Introduction

Choosing a survey tool is no longer just about writing questions. Teams increasingly expect a tool that can draft a study, reach the right participants, decide who sees which question, collect responses across several channels, analyze open-ended text, and hold up when someone challenges the decision made from the data.

Tally is one of the best-liked form builders available.

Tally gives away unlimited forms and unlimited submissions on its free plan within stated fair usage guidelines, includes conditional logic, calculations, signatures, payment collection, and file uploads at no cost, and holds a 4.9 out of 5 rating on G2 across 141 reviews as of August 2026.

Tally reports that more than 500,000 teams use it, naming Notion, Make, Rakuten, and Glovo among them.

Over the past several years, however, the question many of those teams bring to a form builder has changed.

They are frequently no longer collecting an email address or a workshop signup. They are trying to answer a question about customers that somebody will act on.

That is where a form builder and a research platform stop being the same category. A form collects what people type into it. A study is designed to produce evidence that survives scrutiny from the people who did not run it.

Sprig is an enterprise survey platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) agents. It is built for the second job, and it is not built for the first.

Executive Summary

Sprig and Tally are not substitutes for each other. Tally is a form builder, and Tally is typically the better choice for collecting structured input from people you can already reach: signups, applications, intake forms, and short surveys sent to a list you control. Sprig is an enterprise survey platform, and Sprig is generally the better choice when the answer has to be defensible, which means reaching people outside your own list, targeting respondents by product behavior, applying quantitative methods, and showing why the sample supports the conclusion.

Most teams that outgrow Tally do not outgrow it on features. They outgrow it on who they can reach and what they can prove.

Sprig vs. Tally at a Glance

Which Platform Should You Choose?

Choose Sprig if

Sprig is generally the stronger choice for teams whose research has to answer to someone.

That includes product managers who need feedback from users who took a specific action inside the product, market researchers who need respondents outside the customer list, and customer experience teams running continuous measurement across a journey rather than a one-time survey.

Sprig typically fits when the study requires methodology as much as questions. Conjoint analysis, MaxDiff, and quota-controlled sampling are the difference between a number you report and a number you defend.

Sprig also fits when research is spreading across an organization.

Governance, role-based permissions, single sign-on (SSO), audit controls, and SOC 2 Type II compliance become requirements the moment a security review enters the process, and they typically arrive earlier than teams expect.

The clearest signal is reach. If the people you need to hear from are not already on a list you own, a form builder cannot solve that problem, because reaching them is not a form problem.

Choose Tally if

Tally is generally the stronger choice for teams collecting structured input from an audience they already have.

Signup forms, applications, event registrations, order intake, and short feedback surveys sent to an existing list are exactly what Tally is built for, and it typically does them with less setup than almost anything else.

Tally also commonly fits when the form is not research at all. Payment collection, signature capture, and lead capture sit outside what a survey platform does, and Sprig does not publish them.

Tally fits teams operating without a research budget. Unlimited forms and unlimited submissions on the free plan is not a trial limitation, and no enterprise survey platform matches that entry point.

Tally fits European teams with a data residency requirement and no certification requirement.

Tally stores form data in Europe and encrypts it in transit and at rest, which answers a real question for some buyers before any certification discussion begins.

Comparison Methodology

This comparison draws on primary sources. Tally capability claims come from Tally's own features page, help documentation, developer documentation, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) page, all retrieved on August 17, 2026. Sprig capability claims come from Sprig's published product documentation and integration documentation.

Third-party ratings are reported with their review counts and retrieval dates. Tally holds 4.9 out of 5 on G2 across 141 reviews and 4.9 out of 5 on Capterra across 41 reviews, both retrieved August 17, 2026.

Sprig holds 4.3 out of 5 on G2 across 199 reviews, retrieved the same day. The two review corpora differ in size and in what reviewers are evaluating, and neither score is offered here as evidence of capability.

Where a capability could not be verified from a vendor's own published material, this guide says so instead of inferring it. Absence of published documentation is reported as absence of documentation, not as absence of the capability.

No prices appear in this guide. Both vendors change packaging, and a comparison that depends on a price is stale the week it publishes.

What You'll Learn

The difference between a form and a study
Where Tally is genuinely the better tool
What breaks when research runs on a form builder
How the two platforms handle open-ended responses
What migration actually involves

What Sprig and Tally Are Built to Do

Two products can commonly share a question type and still be built for different jobs. Both Sprig and Tally let you ask a multiple-choice question, apply conditional logic, and collect the answers, but the products diverge almost everywhere else.

Tally Overview

Tally is a form builder from a small company based in Belgium, and its design ideas are unusually consistent. Its central design idea is that building a form should feel like typing a document, and that idea is executed unusually well.

