Tally vs Fillout (2026): Client Intake, Uploads & Costs

Tally vs Fillout: The Short Answer for Client Intake

Choose Tally when you need a public enquiry or onboarding form, generous free submissions, and affordable branding. Choose Fillout when the form must read and update existing Airtable records, produce a PDF using your own document layout, or verify returning respondents before showing their information. Both can collect a new client's details; the difference is what must happen before and after that person presses Submit.

For a five-person agency that wants its own form domain, no vendor badge and visibility into unfinished responses, the documented annual subscriptions are $290 for Tally Pro and $900 for Fillout Business. That $610 difference is real subscription arithmetic, not proof that Tally replaces every Fillout feature. Conversely, five colleagues can collaborate on Fillout Free within its 1,000-response monthly allowance, while inviting colleagues to shared Tally workspaces requires Pro. The cheaper choice changes with the job.

Scope and research method, October 30, 2026: this is a documentary comparison, not a hands-on product test. We checked both pricing pages, their linked help articles and Fillout's monthly/annual pricing toggle. The budgets, intake blueprint and acceptance checklist below are our own worked examples, not measured conversion rates or customer results. Tally means the form builder at tally.so, not Tally accounting software. Fillout forms and Zite apps have distinct subscriptions and limits. For the wider category, see our Typeform alternatives guide.

Define the Intake Job Before Comparing Features

An enquiry form asks whether a prospect is a fit. An onboarding form collects the materials needed to start agreed work. A returning-client update form lets an existing client change a record you already hold. Do not treat these as one long questionnaire. A prospect should not need account credentials to request a quote, and an anonymous visitor should not be able to browse your customer database just because the form supports a record picker.

For a design or consulting agency, begin with service required, a short project objective, an indicative budget, timing and a contact address. After the engagement is approved, ask for brand assets, the decision-maker and delivery constraints. Keep internal margins, sales notes, risk assessments and staff-only comments outside the record exposed to the client. The blueprint later in this guide separates these fields so the software choice follows a concrete workflow rather than a long feature checklist.

Both tools support conditional logic and multiple pages. That does not establish which converts better: question relevance, audience, mobile layout and traffic source all affect completion. Compare the same questions and required fields before attributing an outcome to the tool. If you need a persistent portal with multiple private views rather than a form, use our Softr vs Glide comparison to evaluate that separate requirement. A form link with a password is not automatically a client portal.

Pricing: Monthly Payments vs the Actual Annual Bill

Tally's Pro documentation states $29 monthly or $290 yearly; its Business documentation states $89 monthly or $890 yearly. The pricing page displays rounded annual equivalents of $24 and $74 per month. Do not turn those rounded labels into $288 or $888 annual invoices. Pro includes branding removal, custom domains, shared workspaces, larger uploads and partial submissions. Business adds respondent email verification, automated submission retention and longer form-version history.

Fillout's pricing page shows Starter at $19 monthly or $180 annually, Pro at $49 or $480, and Business at $89 or $900. Annual equivalents are $15, $40 and $75 per month. Starter adds login forms, signatures, CAPTCHA and custom endings; Pro removes branding; Business adds a custom domain, partial-response viewing, analytics and larger uploads. The separate Team plan is $300 monthly or $3,000 yearly and bundles Forms Business with additional permissions and Zite capabilities. Enterprise requires a quote.

These are organization subscriptions, not five-seat invoices: Fillout's billing guide explicitly includes unlimited seats and says a Fillout upgrade does not automatically upgrade Zite. Tally Pro also permits unlimited colleagues in its organization, but Tally's fair-use terms prohibit sharing a paid subscription with outside businesses. Price your own agency's intake here; do not assume one subscription can be resold as independent workspaces for every client. As in our SaaS spending guide, use the required tier and the actual renewal bill, not the smallest advertised number.

Free Limits: Responses, Fair Use and What Happens at the Cap

Tally Free includes unlimited forms and submissions under its fair-use policy, with conditional logic, payments, signatures, password protection, duplicate-prevention controls and native integrations listed on its pricing page. Unlimited is not an unlimited-resource contract. Its examples of extensive usage include 50,000 submissions a month, 100 GB of monthly uploads or 500 GB stored, and 50,000 notification emails monthly. Tally describes recurring high usage over three to four months as a reason to discuss a custom plan, with the custom fee added to the existing subscription. These are policy examples, not a published automatic per-response overage tariff.

