature board, still pending.

A real address field. Tally has no address block. You’d assemble one from short-text questions, so there’s no per-country layout, no postcode validation, and nothing to autocomplete. Nextforms has a single address question that re-lays itself for the country (State and ZIP for the US, postcode-then-city and no state for the Netherlands) and stores each part separately, so exports get a column per part. Suggestions come from Google Places. Bring your own key on any plan, or Pro includes 1,000 lookups a month.

Repeating groups with line items that add up. Ask the same questions once per guest, product or reference: the respondent adds a row for each. Each row can work out its own line total, the rows add up to an order total, and the payment charges it. In Notion and Airtable each row can become its own page or record, linked to the response. Free on every plan. Tally has no repeating section yet; it’s one of the most requested features on its feature board.

Choices from your own database. A question whose options are the rows of a Notion database, an Airtable table or a Google Sheets tab, filtered to the ones you mean to offer and kept up to date without publishing again. Free on every plan.

Unfinished responses you can win back. See the answers people gave before they left and where they stopped, and send them a reminder with a link that reopens the form exactly where they left off. On Pro.

A free plan that does the job. Pro is for teams, approvals, unfinished responses, your own domain and emailing respondents without connecting a sender. Everything else on this page is free.

Where Tally wins

Tally is the more mature product: more input types today (rankings, for example), 45+ interface languages, form importing, and it’s made in the EU, which matters to some buyers. If you need those specifics now, Tally earns the pick.

The short version

If you only need to collect answers, Tally does that well. Nextforms is for forms that trigger work (approvals, routing, emails and follow-ups), decided by a workflow you can see, and without paying to email your own respondents.