Tally's commercial model is the second design idea. Unlimited forms and unlimited submissions are free, and the paid tiers add branding removal, custom domains, team workspaces, and analytics rather than gating the core.

Tally's free plan includes capabilities that competitors commonly charge for: conditional logic, calculations and formulas, hidden fields, answer piping, signature capture, payment collection, file uploads, and application programming interface (API) access.

Where Tally Works Well as a Survey Tool

Tally is a good survey tool when the audience is already reachable and the method is simple. A satisfaction survey sent to a customer list, a post-event feedback form, or a short preference question with a clearly defined population will produce usable results in Tally at no cost.

Tally becomes the wrong tool when a study needs quota control, respondents from outside your own list, or a method such as conjoint analysis, because Tally does not publish those capabilities.

What Tally Does Not Publish

Tally does not publish in-product surveys inside web or mobile applications, behavioral event targeting, quota control, panel recruitment, conjoint analysis, MaxDiff, longitudinal repeat runs, single sign-on (SSO), or SOC 2 certification. Tally also does not translate creator-written question text.

These are scope boundaries instead of defects. Tally has never presented itself as a research platform, and the boundary is where the product stops rather than where it fails.

Sprig Overview

Sprig is an enterprise survey platform powered by AI agents. It supports customer research, market research, and in-product research from one study architecture rather than separate tools per channel.

Three specialized agents run across the research lifecycle. The Design Agent programs the study before fielding, the Field Agent delivers it conversationally and asks follow-up questions in real time, and the Synthesize Agent builds an evidence-backed report as responses arrive.

Sprig studies deploy across links, email, web applications, mobile applications, and research panels, and every entry point feeds the same dataset.

A Different Definition of Speed

Both products are fast, but they are fast at different things.

Tally is fast to a published form. A person with no training can typically have a working form live in a few minutes, and that speed is real.

Sprig is designed to be fast to an answer.

Time to insight measures how long it takes to move from a research question to a decision supported by reliable evidence, and drafting the questions is often the smallest part of that.

For a signup form those two speeds are the same number. For a pricing study they are not close.

From Point Solutions to Research Programs

Historically, teams assembled research from point solutions.

Design the survey in a form builder, buy respondents from a panel provider, send customer surveys through an email marketing tool, export the results, and rebuild the analysis by hand in a spreadsheet.

Modern research platforms collapse that chain. The value is not that any single step is faster, it is that the handoffs disappear.

Tally sits deliberately at one link in that chain and integrates outward through Zapier, Make, n8n, webhooks, Airtable, Google Sheets, and Notion. That is a coherent strategy and it generally works well for workflow automation.

Rather than connecting point solutions, Sprig consolidates the chain into a single platform where design, fielding, and analysis operate on the same study.

The Form or Research Diagnostic

This is the fastest way to tell which tool a given project needs. Answer these seven questions about the project in front of you.

Do you need responses from people who are not already on a list you control?
Does the sample need to reflect a population instead of whoever replied?
Do you need to control how many responses come from each segment?
Does the question require a method such as conjoint analysis, MaxDiff, or price sensitivity testing?
Do you need to ask people at a specific moment inside your product?
Will someone outside your team challenge the conclusion?
Does this study need to run repeatedly and be comparable over time?

A single yes to any of those seven questions generally means the project needs a research platform. Seven noes means Tally will do the job, and paying for more tool than the job requires is its own kind of mistake.

Form and Survey Creation: How Sprig and Tally Compare

Survey creation is typically where buyers form their first impression, and it is the dimension where Tally is strongest.

The authoring experience often determines who in an organization can create a study without help, which in turn determines how much research actually gets done.

Survey Creation at a Glance

Tally's Document-Style Editor

Tally's editor works like a text document. You type a question, press a key, and the input type appears inline, which removes the field-configuration step that most form builders require.

The effect on adoption is real. Reviewers on G2 and Capterra consistently rate the experience highly, and Capterra's feature sub-score sits at 4.8 out of 5 across 41 reviews as of August 2026.

Input Types and Layout

Tally supports contact information fields, ratings and rankings, date and time, signatures, file uploads, payment collection, multi-page forms, column layouts, embedded media, and text formatting.

Logic and Calculation

Tally supports conditional logic, calculator formulas, hidden fields, answer piping, pre-populated fields, answer randomization, and redirect on completion.

Calculation is a genuine strength, and quiz-style or scoring forms are frequently easier to build in Tally than in a survey platform.

Languages and Reuse

Tally translates default form text into more than 50 languages and supports right-to-left text. Those translations cover text a creator cannot edit, such as error messages and the default thank-you page.

Tally does not publish multilingual forms that translate creator-written question text, and routes that use case to a third-party translation service. Sprig publishes AI translations.

