Google Forms vs Tally: which should you use?

The short answer

• Choose Google Forms for quizzes and classwork, quick internal surveys, and anything where the answers should land in Google Sheets for a team that already works in Google. It’s free, familiar, and the people answering have probably seen one before.
• Choose Tally for order forms, sign-ups, applications and anything public-facing that should look like your brand. Logic, payments, signatures and file uploads are all on its free plan, and nobody needs an account to answer.

What Google Forms and Tally are

Google Forms is Google’s free form and quiz builder, alongside Docs, Sheets and Drive. You build a form question by question, share a link, and see answers as charts or in a Google Sheet. It’s free with any Google account and included in Google Workspace.

Tally is a form builder from Tally BV, a company based in Belgium. You build a form by typing, the way you’d write a document. Its free plan covers most of its features, and the paid plans add control over branding, team workspaces and a few extras.

Price and free plans

Both are free to start. Google Forms has no paid plan of its own, while Tally sells Pro and Business plans that add extras rather than lifting response limits.

• Google Forms: free with a Google account. Businesses can get it with Google Workspace, from £5.90 per user a month in the UK before VAT. Files people upload count against your Google storage (15 GB free, shared with Gmail and Google Photos).
• Tally Free: unlimited forms and submissions under fair use, with logic, payments, signatures, file uploads up to 10 MB a file, and integrations.
• Tally Pro: $29 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly. Removes Tally’s branding and adds custom domains, team workspaces, partial submissions, custom CSS, uploads of any size, and drop-off analytics.
• Tally Business: $89 a month, or $74 a month billed yearly. Adds email verification for the people answering, automatic deletion of submissions after a set time, and 90 days of version history.

For most people both stay free. Tally’s paid plans matter when the form is public and should carry your name, not Tally’s.

Building a form

Google Forms is quicker to learn. Tally is quicker to write in once you know it.

In Google Forms each question is a card. You pick a type from a menu, type the options and drag cards into order. Anyone who has used a Google app will find their way round in minutes. On supported accounts, Gemini’s “Help me create” can draft a form or quiz from a short description.

In Tally you start with a blank page and type. Press “/” to add a question, a heading, an image or a payment block, much like writing in Notion. Tally AI can draft a form from a description, a screenshot or a PDF.

Questions, logic and quizzes

Tally’s logic goes further. Google Forms can send people to a different section depending on an answer. Tally can also show or hide single questions, calculate values and reuse earlier answers in later questions.

Question types

Google Forms covers the everyday types: short answer, paragraph, multiple choice, tick boxes, dropdown, file upload, linear scale, rating, grids, date and time. Response validation can check numbers, text length and patterns such as email addresses.

Tally has the same everyday types and adds payment, signature, ranking and matrix questions, plus hidden fields that carry information in from the form’s link.

Quizzes

Google Forms wins here. Its quiz mode gives each question an answer key and points, marks answers automatically and lets you release grades when you’re ready. It works with Google Classroom, which is why so many teachers use it. Tally can add up a score with calculations and show a different result for each score, which suits fun quizzes more than marked tests.

Design and branding

Tally gives you more control over how a form looks. Google Forms keeps a familiar Google look.

In Google Forms you can choose a theme colour, a background colour, a header image and a few font styles. There’s no custom CSS, no custom domain and no way to remove Google’s branding.

Tally forms take a cover image, a logo, your colours and fonts on the free plan. Pro adds custom CSS, your own domain, and removes “Made with Tally”. For a form on a business website, that difference is often the deciding one.

Sharing and who can answer

Both give you a link to share and code to embed a form in a web page. Tally can also show a form as a pop-up on your site.

The bigger difference is sign-in. Anyone can answer either tool’s forms without an account, but Google Forms asks people to sign in to Google if you limit answers to one per person, collect verified email addresses or include a file upload. Tally never needs the people answering to have an account: it can stop duplicate submissions without one, and Business adds email verification.

Both can close a form on a date or after a number of responses. Google Forms added this in January 2026; on Tally it’s part of the free plan, along with password protection. Google Forms can instead limit a form to people in your organisation or to people you name.

Payments, signatures and file uploads

Tally does all three on its free plan. Google Forms does file uploads only, and only for people signed in to Google.

• Payments: Tally takes card payments through Stripe and adds no fee of its own on top of Stripe’s. Google Forms has no payment question; you’d need an add-on or a link to a separate payment page.
• Signatures: Tally has a signature question. Google Forms doesn’t.
• File uploads: Tally accepts files up to 10 MB each on the free plan, and any size on Pro, with no sign-in. Google Forms saves uploads to a folder in your Google Drive, and the person uploading must sign in to Google.

Results and integrations

Google Forms is strongest if your team lives in Google Sheets. Tally connects to more tools out of the box.

Google Forms shows a summary with charts, each response on its own, and can link to a Google Sheet that fills as answers arrive. You can download a CSV, get an email for new responses, and extend it with add-ons and Apps Script.

Tally keeps submissions in a table you can filter and download as a CSV. On the free plan it sends them to Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make or any webhook. Pro adds partial submissions, drop-off analytics, and Google Analytics and Meta Pixel tracking.

Working as a team

Google Forms is the easier choice for teams on a budget. You can add editors for free, the same way you share a Google Doc, and edit together at the same time. In Tally, shared workspaces with unlimited team members come with Pro.

Privacy and where data is kept

Tally keeps form data in Europe. Google keeps it in its own data centres, and some Google Workspace plans let an admin choose a data region.

Tally is based in Belgium and stores form data on Google Cloud in Belgium, encrypted in transit and at rest. It says it complies with the GDPR and offers a data processing agreement. Some of the services it uses, such as Stripe for payments, are based in the US.

Google Workspace comes with Google’s data processing terms. If you collect personal data for a business, use a Workspace account rather than a personal one, and check either tool’s terms against what you plan to collect.

Switching from Google Forms to Tally

There’s no direct connection, but it doesn’t take long. Tally can rebuild a form from a PDF, screenshot, CSV or Word file, free on every plan.

• Open your Google Form and print it to a PDF, or take screenshots.
• In Tally, create a new form, choose to import, and upload the file.
• Check the questions, then add back any logic or calculations, which aren’t carried over.
• Download your old responses from Google Forms as a CSV to keep them.

Which should you choose?

Match the tool to the job:

• A marked quiz for a class: Google Forms.
• A survey for colleagues who all use Google: Google Forms.
• An order form, booking or event ticket that takes a card payment: Tally.
• A job application with a CV upload, from people without Google accounts: Tally.
• A form on your website that should look like your brand: Tally, with Pro for your own domain and no Tally branding.
• Answers sent straight to Notion or Airtable: Tally.

Questions people ask

Only need quick feedback?

Google Forms and Tally are both form builders. If all you want is a quick read on how people felt after a visit, a class or an event, a form can be more than the job needs.

Tinysurv does that one job. You ask one question, answered with stars, thumbs or smileys and an optional comment. Put up the QR code poster or share the link, and people answer in one tap on their own phone, with no app and no account. One question. Nobody sighs at one question.

• QR code poster. Ready to print, in your colours, with every survey.
• Fair results. Each phone answers once a day, so one person can’t swamp the score.
• Results at a glance. Your score, how it changes day by day, and what people wrote.

See it working on the examples, or read the FAQ and pricing.