Koji vs Tally: AI-Moderated Customer Research vs Free Form Builder (2026)

Tally is one of the most beloved form builders on the internet — and for good reason. The free plan is famously generous (unlimited forms, unlimited responses, conditional logic, payments, file uploads), the interface is clean, and the Notion integration is best-in-class. Founders, indie hackers, and small teams reach for Tally as the no-brainer alternative to Typeform.

But here is the catch most teams discover six months in: Tally is a form builder, not a research tool. It is excellent for collecting structured answers from people who already know what they want to say. It is not built to uncover why a customer churned, why a prospect chose your competitor, or what the underlying job-to-be-done really is. For that, you need conversation — follow-up probes, thematic analysis across responses, and synthesis you can act on.

This is a head-to-head comparison of Koji and Tally across pricing, capabilities, research depth, and the moments when each tool is the right call.

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TL;DR — Koji vs Tally at a glance

| Dimension | Koji | Tally | | --- | --- | --- | | Primary use case | AI-moderated customer research interviews | Free-form data collection & form building | | Question depth | Voice + text conversations with automatic follow-ups | Static fields, conditional logic only | | Follow-up probing | Automatic AI probes on every response | None — respondents answer once | | Analysis | Automatic thematic analysis across all participants | Manual review in a spreadsheet (or Notion) | | Reports | One-click executive reports with quotes & themes | Export CSV → analyze yourself | | Voice interviews | Yes (ElevenLabs-powered, multi-language) | No | | Free plan | 10 credits at signup, no card needed | Unlimited forms & submissions | | Paid plans | €29/mo Insights, €79/mo Interviews | $29/mo Pro, $89/mo Business | | Best for | PMs, founders, researchers, CX teams who need why answers | Sign-up pages, contact forms, lead capture, simple surveys |

If the question you are asking is "what email do you want me to send the demo to?" — use Tally. If the question is "why didn't you upgrade after your trial?" — Tally cannot help you, and Koji is purpose-built for exactly that conversation.

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What Tally does extraordinarily well

Let us not damn with faint praise. Tally is a category-leader at what it is: a free-tier form builder for builders.

• Unmatched free plan. Tally gives you unlimited forms and unlimited submissions for free, while Typeform caps free users at 10 monthly responses. For a no-budget founder, this alone is a winning argument.
• Conditional logic in the free tier. Skip logic, answer piping, calculations, and multi-page forms are all in the free plan — features competitors charge $50–100/month for.
• Native Notion integration. Responses flow directly into a Notion database. If your team lives in Notion, this is magic.
• Payments out of the box. Stripe payments work on the free plan — useful for taking deposits, paid waitlists, or one-off purchases.
• Pro plan at $29/month unlocks branding removal, custom domains, custom CSS, file uploads, partial submissions, and analytics integrations. The Business plan at $89/month adds data retention controls and email verification.

If your job is "I need a contact form, a job application page, a workshop sign-up, or an event RSVP" — Tally is the right answer, and you can stop reading here.

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Where Tally falls short for customer research

The cracks appear the moment your goal stops being collect a known field of data and starts being understand a person's reasoning.

1. No follow-up questions

A form asks question A, then question B, then question C. If a respondent says something fascinating in question A — "I almost switched to your competitor last quarter" — the form does not notice. It simply moves to question B.

Real research depends on the follow-up. The famous Mom Test principle is that the first answer is almost never the real answer. You have to probe: "Tell me more about that", "What made you reconsider?", "Was there a specific moment?" — and you have to vary the probe based on what the person just said. Tally has no concept of this. Koji's AI-moderated interviews generate context-aware follow-ups in real time on every response, the way a senior researcher would.

2. No thematic analysis

Tally exports a CSV. From there, you read every open-text answer, code it manually, group themes, count occurrences, and write up findings. For 10 respondents that is a few hours. For 100 respondents that is a week.

Koji runs automatic thematic analysis the moment your study closes: themes, quotes, sentiment, frequency — synthesized across every respondent in your study. The output is a shareable research report, not a spreadsheet to clean.

3. No voice — and voice matters more than people admit

Typed answers are short. People write 12 words and submit. Voice answers are 5–10x longer and contain texture you cannot fake: hesitation, emphasis, the moment a user realizes they were actually frustrated about a deeper issue. Tally is text-only. Koji supports both voice and text interviews and lets the respondent choose. Studies running on Koji typically see 4–7 minute voice conversations with 800–1,500 words of transcript per respondent.

4. Limited question types for research

Tally supports the standard form question types — short text, long text, multiple choice, dropdown, file upload, rating, payments. It does not natively support the six structured research question types that researchers actually need across a study: open-ended (with AI probing), scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking, and yes/no — each calibrated for analysis. Koji ships all six and weaves them into a single conversation alongside open-ended exploration.