Sprig's Agent-Assisted Study Design

Sprig approaches creation from the methodology end rather than the field end. The Design Agent clarifies the research objective, recommends a methodology, drafts questions, and flags wording that introduces bias.

Rather than replacing methodological expertise, the Design Agent assists with drafting and structure while researchers remain responsible for validating the final approach.

Adaptive Study Architecture

Sprig studies support quotas, embedded data, variable piping, loop and merge, survey retakes, longitudinal runs, and dynamic uniform resource locators (URLs) that carry participant attributes into question logic.

Question Coverage for Research

Sprig supports 14 documented question types, including matrix, rank order, conjoint, MaxDiff, Net Promoter Score (NPS), video and voice responses, and Recorded Task, which captures screen, voice, and video while someone works through a prototype.

Where the Editors Actually Differ

The difference is not ease of use. Both editors are easy.

The difference is what the editor knows. Tally's editor knows about fields, and Sprig's study builder knows about research design, which matters only when the study has a methodology to get wrong.

For a workshop signup form that knowledge is overhead. For a pricing study it is the entire point.

Form and Survey Creation Verdict

Winner: Tally

Both Sprig and Tally let a non-specialist build and publish something quickly, and neither requires technical skill.

Tally is typically faster to a finished form, easier for someone who has never built a survey, and stronger on visual customization, calculations, and multi-language support.

Sprig's study builder carries methodology guidance that Tally does not attempt, but that guidance is only valuable when the project has methodology in it.

Tally wins this dimension outright, and a guide that claimed otherwise would be describing a different product.

AI Capabilities: How Sprig and Tally Compare

AI has changed what buyers expect from a survey tool more than any other factor in the past two years.

The useful question is not whether a product has AI features, it is which parts of the research lifecycle those features actually touch.

AI Capabilities at a Glance

Sprig's Three Research Agents

Sprig applies AI across the research lifecycle instead of at a single step.

The Design Agent works before fielding. It generates a fully programmed study with response options, logic, and randomization already in place, detects broken or conflicting logic, flags unclear questions, and estimates completion time.

The Field Agent works during fielding. It delivers studies conversationally and generates follow-up questions in real time based on what a respondent says. Follow-ups can be disabled per study, and targeting and quota rules stay set by the researcher.

The Synthesize Agent works as responses arrive. It builds an evidence-backed report with themes, summaries, and supporting quotes drawn from the responses behind each theme.

What Agent-Assisted Analysis Produces

Rather than returning a word cloud, thematic analysis returns findings a team can act on.

Instead of reading three thousand onboarding responses, a researcher might receive a summary such as: setup was generally straightforward, users struggled with permissions, pricing confusion appeared repeatedly, and mobile onboarding satisfaction exceeded desktop.

Tally's Approach to AI

Tally does not publish native AI features for drafting questions, recommending methodology, or analyzing responses inside the product.

Tally's strategy is different and defensible: rather than building analysis into the product, Tally exposes forms and submissions to AI clients through a first-party Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and lets those clients do the work.

That approach has a real advantage. The analysis quality tracks whatever model the user brings, and it improves without Tally shipping anything.

Tally's approach also has a limit. AI that only operates after collection cannot improve the question wording, cannot recommend a methodology, and cannot manage quotas while a study is in the field.

The Limits of AI in Research

AI has accelerated survey creation and analysis, but it has not replaced research fundamentals.

An agent that drafts a question cannot tell you whether the 400 people who answered it resemble the market. Sprig does not publish weighting, sample size guidance, or significance testing, and a researcher still owns those judgments.

Rather than automating research judgment, both approaches move labor. Tally moves it to the client after collection, and Sprig moves it earlier, to the point where the study is being designed.

AI Capabilities Verdict

Winner: Sprig

Both Sprig and Tally give users a path to AI-assisted analysis of collected responses, and Tally's path costs nothing on any plan.

Sprig applies AI earlier in the research lifecycle, where methodology recommendation, bias reduction in question wording, and quota management during fielding change what the data can support.

Tally is well suited for teams whose AI needs begin after the responses arrive and who already work inside Claude or ChatGPT.

Teams that want help designing the study rather than only reading it will find that Tally does not publish that capability.

AI Client Access and the Model Context Protocol

This dimension deserves its own section because the result is counterintuitive. Model Context Protocol (MCP) support is a checkable capability that most enterprise survey vendors do not have, and a free form builder has it.

