Tally vs SurveyMonkey

Tally is a form builder that will happily run a survey. SurveyMonkey is a survey platform that will not build you much of a form. The price gap between them is large enough that the question is whether you need what SurveyMonkey adds.

What each one asks you to pay for

Tally's free plan carries unlimited forms and unlimited submissions within a published fair-use policy, including conditional logic, calculations, signatures and file uploads. What it charges for is presentation — removing branding needs the Pro plan at twenty-four dollars a month, and capturing part-finished responses is paid.

SurveyMonkey's free tier limits the questions per survey rather than the replies collected, so it constrains the instrument rather than the sample. Paying monthly costs far more than the annual rate for a smaller allowance.

Tally scores 5 for value against SurveyMonkey's 2, which is the widest value gap in this wave.

Where the form data lives

Tally stores form data in the EU by a company based there. For anyone collecting personal data under a European contract, that is not a preference — it is the question that gets asked first, and only one of these has a straightforward answer to it.

On the forms themselves Tally scores 5 for logic against SurveyMonkey's 4 and 4 for customisation against 3. Tally accepts payments, does calculations and collects signatures; SurveyMonkey does none of the three.

What SurveyMonkey gives back is analysis and recognition. Its reporting is built in rather than an export away, its templates cover the standard research instruments, and respondents know the format before they start — which lifts completion on a cold list in a way no feature of Tally's does.

Tally scores 4 for looks and SurveyMonkey scores 4 as well, arriving there differently: Tally through a plain document-style editor, SurveyMonkey through themes that constrain you and also stop anything looking broken.

Which should you choose?

Choose Tally if the form does work — takes a payment, collects a signature, calculates something — or if EU data storage is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

Choose SurveyMonkey if this is genuinely research, you want the analysis without exporting, and the recognisable format will earn you responses you would otherwise lose.