Nirby vs Tally: the form is half the road
Tally solves capture very well, and for free. Nirby is built for the other half: everything your team does with each answer that arrives.
Tally is probably the best form builder you can use without paying: you write it like a document, it comes out right the first time, and its free plan is enough to actually run on. If all you need is a form, Tally will make you happy.
The interesting question is a different one: does your process end when the answer arrives, or does it start there? Because for the second case a form builder — any form builder — is not enough. This article is about that second half.
What Tally does well
- The free plan is genuinely useful, not a demo.
- It gets built fast: you type and the form appears.
- It covers what most people need: logic, calculations, payments, sending to other tools.
- The product is honest and it shows in how it is made.
Where Tally stops, on purpose
Tally is a tool for making forms. It does that very well and that is where its scope ends, by design: what happens to what you collected — reading it, interpreting it, deciding, replying — is your work.
For plenty of uses that is exactly right, because the data collected is the result.
The breaking point comes when the data is not the result but the raw material: a quote request you have to understand and answer, an application you have to assess, a brief you have to turn into a proposal. There the form is 10% of the work, and the other 90% is done by a person, by hand.
What you get with Nirby
That 90% is our ground:
- Starting also takes minutes, not a project. You describe to the AI what you need, the way you would tell a colleague, and it proposes the whole Form; when you sign up it can even read your site and hand you one already built, in seconds. You adjust it and publish.
- Requests that arrive complete, because what is missing gets asked for during the conversation, not in an email two days later.
- Documents that hand over their data on their own, without anyone opening them.
- One set of criteria for every case, defined once and applied the same way every time.
- A room for your customer after they submit, with what was generated from their case, a chat for questions and your calendar to book a slot. While your team has not looked at the case yet, the customer already has something useful in hand — not a thank-you screen.
- Memory per contact: what they told you six months ago is still there for the whole team when that company comes back.
If you get four cases a month and handling them by hand does not weigh on you, Tally has you covered. When the cases pile up and replying late starts costing sales, the maths changes.
The comparison, at a glance
| Nirby | Tally | |
|---|---|---|
| Genuinely useful free plan | With limits | Yes |
| Published in minutes | Yes | Yes |
| Proposes the form from your website | Yes | No |
| Payments inside the form | No | Yes |
| Questions that adapt to the case on their own | Yes | No |
| Documents read and data extracted | Yes | No |
| Every case analyzed by the same criteria | Yes | No |
| A room for the customer when they finish | Yes | No |
| Memory per contact for the team | Yes | No |
Written in August 2026. Tally improves fast: if something in this table is going to make you decide, check it on their site.
So, which one?
Stick with Tally if…
- You need a form, not a process.
- You get few cases a month and handling them by hand does not hurt.
- You need to take payment inside the form.
- You build different forms often and want to do it without asking anyone.
- Budget rules, and it rules hard.
Try Nirby if…
- You get enough cases that reading them one by one has become a job.
- What reaches you comes in documents somebody has to interpret.
- Two people on the team assess the same thing differently and it shows.
- You lose cases by taking days to answer something that could be ready on day one.
- You talk to the same company again months later and the context has to be rebuilt.
How to decide without reading anything else
If the form is the work, Tally solves it very well and for free.
If the form is the door and the work is behind it, that half of the road is ours.