AI Client Access at a Glance

| Category | Sprig | Tally | |:-----------------------------------------:|:-----------------------------------------------:|:----------------------:| | First-party Model Context Protocol server | Yes | Yes | | Claude support | Yes | Yes | | ChatGPT support | Yes | Yes | | Gemini support | Documented connection path | Not named individually | | Copilot support | Documented connection path | Not named individually | | Cursor support | Yes | Yes | | Create studies through an AI client | Yes | Yes | | Read responses through an AI client | Yes | Yes | | Plan requirement | Available to connect through Sprig integrations | Free on all plans |

What Tally's Model Context Protocol Server Does

Tally publishes a first-party Model Context Protocol server that lets an AI client create forms from a plain-language description, edit existing forms, browse workspaces, and fetch and analyze submissions.

Tally documents support for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Cline, and Continue, and states that the server is free to use on all plans.

Tally also documents a deliberate constraint: the assistant cannot delete forms or submissions, and submission data is only retrieved when explicitly requested.

What Sprig's Model Context Protocol Server Does

Sprig publishes a first-party Model Context Protocol server that connects live studies, responses, and user themes to AI clients through an authorization flow.

Sprig documents connection paths for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Cursor. Tally names Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Cline, and Continue, and states that any compatible client works, so neither list should be read as a limit.

The practical difference is what sits behind the connection. A Sprig query reaches quota-controlled studies with panel and in-product responses in one dataset, and a Tally query reaches form submissions.

Governance on the Connection

Sprig publishes a data governance model for its Model Context Protocol server. Access is scoped to the authenticated user's role, retrieval is capped at 1,000 responses per call, response data is not used to train models, and an organization-wide administrator kill switch is available.

Agents cannot launch or modify a live study. A person approves every study in the application, which is the guardrail that makes agent access acceptable to a security reviewer.

Why This Matters More Than It Looks

First-party Model Context Protocol support is rarer among enterprise survey vendors than buyers assume. Several established platforms in this category do not publish one at all.

Rather than treating this as a differentiator to claim, the honest reading is that Tally shipped a capability much of the enterprise category has not, and it shipped it free.

AI Client Access Verdict

Winner: Tie

Both Sprig and Tally publish first-party Model Context Protocol servers that let an AI client create and read data without an export step, and both cover the two clients most teams use.

Sprig scopes access to the authenticated user's role, caps retrieval at 1,000 responses per call, and requires a person to approve any study before it launches. Tally makes its server free on every plan and blocks deletion of forms and submissions.

Neither approach is inherently better for this dimension. The difference that matters is not the connection, it is what the connected dataset contains.

Survey Distribution and Participant Recruitment: How Sprig and Tally Compare

Distribution is typically the dimension where the gap between the two products is widest, and it is frequently the one that ends the evaluation. A study can only tell you about the people it reached.

Distribution and Recruitment at a Glance

Tally's Distribution Model

Tally distributes forms the way most form builders do, and it does it cleanly. A form gets a link, an embed code, and a popup, and the link works anywhere a link works.

Tally supports pre-populated fields and hidden fields, so a link can carry information about the person clicking it. That covers a useful class of personalization without any integration work.

What Tally's Model Assumes

Tally's distribution model assumes you already have the audience. The form is ready, and getting people to it is your job.

For an existing customer list, a newsletter, or a community, that assumption generally holds fine and adds no cost.

Sprig's Distribution Model

Sprig treats distribution as part of the study rather than as a step after it. Email campaigns, CRM workflows, panel recruiting, QR codes, direct links, and in-product delivery all connect to the same study and produce one dataset.

In-Product Delivery

Sprig deploys studies inside web applications and mobile applications through lightweight software development kits (SDKs) supporting web, iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter.

Engineers install Sprig once. After that, research teams can create studies and adjust targeting without new deployments or engineering time.

Behavioral Targeting

Sprig connects to user attributes and behavioral events, so a study can trigger after a specific action, during onboarding, or at a moment of friction.

This is the capability that has no equivalent in a form builder. Asking the right person at the right moment is a targeting problem, not a form problem.

Reaching People Outside Your List

Sprig supports recruitment beyond an existing user base through a native User Interviews integration, secure study links that work with any panel provider, and centralized screening and quota management.

Panel and customer responses enter the same study and are analyzed together, which removes the reconciliation step that separate tools create.

Response Integrity

External distribution increases exposure to bots and low-quality responses. Every Sprig study includes invisible bot detection, and each response is scored on behavioral and response patterns so teams can filter below a chosen threshold.

Tally addresses a narrower version of the same problem through reCAPTCHA, duplicate submission prevention, and email verification on its Business tier.

Worked Example: The Same NPS Study on Both Platforms

Consider a common request. Leadership wants a Net Promoter Score (NPS) reading on a new onboarding flow, and they want to know whether it differs by plan tier.

On Tally, the workflow is: build the Net Promoter Score question, generate a link, export the customer list from the billing system, segment it by plan tier in a spreadsheet, send the link through an email tool, wait, export submissions, and join the responses back to plan tier by email address in the spreadsheet.