Fillout's response-counting guide specifies 1,000 monthly responses on Free, 2,000 on Starter and 5,000 on Pro, pooled across all forms in the organization. The count resets on the first of the calendar month in UTC, not on your subscription renewal date. Completed submissions through a live form count, including your own tests; preview-mode tests and partial responses do not. The completion date decides the month, and deleted submissions are removed from the count. Budget for legitimate demand rather than deleting records to turn a limited plan into a permanent high-volume workaround.

Crucially, Fillout does not document a hard stop at response 1,001. Its pricing FAQ and response guide say forms keep collecting, with no change in the Results view. Regular excess prompts an upgrade request; persistent excess without action can lead to limited or suspended features. Business's unlimited responses still fall under Fillout fair use: examples include consistently more than 30,000 monthly or 250,000 total submissions, more than 50 GB uploaded monthly or 300 GB stored, and more than 10,000 monthly emails. A burst is not a guarantee of permanent extra capacity, and a response allowance is not an email allowance.

An 800-response month fits both free response allowances. A predictable 2,500-response month exceeds Fillout Starter, so Pro is the normal volume-based choice before considering feature requirements. At 6,000 monthly responses, Fillout Business is the standard unlimited-response tier; Tally can remain free if no paid features or extensive-usage conditions apply. A team needing its own domain may already require Business on Fillout even at 100 responses. Feature gates and usage gates must be checked independently.

Worked Costs for the Same Agency Workflow

Scenario one: a solo consultant receives 800 completed enquiries monthly, each with files below 10 MB. They accept vendor branding, need no email login, and manually follow up after reviewing results. Either free plan fits those stated requirements. This is not a claim that every part of an agency stack is free: your website, CRM, storage destination and any payment processing remain separate. Our Tally review gives the broader product context; this comparison is concerned with the workflow-specific costs.

Scenario two keeps the same 800 responses but adds five internal colleagues who must edit forms and work with results. Tally needs Pro: $29 monthly or $290 yearly for the organization, not $145 monthly or $1,450 yearly. Fillout's free seats meet that collaboration requirement for $0. This assumes ordinary shared editing, not read-only client access, integration restrictions or enterprise identity controls. Those more specific permissions are a different requirement and can change the tier dramatically.

Scenario three is a branded agency intake process with five colleagues, 2,500 completed responses a month, an agency-owned form subdomain and owner visibility into partial submissions. Tally Pro is $29 monthly or $290 yearly. Fillout Business is $89 monthly or $900 yearly because the custom domain and partial-response view are Business features. The difference is $60 on monthly billing or $610 across the two annual subscriptions. A full year of monthly payments costs $348 versus $1,068, a $720 difference; that is not the annual-billing comparison. The table keeps those payment choices separate.

A fourth job can reverse the feature recommendation without reversing the sticker price: 1,250 returning clients need verified logins and native Airtable record updates, with Fillout branding acceptable. Fillout Starter's $180 annual plan is a logical starting point. Tally Business's email verification should not be priced as an equivalent database-update portal: a verified email and an authorized record update are different capabilities. A custom automation might close the gap, but its build time, provider charges, permissions and ongoing maintenance require their own estimate. Our software evaluation framework explains how to validate that extra work before an annual commitment.

File Uploads: Per-File Limits Are Not Storage Limits

Tally's file-upload guide allows respondents to upload without creating an account. Free files can be up to 10 MB each; Pro removes that individual-file limit, still subject to fair use. You can restrict file types, file count and file size yourself. Fillout's upload guide documents 20 MB per file on Free, Starter and Pro, 1 GB on Business and Team, and up to 5 GB on Enterprise by arrangement. Use the explicit 1 GB help-center limit for Business rather than interpreting the pricing page's '1 GB+' shorthand as unlimited.

For a client sending a 15 MB PDF, Fillout Free accommodates the individual file and Tally Free does not. For a 40 MB artwork file, Fillout Pro's higher response allowance does not help: its file cap is still 20 MB. Tally Pro or Fillout Business is the relevant comparison. Do not ask clients to upload credentials, private keys or entire unrelated document archives just because larger files are allowed. Offer an appropriate restricted file-sharing channel when the deliverable does not belong in an intake response.

