Tally vs Google Forms: Two Free Builders, Different Ceilings

The short answer: both cost nothing, so the choice turns on who answers and how large one form grows. For public campaign forms, where the traffic source has to be recorded and strangers may pay or upload a file, Tally's free plan carries hidden UTM fields, Stripe payments and uploads of up to 10 MB a file, with no submission meter below the 50,000 a month its fair use policy calls heavy use; Pro, at $29 a month or $24 billed yearly, adds branding removal and team features rather than volume (checked on 26 October 2026 on the Tally pricing page and fair use policy). For surveys and sign-ups answered by colleagues inside Google Workspace, Google Forms needs nothing new, though Google's help now caps each form at 500,000 responses and 1 GB from September 2026 (Google Forms help).

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Three checks on the forms you already run:

1. Size your busiest form. For example, a webinar form taking 3,000 sign-ups a month passes 10,000 responses in 10,000 / 3,000 = 3.3 months, the point at which Google's response help says the question and individual views can disappear and CSV downloads stop sorting by time; at 100,000, after about 33 months, the Sheets sync can stop. The same 3,000 a month is 3,000 / 50,000 = 6% of the heavy-use example in Tally's fair use policy.
2. Keep the sheet your reports read. If responses already land in a linked Google Sheet, Tally's free Google Sheets integration can write to the same sheet, so dashboards built on it keep working whichever builder you pick.
3. Count submissions you can tie to a campaign. Tally's hidden fields, free on every plan, store utm_source and similar values from the link without showing them to the respondent. Google's equivalent is a pre-filled link, which fills answer fields on the form itself. The share of last month's submissions with a known source is the number to improve.

Google Forms is built for people who are already signed in to Google. Tally is built for a link in an email or an ad. Read each vendor's own documentation for the other side: Tally's Google Forms comparison marks closing a form on a date or a response limit as missing from Google Forms, while Google's response help documents both.

Free against free

Sources, read on 26 October 2026: Tally's pricing page, hidden fields guide, payment forms guide and GDPR page; Google's question types, response help, publishing guide, Gemini in Forms and data regions guide.

Three things that tip it

Who is answering

Google's question types article says a file upload question needs the respondent signed in to a Google Account, and the publishing guide lets an owner restrict a form to a domain or group before it goes out. Inside a company those are features. For a supplier, a creator or a prospect from an ad they are friction, which the Typeform vs Google Forms page covers for uploads in more detail.

How large one form can get

Google's limits now sit on each form, not on your plan. Above 10,000 responses the per-question view can go missing, above 50,000 the summary, above 100,000 the Sheets sync, and at 500,000 the form stops until the owner downloads and deletes older responses, per its response help. A recurring form, such as a weekly event registration that never gets replaced, reaches those lines on its own. Tally meters none of this below its fair use examples.

Where the rows are kept

Tally says all form data is stored in Europe, lists Google Cloud in Belgium as its host, and acts as processor with a data processing agreement accepted through its terms, per its GDPR page. Google lets an administrator pin Forms text, responses and draft responses to the EU through data regions, but only on supported editions, Business Standard and above among them, per the data regions guide. A personal Google account or Business Starter has no such setting.

What each costs

Tally: Free; Pro at $29 a month billed monthly or $24 a month billed yearly; Business at $89 or $74, which adds automatic deletion of submissions after a set period and respondent email verification, per the pricing page, checked on 26 October 2026.

Google Forms has no price of its own; it comes with a Google account or inside Google Workspace. When read on 26 October 2026, the Workspace pricing page listed a 14-day trial and 30 GB of pooled storage per user on Business Starter, and showed no per-user prices to the browser used, so check the figure on that page yourself.

One AI step: campaign fields added by Tally AI

Tally's hidden fields guide includes a prompt for its built-in assistant: open the form, click Ask AI, and type "Add hidden fields for utm_source and utm_campaign." Tally AI is free on all plans, per the same guide. The human check is one submission. Publish, open the link with ?utm_source=test&utm_campaign=check added, submit, and confirm both values appear in the Submissions tab and in the connected sheet. Only then do the campaign links go into emails and ads, each with its own utm_source.

On the Google side, Gemini's form drafting needs an eligible Workspace or Google AI plan, and Google lists multi-section forms among what it does not yet support.

Choose Tally if the job is

• Public lead, event and application forms where the campaign source has to travel with each submission.
• Taking a card payment or a file from someone without a Google account.
• Keeping form data in Europe without asking an administrator to configure regions.

Choose Google Forms if the job is

• Internal surveys, quizzes and sign-ups for colleagues already signed in to Google Workspace.
• Restricting a form to your own domain or a group before it goes out.
• Answers that go straight into Sheets for people who already work there.

Free first, and the badge on the default

Both are free, so run the real test: put your next campaign form on Tally's free plan with hidden fields, keep the internal surveys in Google Forms, and compare the share of submissions with a known source after one campaign.

Leave a free Tally form on its defaults and every respondent sees a "Made with Tally" button on the form and on its thank-you page, per the branding article; that button is how the free plan earns its keep, in front of your audience, and removing it is the first thing Pro's $29 a month buys. Decide whether the badge matters on a campaign page before you pay to remove it. On an internal survey it does not.

FAQ

When does a Google Form stop taking responses?

At 500,000 responses or 1 GB per form under the limits starting in September 2026, until the owner downloads and deletes older responses. Existing enterprise forms already above the limit keep receiving responses until March 2027, per Google's response help.

Can Tally write into the Google Sheet I already use?

Yes. The Google Sheets integration is on Tally's free plan, alongside Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make and webhooks, per its pricing page.

Does Tally take a cut of payments?

No. Its payment forms guide says standard Stripe fees apply and Tally adds nothing on top; recurring payments are not supported.