On Sprig, the workflow is: build the study, target users who completed onboarding in the last seven days, pass plan tier as a user attribute so it arrives with the response, and read the result segmented by tier without a join.

Both produce a number.

The Tally version repeats the export, segment, send, export, and join sequence on every run and breaks when a customer changes email address.

The Sprig version is repeatable because the segmentation lives in the study rather than in a spreadsheet.

The difference compounds with frequency. A one-time reading generally favors whichever tool is already open, and a quarterly tracker favors the one that does not need reassembling each time.

Distribution and Recruitment Verdict

Winner: Sprig

Both Sprig and Tally publish forms to a link, an embed, and a popup, and for reaching an audience you already own those three channels are frequently sufficient.

Sprig adds native email delivery, in-product surveys on web and mobile, behavioral event targeting, quota management, and panel recruitment, which are the capabilities that determine who a study can reach rather than how it looks.

Tally is well suited for organizations whose respondents are already reachable through an existing list or channel.

Teams that need responses from people outside an existing list will find that Tally does not publish recruitment, and no amount of form quality substitutes for it.

Advanced Research Methods and Integrations: How Sprig and Tally Compare

These two dimensions commonly belong together in this comparison because they point in opposite directions. Sprig invests in research methodology, and Tally invests in workflow connectivity.

Research Methods and Integrations at a Glance

Named Methods and When They Matter

Advanced methods are not a feature checklist. Each one answers a question that a rating scale answers badly.

Conjoint analysis estimates how buyers trade off combinations of attributes, which is how you learn what a feature is worth relative to price instead of whether people like it.

MaxDiff, formally Maximum Difference Scaling, measures relative preference among individual items and separates a crowded list in a way that rating every item on a five-point scale does not.

Response-based quotas control how many answers arrive from each segment, which is what lets a result be generalized to a population instead of to whoever replied.

Sprig supports conjoint analysis and MaxDiff as first-party question types. Tally does not publish either method, and building them by hand in a form builder typically produces a survey that looks right and analyzes wrong.

Where Tally Is Genuinely Stronger

Tally's integration surface for workflow automation is broader than Sprig's, and this is not a close call.

Tally connects natively to Zapier, Make, n8n, Pipedream, Integrately, IFTTT, and webhooks, plus Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, Coda, Slack, Linear, and Discord. Several of those connectors are available on the free plan.

For a team whose requirement is that a submission should create a task, update a database row, and post to a channel, Tally is the better tool and it costs nothing.

Where Sprig's Integrations Point

Sprig's integrations are aimed at research context rather than task automation. Segment and RudderStack bring user event and attribute data in so studies can target precisely.

Mixpanel and Amplitude connect survey responses to product analytics, which is how a team learns why a metric moved and not only that it moved.

Figma supports prototype testing, and Dovetail and Notion centralize findings in a research repository.

Advanced Research Methods Verdict

Winner: Sprig

Both Sprig and Tally can put a rating scale or a ranking question in front of a respondent, and for many questions that is the correct instrument.

Sprig leads decisively on research methodology, since conjoint analysis, MaxDiff, and quota-controlled sampling are not capabilities a form builder can approximate. Sprig does not publish weighting, sample size guidance, statistical power, or significance testing, and it does not publish its MaxDiff estimation methodology, so buyers who need those should ask for them by name.

Tally is well suited for studies where the method is a direct question and the population is already defined. Teams running tradeoff or pricing research will find that Tally does not publish the instruments those studies require.

Integrations Verdict

Winner: Tally

Both Sprig and Tally publish an application programming interface and connect outward to the tools teams already use, and both integration surfaces are broad enough that neither is a reason to rule a product out.

Tally wins this dimension outright. Its connector list is broader, it covers the automation platforms teams actually run, and several of those connectors are available on the free plan.

Sprig's integration surface is narrower and pointed at a different job, connecting product analytics, customer data platforms, and research repositories so studies can target precisely and findings can be stored where the organization keeps them.

Analysis and Reporting: How Sprig and Tally Compare

Collecting responses is generally the easy half. What separates a survey tool from a research platform is what happens between the last response and the decision.

Analysis and Reporting at a Glance

What Tally Reports

Tally provides form visit analytics on every plan, and adds drop-off analytics, partial submissions, Google Analytics, and Meta Pixel on its paid tiers.

Tally also supports exporting submissions to a spreadsheet or as a portable document format (PDF) file, which is where most Tally analysis actually happens.

For a form with a hundred responses and five fields, a spreadsheet is generally a perfectly good analysis environment and adding a platform on top of it would be waste.

What Sprig Reports

Sprig's Synthesize Agent performs thematic analysis on open-ended responses, summarizes them, compares segments, and identifies patterns and outliers without an export step.

