Tally makes building a form as easy as writing a document. pylo builds forms on your own data model: submissions become records, flows start on submit, and your team works with them under one permission model, hosted in Germany.

TL;DR

Tally is one of the nicest form builders around: you type a form like a document, the free plan is generous to the point of being unusual, and the data stays in Europe. It is perfect for collecting answers quickly and sending them to Notion, Airtable or Google Sheets. The answers then live in whatever tool you connect, and the process behind the form is built with Zapier, Make and that tool. pylo is a backend platform with a form builder inside: every form writes directly into your own data model, a submission starts a flow, and your team works with the result under one permission model. If you need a quick, beautiful form for free, choose Tally. If the form feeds records and processes, pylo replaces the stack behind it.

What is pylo?

pylo is a Backend-as-a-Service platform from Germany that you can use to build the operating system for your company. You model entities, fields and relations in the admin panel or through the API, and pylo generates a typed GraphQL API instantly. The form builder is part of that system: every form writes directly into your own data model. The same permission model governs the API, the admin UI, forms, flows, dashboards and the MCP server, and pylo flows run the process that starts when someone submits a form.

What is Tally?

Tally is a form builder from Belgium, built by a small, bootstrapped team. Instead of dragging fields, you type your form like a document and insert questions with slash commands. The free plan includes unlimited forms and submissions under fair use, conditional logic, calculations, answer piping, payments, signatures, file uploads up to 10 MB and integrations with Notion, Airtable, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make and webhooks. Pro adds custom domains, branding removal, team collaboration, partial submissions, custom CSS and drop-off analytics; Business adds data retention controls and email verification. Data is stored in the EU.

At a glance

A form tool versus forms on your data model

Tally is a front end for answers: it is fast to build with and looks good. But it also means the real data model, with customers, projects and their relations, is somewhere else, and every form needs its own integration to get there.

In pylo the data model is where you start. You model customers, applications, bookings or tickets as entities with relations, and every form field maps to one of their fields. A submission is a record that is linked to what it belongs to, and the same customer can be updated from several forms. pylo's editor is not as quick as typing a Tally form, and it has no payments or signatures, but nothing has to be synced afterwards.

How pylo forms work

pylo forms are built on your data model. You add fields such as text, long text, email, phone, number, URL, checkboxes, single or multiple choice and file uploads, structure the form with headings, paragraphs and page breaks, and map every field to a field on one of your entities, including relations. Fields can be hidden, carry default values, placeholders and tooltips, show or hide depending on earlier answers and check input against validation rules. A form can be public or require a login, and you can limit submissions per form and per user. You embed a form on any website as an iFrame, or build your own frontend on the API.

One form can run as several instances, each with its own availability window, its own submission limits and, for authenticated forms, its own list of users who may fill it in. The same onboarding form can run for every client or every event without copying it. You can also mark a field as the matching key, for example an email address, so a submission updates the existing record instead of creating a duplicate.

What happens after submit

Tally sends email notifications, redirects to a page of your choice and passes submissions to its integrations or a webhook. Everything that comes after, such as checking for an existing contact, creating a project or notifying the right person, happens in a middleware service or the connected tool, with their own limits and pricing.

In pylo a submission is not a response in a separate inbox; it is a record in your entities. Every submission emits an event, and that event can start a pylo flow: send a confirmation email, create follow-up records, assign the request to the right team member, call an external system or wait for an approval. Flows include retries, custom rate limiting, error handling and full event logs, and you can write your own flow actions in TypeScript. Your team then works with the result in pylo's admin UI, with list and detail views and fields that show or hide depending on the record's state.

Permissions and who sees the submissions

In Tally, team members on Pro share access to workspaces and their forms. Who may see which submission is then decided by the tool the data goes to and those rules have to match across every tool involved.

pylo separates tenants at the row level. Inside a tenant, any entity can act as the requester (ARO) and any entity as the requested object (ACO), with hierarchies and field-level rules. The same rules apply to the form, to the records it creates, to the admin UI where your team processes them, to dashboards and to MCP. A sales rep sees the leads from their region, a partner sees only the requests they submitted, and nobody needs a separate seat in a form tool to look at the answers.

Events and dashboards built in with pylo analytics

Tally shows form visits, completion and, on Pro, drop-off per question, which helps you improve the form. Reporting on what happened to the submissions afterwards depends on the tool they went to.

