What are Tally Forms?

Over the last few weeks, I have found myself complaining a lot about one particular feature: forms.

I cannot believe I have cared so much about forms. Who am I?

Anyways, that led me to finally trying out a tool that I kept hearing about from others, but never bought into. I honestly thought it was just a knockoff version of Typeform and I was definitely wrong. That tool is Tally Forms.

If you’re like me and haven’t tried about Tally Forms yet - you can try it out for yourself using the link below!

Building a form in Tally Forms

Let’s start with what Tally Forms is: another form builder. However, Tally Forms isn’t built like your typical form builder. Tally Forms is much more like building a web page rather than your typical form. It’s incredibly granular and pretty much everything is independent of one another.

In a different YouTube video, I built an Airtable for how to manage Applications, so I’m just going to compare the form that I created in Airtable to what it would look like in Tally Forms.

You can see just by looking at them that they’re slightly different experiences as someone that would input their information into the form. Tally Forms has more of a Typeform feel to it while Airtable Forms has more of a Google Forms feel.

One item that I like about Tally Forms over Typeform though is that you can see all of the questions. I know a lot of people like scrolling and the ability to just use a lot of keyboard shortcuts in TypeForm which is nice, but I hate when I can’t see the entire form. It feels like it’s never ending and you don’t know what’s coming next. Maybe I just don’t like surprises like that?

A few things that I really like about Tally Forms though in my initial impressions:

First, the ability to build a form like a webpage. I never put two and two together before using Tally Forms and wow, building a form in Tally Forms is a great experience because of its formatting. Creating a form like a webpage gives you so much more customization and the ability to design the form to your own needs. You’re not locked into text being in certain areas or particular spacing in a form.

Second, conditionals are really nice in Tally Forms. You can show or hide particular questions or even particular answers based on earlier questions in a form. The ability to have an answer determine which possible answers show is incredible. For example, if you were building a quiz for a course, you know how much of a nightmare you could make for someone? Or how much you could have them second guessing themselves?

Third, this is so much like Notion and I dig it. The keyboard shortcuts and blocks in Tally Forms are wonderful. If you like creating in Notion, you’ll enjoy creating in Tally Forms. I now understand why the Notion community loves Tally Forms so much. Especially because Tally Forms is like the unofficial form builder of Notion. Notion has no native form builder whatsoever and I understand why that might the case for a while since Tally Forms is so wonderful.

Integrations

Speaking of Notion - The most significant part that I really like about Tally Forms though is its ability to integrate with other tools like Notion. I definitely didn’t realize this until jumping into Tally Forms.

Tally Forms does not need Zapier to work with tools such as Airtable, Google Sheets, Notion, Slack, or Coda. Yes, it works with Zapier too, but the ability to integrate with those main tools without Zapier is amazing. All you have to do is connect the APIs together and you’re done. You can map the fields and everything. Incredible.

These integrations really make me question why I’ve ever building forms in Airtable or Google Forms as Tally Forms make forms so wonderful. Maybe internal forms I should continue to build in the native tools, but for external application processes, I’m starting to think that Tally Forms should be the go to. It’s just a better experience all around and I can make sure that I’m communicating well about a particular program right in the form. The beauty of having Tally Forms built like a webpage rather than your traditional form.

Just like most form builders, you can embed Tally Forms anywhere and if you pay for the Pro subscription of Tally Forms, you can even integrate Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. Those two integrations being important if you’re trying to measure if people are coming to your form at all.

How Tally Compares

Let’s now dig into how Tally Forms compares to two main form builders: Airtable Forms and Google Forms.

The most obvious difference is how you build forms in Tally Forms compared to Airtable and Google. As I mentioned, Tally is much more like a webpage and that gives you so much more design leeway compared to Airtable and Google.

For example, if you want to have a paragraph of text or an image in between questions but not have new section, you can’t do that in Airtable or Google forms. You could have text in subtext areas underneath particular questions, but there’s no way to break a form up a little bit. In Tally Forms, you can do just that.

That can really drive an experience when it comes to filling out a form in Tally. Instead of a form feeling like just another thing to do and fill out, it can be a wonderful experience. That really matters as people remember experiences and if you want to build a strong brand, that little wonderful experience in a form submission can be another aspect that helps you do that. It’s minor, but it adds up.

The second key difference is the quality and amount of integrations. Tally integrates with more tools than Airtable and Google Forms. If you’re already using Airtable and Google Suite for data collection and processing, this isn’t as big of a deal. However, if you’re using Notion for your workflows, Tally is huge. You don’t have to pay for Zapier with Tally when it comes to storing responses and that’s so huge. Zapier is a great tool but it does get expensive.

For Airtable and Google, they naturally store that data in their platform, but if you’re not using those platforms for your day to day workflows, you most likely are sending that data somewhere else via Zapier or manually importing that info somewhere else. That gets expensive and/or annoying. Not fun.

The last key difference between Airtable and Google Forms with Tally is that a few features in Tally Pro are really awesome for the right people. For example, the ability to capture partial submissions is wonderful. You can then see where a form might be getting too tedious or if one particular question is just stopping people in their tracks. Airtable and Google don’t offer that at all.

As I mentioned earlier, you can connect Tally with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel in Tally Pro. You can do those actions in Google Forms, but cannot in Airtable forms.

Final Thoughts

My verdict on Tally Forms is that it’s one heck of a tool and definitely a tool to have in your digital toolkit, especially if you are using Airtable or Notion very heavily. The ability to just have Tally Forms integrate into those two tools without Zapier is amazing.

There’s also just a lot of minor features that have me loving Tally Forms. Features like that their messaging is incredibly clear and direct on their website. Plus, the granular control of everything is such a gamechanger.

Lastly, Tally just gives away a ton of free value. Not saying everything should be free, but the fact that Tally allows anyone to use it a ton without paying for it, is pretty helpful. They’re definitely not trying to maximize profits. Plus, Tally Pro is definitely reasonably priced with it being $290 per year. For some comparison, Typeform is around $600 per year for around the same features in Tally Pro.

Again, if you want to try out Tally Pro for yourself, you can check out the link below!