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.

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.

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.

Pro buys convenience, not capabilities. Our paid plan is about teams, approvals and zero-setup senders, not about unlocking things the free plan was quietly withholding.

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.