Here is a storage budget you can reproduce: 800 submissions x 2 files x 2 MB = 3,200 MB, or 3.2 decimal GB of uploaded content each month. Keeping six months creates roughly 19.2 GB before deletions, generated documents or other copies. At 14,000 submissions with the same files, the workload is 56 GB monthly and 336 GB across six months. That exceeds Fillout's published upload and retained-storage fair-use examples despite being below its 30,000-monthly-submission example. It remains below Tally's corresponding 100 GB monthly and 500 GB stored examples, but that does not guarantee acceptance of every intensive workload.

There is also a separate Zite meter. Fillout's storage guide says files uploaded to a Fillout form do not count toward Zite database storage, but their copies saved into a Zite database do. Zite Free includes 1 GB, Pro 10 GB and Business 100 GB. Since October 29, 2026, new form-to-Zite records retain a copied file; older records can still link to the form's original. A 3.2 GB monthly intake can therefore fit the form's policy but exceed a free database's allowance. Check the database's per-file limit too; buying Fillout Business does not automatically buy Zite Business storage.

Airtable: New Enquiries vs Updating Existing Client Records

Tally has a native Airtable integration, available free. Authorize the relevant base, choose a table and map your fields. You can sync existing responses when connecting or send only new ones. The mapping supports files and signatures as attachments and submission PDFs as URLs. It is inaccurate to say Tally needs Zapier merely to send responses into Airtable. The documentation reviewed describes submission syncing, however, not the equivalent of Fillout's client-facing record-update and record-picker flow. Treat that distinction as the reason to evaluate Fillout, not a claim that Tally cannot connect to databases.

Fillout's Airtable update guide lets you select Update record and generate a unique form link for each existing record. Opening it pre-fills the form from that record; submitting updates it. The guide explicitly says a missing record id creates a new record instead. That detail matters for duplicate prevention: a broken or stripped link can create another client row instead of correcting the original. Test an actual update and inspect the record id afterward, not just the friendly confirmation screen. Our Airtable review covers the database side of the decision.

Keep your matching rules explicit. An email address is a useful contact field but not necessarily a unique client or project identifier: one buyer can manage several projects, and multiple people can share an inbox. Store a stable client id, a separate project id and the original submission id in your receiving system. For a new enquiry, create a new intake record and let a defined matching process link it to the client; for an authorized update, write only the approved fields on the existing record. If a workflow retries, those identifiers help you find and prevent duplicate downstream work.

Client Privacy: An Update Link Is Not a Login

Fillout's update documentation contains an unusually important warning: by default, an update link can expose every field on the underlying record, even fields absent from the visible questions. This supports pre-filling, calculations and answer piping, but makes a record containing internal notes inappropriate for casual sharing. Its Restrict prefilled data setting limits loading to fields mapped to questions. The trade-off is deliberate: unmapped fields then cannot drive calculations, validation, piping or other logic. Do not map an internal field merely to preserve a convenient calculation and assume hiding its question protects it.

For returning clients, Fillout's login pages can verify email ownership and restrict access to domains or a users table, starting on Starter. That is separate from deciding which record the person is authorized to read or update. Its logged-in data guide supports record-picker filters based on the authenticated user's data and says these filters are applied on the server, while still advising that records unsuitable for respondents stay outside the connected table. Restrict the table and loaded fields, configure the identity relationship, and verify the result with two synthetic clients in your own workspace. A typed email or a hidden URL parameter alone is not proof of ownership.

Tally's file privacy deserves the same attention. Uploaded files viewed inside Tally require authentication, but its file-upload documentation says integrations add access tokens to exported links so they work without a Tally login. Anyone with access to a receiving spreadsheet can use those links. Treat a spreadsheet export containing attachments as sensitive data, not harmless metadata. Restrict the destination, avoid broad Slack channels and notifications containing full answers, and check what happens to copied files after the original is deleted. Use our free cloud storage guide to distinguish storage capacity from sharing control.

One practical embed caveat: Fillout's Google sign-in option does not work inside website embeds. The login guide says an email-code option must also be available, or you must share the hosted form link. Include both the embedded version and the direct URL in a login test. A correctly priced login feature is still unsuitable if the only enabled login method fails in the place clients actually encounter the form.