5. No moderation, no consultant, no synthesis

Modern research platforms layer an AI consultant on top of the data — someone you can ask "What did the at-risk customers say differently from the happy ones?" and get a real answer with citations. Tally has no analysis layer because Tally is not a research tool. Koji's customizable AI consultants let you interrogate your study after the fact, the same way you would interrogate a senior research lead.

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Side-by-side: a real research scenario

Imagine you are a Series A SaaS founder and 12 customers churned last quarter. You want to know why.

Tally workflow:

1. Build a churn survey in Tally (10 minutes).
2. Email it to 12 ex-customers.
3. Get 4–6 responses (typical churn-survey response rate is 30–50%).
4. Read every long-text answer line by line.
5. Open a Notion doc, manually code themes.
6. Realize three of the responses say "price" — but you cannot probe whether they mean list price, perceived value, or budget freeze. The thread is dead.
7. Write up findings in 2–3 days. Half are inconclusive.

Koji workflow:

1. Create a study from the churn interview template (5 minutes).
2. Send the link to 12 ex-customers.
3. Get 7–9 responses (voice/conversational AI typically lifts response rate 2x vs traditional surveys).
4. Every "price" answer gets auto-probed: "When you say price, do you mean the headline number, or the value you were getting for it?" — and the respondent unpacks it.
5. Open the study report. Three themes emerge automatically: Onboarding friction (5/9 mentions), Missing competitor feature X (4/9), Champion left the company (3/9). Price comes up but is downstream of value perception.
6. Share the report with the team in 30 minutes. You now have specific, actionable answers — not survey aggregates.

The cost of the second workflow is one Koji subscription. The cost of the first workflow is everything you would have done with the wrong answer.

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Pricing — head to head

Tally (2026):

• Free: unlimited forms, unlimited submissions, conditional logic, payments, file uploads
• Pro: $29/month (or $24/mo annual) — branding removal, custom domains, custom CSS, partial submissions, version history (30 days)
• Business: $89/month — data retention controls, email verification, extended version history (90 days)

Koji (2026):

• Free: 10 credits at signup (enough to run a small pilot study), no credit card required
• Insights: €29/month — unlimited studies, structured questions, thematic analysis, reports
• Interviews: €79/month — adds AI-moderated voice interviews, unlimited transcripts, AI consultants

Both products are priced honestly. Tally's free plan is the most generous on the market for form building. Koji's free credits let you run a complete pilot study before paying — which is unusual in the research space, where most enterprise tools require a sales call to see a demo.

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When to use Tally (and not Koji)

• You need a contact form, RSVP, lead capture, or workshop sign-up page.
• You are running a paid waitlist with Stripe payments.
• You need a structured intake form for clients or applicants.
• Your respondents already know exactly what to say, and you just need a clean record of it.
• Your team lives in Notion and you want answers to flow into a database.

For these jobs, Tally is the right tool and Koji is overkill.

When to use Koji (and not Tally)

• You are running churn interviews, win/loss interviews, or customer discovery.
• You want to understand why a behavior happened, not just that it happened.
• You need automatic thematic analysis across 20+ respondents.
• You need voice interviews to capture the texture and length of real conversation.
• You want a shareable research report without writing one by hand.
• You are pitching findings to a board or exec team and need quotes plus themes.

For these jobs, Koji is the right tool and Tally cannot reach.

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How to migrate from Tally to Koji

If you are currently running customer surveys in Tally and getting thin, repetitive answers, here is the practical migration path:

1. Export your existing Tally responses as CSV. Keep them as a baseline — you will likely re-run the study on Koji to see the lift.
2. Identify the open-text questions in your Tally surveys. Those are the questions where you were losing depth. They become Koji conversational questions.
3. Keep the structured questions (multiple choice, ratings, demographics). Koji supports all of them natively as structured study questions.
4. Pilot a study on Koji. Send to 15 respondents. Compare response depth, completion rate, and analysis time vs your last Tally survey. The difference is usually visible inside 24 hours.
5. Keep Tally for forms, lead capture, and RSVPs. Use Koji for research. They are not competitors — they are different jobs.

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The bottom line

Tally is a brilliant free form builder. If your job is collecting structured data from people who know what they want to say, you should use it.

Koji is purpose-built for the question Tally cannot answer: why. Why did they leave? Why did they choose us? Why didn't they upgrade? Why did this feature fall flat?

Voice interviews. Automatic follow-up probing. Thematic analysis on every response. Shareable reports in minutes. Customizable AI consultants you can interrogate after the fact. That is what a 2026 research tool looks like.

If you have ever closed a Tally export, scrolled through 47 rows of single-word answers, and thought "this tells me nothing" — that is the moment Koji exists for.

Start your first study free →