Rather than reading every open-ended response, researchers review themes and drill into the responses behind them, while remaining responsible for judging whether a theme is real or an artifact of wording.

Behavioral Context Around a Response

Sprig captures session replay clips around each in-product response, covering up to five minutes on either side of the answer.

This closes a gap that survey data alone cannot. A response saying the flow was confusing is a claim, and watching what the person actually did immediately before saying it is evidence.

Comparing Across Studies

Sprig supports longitudinal studies and multiple survey runs, so a tracker asked quarterly stays comparable instead of becoming four disconnected forms.

The Open-Ended Response Problem

Open-ended responses are frequently where the value is and where the labor is. Three thousand text answers contain the reasons behind every number in the study, and reading them by hand is typically what gets skipped.

Tally's answer is to hand those responses to an AI client through its Model Context Protocol server, which works and costs nothing.

Sprig's answer is to run thematic analysis inside the platform, where the themes stay attached to the study, the segments, and the response metadata rather than living in a chat session.

Analysis and Reporting Verdict

Winner: Sprig

Both Sprig and Tally give teams a path to analyzing open-ended responses with AI, and Tally's path through its Model Context Protocol server is genuinely capable for a single study.

Sprig keeps analysis attached to the study. Themes, segments, response metadata, cross-study comparison, and session replay context stay in one place, which is what makes a finding reproducible three months later when somebody asks how you know.

Tally is well suited for teams analyzing one form at a time. Teams running a research program across many studies will find that a chat session is not a place findings can live.

Enterprise Security, Governance, and Administration: How Sprig and Tally Compare

Security is typically where this comparison stops being a matter of preference. These requirements are typically not negotiable, and they are frequently decided by people who never use the product.

Security and Governance at a Glance

| Category | Sprig | Tally | |:-----------------------------------------------------------:|:----------------------------------------------:|:-------------------------------------:| | Encryption in transit and at rest | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | | General Data Protection Regulation alignment | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | | Data processing agreement available | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | | Published subprocessor list | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes, 17 subprocessors | | European data storage | Not published, hosting is in the United States | ✅ Yes, stored in Europe | | SOC 2 Type II | ✅ Yes | Not published | | Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act support | ✅ Yes | Not published | | California Consumer Privacy Act alignment | ✅ Yes | Not published | | Single sign-on | ✅ Yes | Not published | | Role-based access control | ✅ Yes | Workspaces, folders, and team members | | Audit controls | ✅ Yes | Not published | | Data retention controls | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes, on the Business tier |

What Tally Publishes

Tally states that form data is encrypted in transit and at rest and stored in Europe, and that the company is based in Belgium with primary hosting on Google Cloud in Belgium.

Tally publishes a data processing agreement and a list of 17 subprocessors, including Google Cloud for hosting, Cloudflare, SendGrid for email, Stripe for payments, and OpenAI for abuse detection.

Tally's Business tier adds control over submission data retention and email verification.

What Tally Does Not Publish

Tally does not publish SOC 2, ISO 27001, or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance on its public documentation, and no single sign-on (SSO), Security Assertion Markup Language, or System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) capability appears on its features page, help documentation, or tier descriptions as of August 2026.

This is a statement about published documentation, not about the company's internal practices. A buyer with a certification requirement should ask Tally directly rather than assume either way.

What Sprig Publishes

Sprig publishes SOC 2 Type II, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) support, General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act alignment, and Data Privacy Framework participation, alongside Security Assertion Markup Language single sign-on (SSO), role-based access control, and audit logging retained for a year or more.

These are the controls a security review asks for, and their absence is typically what ends a procurement conversation rather than any product capability.

What Sprig Does Not Publish

Sprig hosts on Amazon Web Services in the United States and does not publish regional hosting or data residency options. Sprig also does not publish System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) provisioning or ISO 27001 certification of its own.

A buyer whose first requirement is that data never leaves the European Union should read that as Tally's advantage rather than Sprig's.

Why This Dimension Decides Deals

For an individual or a small team, none of this matters and paying for it would be irrational.

For an organization where a security questionnaire precedes a purchase, a missing certification is not a feature gap to negotiate. It is a stop.

Security and Governance Verdict

Winner: Sprig

Both Sprig and Tally encrypt data in transit and at rest, publish a data processing agreement, and name their subprocessors, and Tally's European data storage answers a residency question that some buyers ask first.

Sprig publishes the certifications and access controls that enterprise procurement requires, including SOC 2 Type II, single sign-on (SSO), role-based access control, and audit controls.

Tally is well suited for individuals, small teams, and organizations without a formal security review. Organizations that run one will generally not be able to proceed on published documentation alone.

Implementation, Migration, and Total Cost of Ownership: How Sprig and Tally Compare

Cost is rarely the number on the invoice, and the full comparison is often decided elsewhere. The full picture includes setup time, the manual work each study requires, and what happens when a study needs to run again.