Team Access, Agency Handoffs and EU Hosting

Tally's team guide uses workspace invitations and gives members the same form-management rights within the workspaces available to them. It does not document a dedicated read-only collaborator role in that guide. Accepting a Pro or Business organization invite also transfers the user's existing forms into a private workspace inside that organization; the guide warns that leaving removes access even to those personal forms. Use a separate work account and agree who owns the forms before inviting freelancers. Do not mix 'clients can submit' with 'clients should become organization members.'

Fillout's free seats likewise do not imply free granular permissions. Its permissions guide places view-only restrictions and connected-account controls on Team and Enterprise. Administrators can access all workspaces and integrations; non-admins have the workspaces assigned to them. If a client needs to inspect results without editing your form or accessing another client's integration, price that exact permission model. An organization-wide account is not a substitute for isolated customer access.

Tally's GDPR documentation states that form data is stored in Europe and encrypted in transit and at rest. It also lists US subprocessors for optional notifications and payments, including SendGrid and Stripe. EU storage therefore does not mean every enabled workflow stays entirely in the EU. Fillout's deployment-region guide states US storage and processing by default, with EU hosting for respondent data on Team or Enterprise by support request. Existing submissions do not carry over automatically, and Zite Apps and Databases are unavailable on EU servers. Treat a region change as a migration, not a harmless toggle. Neither vendor's compliance language by itself makes your particular intake process compliant.

PDFs, Confirmation Emails and Partial Submissions

Tally now offers native submission PDF export for free. The PDF follows the form's design, includes answers and rendered signatures, and carries Tally branding on Free. Uploaded files appear as filenames, not embedded attachments; hidden and calculated fields are excluded. Pro can attach the PDF to customized self or respondent notifications. A completely independent PDF layout still calls for another document tool or an integration. This is more precise than the outdated claim that Tally has no PDF generation at all.

Fillout's PDF document integration accepts your PDF or document template, maps response fields onto it and can offer a download on the ending page. PDF generation is listed on its free pricing tier, but collecting a signature is a separate Starter feature. Generated documents are rebuilt from the template when their link is opened; deleting the submission breaks the link, while emailed and downloaded copies remain outside that deletion. Archive the final downloaded document when you need evidence of what was actually provided at a particular time, rather than treating a regenerating link as an immutable record.

Email confirmations are another separate entitlement. Tally respondent notifications require Pro. Fillout's pricing matrix puts respondent emails on Starter, while its notification help describes verified Free organizations and connected Gmail or Outlook workflow routes as well. The latter also says Free organizations created on or after October 5, 2026 cannot send external emails from Fillout until verified or upgraded, even though responses still collect. Because these sources do not present a single universal free-email rule, budget Starter for a dependable paid entitlement and confirm any Free exception inside your organization. A response appearing in Results does not prove the client received an email.

Owner visibility into an unfinished response is not the same as letting a respondent resume. Tally partial submissions require Pro, must be enabled first, exclude signatures and neither trigger integrations nor email notifications; a CSV download is available. Fillout partial-response viewing requires Business or above, while respondents can resume on any tier using the same browser and device, outside private browsing. An abandoned draft is not an approved order or permission to begin work. Disclose draft capture and do not use it as automatic marketing consent.

Fillout's workflow guide documents conditional branches, delays, approvals, messages and webhooks, with five workflows per form for unverified accounts and twenty for verified accounts. That is a workflow-definition limit, not twenty submissions or twenty executed actions. Tally has native Zapier, Make and webhook routes; advanced automation is not impossible there, but its external service and maintenance costs belong in your budget. Our Zapier vs Make guide is the next comparison only if your required workflow actually needs that layer.

A Client Intake Blueprint You Can Reuse

The table below is an original starting specification for a small agency, not a vendor template or a workflow we claim to have deployed. Separate an anonymous enquiry from authenticated record updates. Give every required question a reason: if an answer does not affect qualification, routing or delivery, leave it out of the first form. Make budget ranges inclusive enough for someone who needs help estimating, and allow 'not sure' where uncertainty is a legitimate answer rather than a validation failure.

Use branching to ask for a website address on a redesign request, brand files on a branding engagement, or migration details only after someone chooses a migration service. File uploads should normally be optional at enquiry stage. A useful acknowledgement says what was received, who will review it and the response window your team can actually meet; it should not claim that a quote, contract or appointment is confirmed merely because a form submitted successfully. Keep newsletter consent separate and unticked by default.

