Nextforms vs Tally: the alternative with workflows built in

Let’s be fair first: Tally is excellent. Unlimited forms and submissions on the free plan, a lovely editor, and honest pricing. If all you need is to collect answers, Tally is a fine choice — we’d rather you use Tally than a paywalled builder.

Nextforms exists 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.

Where Nextforms differs

Emailing your respondent is free here. On Tally, respondent email notifications are a Pro feature. On Nextforms, you connect your own Gmail, Outlook, SMTP, SES, or Mailgun — free — and email respondents from your own address. Tally doesn’t offer connecting your own email provider at any price; their custom sender domains are a paid add-on layered on their sender.

A real workflow engine, not just notifications. Visual workflows with conditions and branching, multi-step approvals with reminders and escalation, send-back-for-correction loops, Google Sheets, Slack, and webhooks — included on the free plan. Tally’s automation story is notifications plus external tools like Zapier or Make, which means another account, another bill, and another place things break.

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.

Pro is $25/month (billed yearly) vs Tally’s $29 — and our Pro is about teams and zero-setup convenience, not unlocking capabilities.

Where Tally wins

Tally is the more mature product: more input types today (e-signatures, rankings), 45+ interface languages, form importing, a template gallery, and a larger integration list via Zapier/Make. It’s made in the EU, which matters to some buyers. If you need those specifics now, Tally earns the pick.

The short version

Tally is the best pure form collector. Nextforms is for forms that trigger work: approvals, emails, spreadsheets, and follow-ups — without a Zapier tax and without paying to talk to your own respondents.