Implementation and Cost at a Glance

What Tally Costs to Adopt

Tally's adoption cost is close to zero, and that is its strongest commercial argument.

There is no procurement process, no implementation, no training, and no engineering work.

A person who needs a form has one in minutes, and Tally publishes unlimited forms and unlimited submissions on the free plan within its stated fair usage guidelines.

Tally's paid tiers add branding removal, custom domains, team workspaces, advanced customization, and analytics instead of lifting a response ceiling.

What Sprig Costs to Adopt

Sprig's link and email studies typically launch on a similar timescale. In-product deployment takes longer, because engineers install a software development kit once before research teams can create studies without further engineering time.

Sprig publishes a free entry point with limited responses and scales from there with response volume, activated capabilities, and deployment environments.

Cost comparison here stays qualitative on purpose. Both vendors change packaging, and the durable question is what each platform removes from your workload instead of what it adds to a line item.

The Cost That Does Not Appear on an Invoice

The hidden cost of running research on a form builder is the manual work around each study.

Exporting a list, segmenting it in a spreadsheet, sending through a separate email tool, exporting submissions, joining responses back to customer attributes, and rebuilding the analysis is six steps that no tool performs for you.

Rather than paying that cost once, teams pay it every time the study runs. A quarterly tracker pays it four times a year, forever.

Migrating from Tally to a Survey Platform

Migration from Tally is generally simple, because there is typically less to move than teams expect.

The important step is the second one. Most teams should not migrate everything, because a large share of Tally forms are not research and moving them to a survey platform makes them worse instead of better.

Historical data is the one genuine risk. Export past submissions before changing plans, since Tally's data retention controls sit on its Business tier and published form version history runs 7 days on the free plan, 30 days on Pro, and 90 days on Business.

Implementation and Total Cost of Ownership Verdict

Winner: Tally

Both Sprig and Tally get a link-based survey in front of respondents quickly, and both offer a free entry point, so neither imposes a barrier on a team that wants to start today.

Tally wins on cost of entry and administrative overhead without qualification. Unlimited forms and unlimited submissions free, no procurement, no implementation, and no governance configuration is a combination no enterprise survey platform offers or is trying to offer.

Sprig's total cost of ownership argument only becomes real when research repeats. Organizations running occasional one-off forms will typically spend less and get what they need from Tally.

Which Platform Is Right for Your Team?

Different teams hit the boundary between a form and a study at different points. These five profiles cover where most of the decisions land.

Product Management

Why teams choose Sprig

Product managers typically need feedback tied to behavior. Sprig triggers studies after a specific in-product action, carries plan tier and usage attributes into the response, and captures session replay around each answer.

Rather than asking everyone what they think of onboarding, a product manager can ask the people who abandoned it yesterday.

Why teams choose Tally

Product managers frequently need a quick form more than a study. A beta signup, a feature request intake, or a five-question check with a customer advisory board is faster in Tally and costs nothing.

Market Research

Why teams choose Sprig

Market research commonly needs respondents who are not your customers, and that is a recruitment problem rather than a survey problem. Sprig supports panel recruitment across more than 300,000 verified participants and more than 300 targeting attributes, quota-controlled sampling, and named methods including conjoint analysis and MaxDiff.

A pricing study built on a rating scale in a form builder produces a number that will not survive its first serious review.

Marketing

Why teams choose Sprig

Marketing teams running message testing, concept testing, or brand tracking need comparability across runs and reach beyond the existing list. Sprig supports longitudinal studies and multiple survey runs so a tracker stays consistent quarter over quarter.

Why teams choose Tally

Marketing teams generally run more forms than studies. Lead capture, event registration, content downloads, and webinar signups are Tally's core competence, and its embed, popup, and Meta Pixel support are built for exactly that work.

Founders and Small Teams

Why teams choose Tally

Small teams should generally start with Tally. Unlimited free submissions, a document-style editor anyone can use, payment collection, signatures, and a broad set of free automation connectors cover a startup's entire form surface at no cost.

The moment to reconsider is not a headcount number. It is the first time a decision worth real money depends on who answered.

Information Technology and Security

Why teams choose Sprig

Security reviewers evaluate published controls more than product experience. Sprig publishes SOC 2 Type II, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) support, single sign-on (SSO), role-based access control, and audit controls.

Tally publishes encryption in transit and at rest, European data storage, a data processing agreement, and a subprocessor list, which satisfies some reviews and not others.

Which Platform Fits Different Organizations?

The Bigger Strategic Question

The question worth asking is not which product is better. Tally and Sprig are both good at what they were built for, and the ratings reflect that.