In the receiving system, use separate states such as received, needs clarification, qualified and declined. Route a qualified record to the owner in your CRM, then create a delivery project only after acceptance. Our agency project-management guide can help with that later stage. Record a submission identifier alongside any created CRM or project identifier so an integration retry can be reconciled without creating a second project or sending duplicate welcome messages.

The Ten Checks to Run Before Publishing

Run the acceptance checks below using invented data, your own test records and mailboxes you control. These are proposed tests, not results from our research. Verify the embedded form and the direct link on mobile as well as desktop. Record the form version, plan, date, expected outcome and actual outcome. A trial is useful only if the feature that sold you the product is demonstrated in the configuration you intend to buy.

The privacy test needs two clearly separate synthetic clients. Confirm that client A can update the intended record, then test the authorized setup against client B's test link and any private test fields. Check both visible questions and loaded data with a technical colleague; hiding a field on screen is not enough. If the expected isolation is not demonstrated, reduce the exposed data or use a proper portal. Do not experiment against real customers or records you are not authorized to inspect.

Also test failure recovery, not only the happy path. Deliberately disconnect a disposable test integration, submit one response, confirm it is retained, then reconnect and follow the provider's documented recovery process. Tally documents integration sync logs and a first-failure email; Fillout documents misconfiguration warnings and optional error notifications. Re-running a submission can also repeat workflows and emails, so inspect the downstream record and notification count. Treat a missing email as a delivery problem to investigate, not evidence that the form never captured the request.

Retention, Export and Leaving Without Losing the Brief

Maintain three inventories: the form definition and branching rules, completed responses and identifiers, and the actual files or final PDFs. A CSV of answers is not a restored form, and a field containing a file URL is not an offline copy. Tally's file guide supports batch downloads from the submissions page, but says you must repeat the download across pages if results are paginated. Export responses and download attachments before removing an account, form or submission on which those links depend.

Tally Business's retention control can automatically delete submissions after a configured period, but those records move to Trash for 90 days unless emptied earlier. A '30-day retention' setting is therefore not synonymous with immediate permanent erasure on day 30. Include exported CSVs, emailed PDFs and connected storage in your retention procedure; deleting the form-platform copy does not magically remove those other copies.

Fillout's form export includes form structure but excludes received submissions and comments. Responses can be exported separately as CSV, respecting the active filters. Re-imported Fillout forms may need their integration accounts reconnected. Its upload documentation says deleting a submission deletes the original uploaded files, while the storage guide says newer Zite database records retain separate copies. A generated PDF link can break immediately even when a previously emailed PDF remains readable. Write down which object you are deleting rather than relying on the word 'export' or 'backup' to mean everything.

For a switch between Tally and Fillout, rebuild one representative form, reconnect the approved destinations, verify branching and permissions, and keep the old response archive separately. The reviewed import guide does not establish a complete Tally-to-Fillout transfer of responses, files, automations and access rules. Replace the public embed or link only after the new form passes its checks, then watch both the intake record and the destination workflow. Keep a tested route back until the new process has handled a normal business cycle.

Which Form Builder Should Your Team Choose?

Choose Tally Free for a low-friction public enquiry form owned by one person when 10 MB files and vendor branding are acceptable. Choose Tally Pro for an internal agency team that wants a custom domain, respondent acknowledgements, larger uploads and partial-response visibility without buying a database-update platform. Choose Business only when its additional email-verification or retention controls are actual requirements. The no-code software category is useful if your needs extend beyond either form builder.

Choose Fillout Free when collaborative editing and new-record capture fit within 1,000 monthly responses. Start with Starter for verified respondent logins, signatures or other Starter-gated inputs; move to Pro for branding removal or up to 5,000 responses. Business is justified by custom domains, partial-response access, 1 GB files or sustained volume above Pro, while Team is a separate budget decision for permissions or EU respondent hosting. Do not recommend a $3,000 annual Team subscription solely because the company has five users: ordinary seats are already unlimited.

Our default for a small agency collecting new briefs is Tally Pro; our default for a form that must update existing client database records is Fillout, with data minimization and access checks built into the selection. Neither recommendation implies a conversion uplift, compliance guarantee or maintenance-free integration. Before paying, confirm three unresolved account-specific points: any free-email exception in Fillout, the complete permissions available on your chosen tier, and a quote for usage above either fair-use policy. Those answers can matter more than the difference between two monthly prices.