Every create, update and delete in pylo emits an event with the full before and after state, including every form submission and every change your team makes to it afterwards. You build dashboards on events and records together, for example submissions per form instance, conversion from request to offer or the time a request stays open, with the same permissions as the rest of pylo.

AI and MCP with guardrails

Tally keeps its product focused on building and sharing forms; analysing answers with AI happens in the tools you send them to.

pylo's MCP server is ready to connect, for developers who use agentic coding and for team members who want to analyze their submissions and records. The AI gets exactly the connected user's read permissions, nothing else. pylo never applies an AI's writes directly: they arrive as proposals that a human accepts or declines inside pylo, whatever AI client someone uses.

Pricing

Tally is hard to beat on price for forms alone: most features are free, and Pro is affordable. The cost sits around it, in the database, the automation tool and the seats for everyone who needs to work with the answers.

pylo does not bill per form, per response or per seat. Submissions are records in your entities, so they count towards the included records of your plan. The price already includes hosting, flows, the admin UI, forms, analytics and personal onboarding, every plan has every feature and unlimited users. Plans differ only in included usage for records, flow actions and file storage.

Hosting, compliance and reliability

All pylo content data, data models and databases live in data centres in Germany. Our subprocessor list is public and names every non-EU parent company openly. A GDPR data processing agreement is part of the terms, and we never use customer data to train AI models. Paid plans come with a 99.5% availability SLA, hourly encrypted backups kept for 30 days at a separate German location, and support from the team that builds the product.

Tally is a European company, stores its data in the EU and is built with GDPR in mind, including data retention controls on Business. If EU hosting is the reason you picked Tally, the tools you connect it to deserve the same check.

Where Tally is the better choice

We would rather tell you than have you find out later:

• You want to build a form in minutes by typing it like a document, with a clean design and custom CSS.

• You need payments and signatures on a free plan. pylo has no payments or signatures out of the box.

• You need partial submissions and drop-off analytics to optimise a form's completion rate.

• You want open signup and unlimited forms and submissions without paying anything.

If you need a quick, good-looking form and the answers can live in your existing tools, Tally is excellent. pylo is for teams that want the form, the data and the process in one place.

Where pylo is a great Tally alternative

We think these are the main reasons to pick pylo over Tally:

• Forms that write into your data model. Every field maps to a field on your entities, including relations, so a submission is a record, not a row in a response table you sync somewhere else.

• No duplicates. A matching key such as the email address lets a submission update the existing record instead of creating a second one.

• The process starts on submit. Every submission is an event that can start a pylo flow, with retries, rate limiting, typed actions and full logs, without Zapier or Make in between.

• Your team processes the result in the same system. Admin views, state-dependent fields and permissions come with the backend, so there is no second tool to look at the answers.

• Permissions on every submission. Hierarchies and field-level rules apply to forms, records, admin UI, dashboards and MCP, with authenticated forms and per-user limits on every plan.

• One form, many instances. Run the same form for every client, event or campaign with its own time window, limits and users.

• No per-seat or per-response pricing. Unlimited users and API requests and all features on every plan. Only three meters are billed: flow actions, records, and file storage/traffic.

• German hosting from a German company. Data stays in Germany on every plan, including the free one, and the DPA is part of the terms. You get a 99.5% SLA from the first paid plan, hourly backups with 30-day retention, and personal support from the people who build the product.

FAQs - Questions and answers about pylo

• Is pylo's form editor as fast as Tally? For creating just the form, pylo is just as fast. pylo forms are built on your entities, so you set up the data model once and then build forms on it, which pays off as soon as forms feed real records.

• Can pylo replace Tally plus Notion or Airtable? Yes, that is the most common case. pylo is the database, the form builder, the admin UI and the automation in one system.

• Can I embed pylo forms in my own website? Yes, you embed a form as an iFrame, or build a fully custom frontend with the Next.js SDK or the typed GraphQL API and write submissions into your entities with the same permissions.

• Can I keep using Tally and send the answers to pylo? Yes, Tally can send every submission to a pylo webhook, where a flow creates or updates the right records. Many teams start that way and move forms over one by one.

• Is pylo open source? No, but you can export all data at any time as CSV or JSON or through the API. The data models, flow definitions and generated SDK code are yours to keep, even after you leave.

• Where exactly is my data? Content data is in data centres in Germany and backups are kept at a different German location.

• Can I get access now? pylo is currently in private beta, you just request access and we will set up your first entities and forms with you on a call and onboard you personally for your first project.