The question is what your organization is trying to become. A company that runs a handful of forms a year needs a form builder and should not be sold anything else.

A company where product, marketing, and customer experience decisions increasingly depend on customer evidence is building a research capability, and a research capability needs infrastructure that can reach the right people and defend its own numbers.

Ultimately, the decision comes down to whether the next hard question you face is about the form or about the answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between Sprig and Tally?

Tally is a form builder for collecting structured input from people you can already reach, and Sprig is an enterprise survey platform powered by AI agents for running research that has to be defensible. Tally is strongest on speed, cost, and generic form work including payments and signatures. Sprig adds in-product delivery, behavioral targeting, panel recruitment, quota control, advanced research methods, and enterprise security certifications.

Is Sprig a Tally alternative?

Sprig is an alternative to Tally for research surveys but not for general forms. Teams commonly move research studies to Sprig while keeping signups, applications, and payment forms in Tally, because a survey platform makes those forms harder instead of easier. The two products overlap on a narrow band of short link-based surveys and diverge everywhere else.

Can you run real research with Tally?

Tally can run valid research when the audience is already reachable and the method is simple. A satisfaction survey sent to a customer list, a short feedback form after an event, or a preference question with a clear population will produce usable results. Tally does not publish quota control, panel recruitment, or advanced quantitative methods, so studies that require a representative sample or a tradeoff analysis will not hold up.

Why do teams switch from Tally to a survey platform?

Teams typically switch for reach rather than features. The trigger is typically needing responses from people outside an existing list, needing to ask users at a specific moment inside a product, or facing a security review that asks for certifications. A secondary trigger is repetition, since the manual list handling a form builder requires gets paid again every time a tracker runs.

Does Tally have AI features?

Tally does not publish native AI features for drafting questions or analyzing responses inside the product. Tally takes a different route: its first-party Model Context Protocol (MCP) server lets Claude, ChatGPT, and other clients create forms from a description and analyze submissions directly. That approach is free on all plans and works well after collection, but it does not assist with study design before fielding.

Does Sprig work with Claude and ChatGPT?

Sprig publishes a first-party Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects live studies, responses, and themes to AI clients. Sprig documents connection paths for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Cursor through an authorization flow, so a researcher can ask a client to summarize a study without exporting anything.

Can Sprig send surveys by email?

Sprig supports native email distribution alongside links, QR codes, embedded surveys, in-product surveys on web and mobile, and research panels. Every channel connects to the same study, so responses collected by email and responses collected inside a product land in one dataset rather than in separate exports that have to be reconciled.

Does Tally support in-product surveys?

Tally does not publish in-product survey capability. Tally supports embedding a form on a website and showing it as a popup, which reaches website visitors but cannot target users by product behavior or user attributes, and does not extend to mobile applications. Sprig deploys studies inside web and mobile applications through software development kits for web, iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter.

Does Tally offer single sign-on or SOC 2 compliance?

Tally does not publish single sign-on (SSO), System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM), SOC 2, or ISO 27001 compliance in its public documentation as of August 2026. Tally does publish encryption in transit and at rest, data storage in Europe, a data processing agreement, and a list of 17 subprocessors. Buyers with a certification requirement should ask Tally directly instead of inferring an answer from documentation.

How do I migrate from Tally to Sprig?

Migration starts by classifying every active Tally form as either a form or a study. Signups, applications, and payment forms should generally stay in Tally. Research surveys get rebuilt in Sprig with targeting and logic that the original form could not express, which typically takes days rather than weeks. Export historical submissions before changing plans, since retention controls and version history are time-limited.

Is Tally good enough for Net Promoter Score tracking?

Tally can collect Net Promoter Score (NPS) responses, and for a single reading sent to a known list it works. Tracking is typically where it becomes expensive, because each run requires exporting the customer list, segmenting it manually, sending through a separate email tool, and joining responses back to customer attributes in a spreadsheet. Sprig carries segmentation into the study itself, so a quarterly tracker stays comparable without reassembly.

How is Sprig rated by users compared to Tally?

Sprig holds 4.3 out of 5 on G2 across 199 reviews as of August 2026, and Tally holds 4.9 out of 5 on G2 across 141 reviews over the same period. The two scores are not measuring the same thing. Tally reviewers are rating a free form builder against other form builders, and Sprig reviewers are rating an enterprise platform against enterprise platforms, where implementation, governance, and administration all enter the score.

Which platform should my organization choose?

Sprig is the right choice for organizations where research decisions carry real consequences and where reach, methodology, and security certifications are requirements rather than preferences. Tally is the right choice for individuals, small teams, and any organization whose forms are genuinely forms. Most organizations should run both, keeping general forms in Tally and moving research studies to a platform built to defend them. The deciding question is whether the next person to see your data will ask how you know.