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Tally and mailcontact are honestly different categories. Tally is a form builder: you design a form in its Notion-like editor and it hosts the form page (or embed) for you. mailcontact is the opposite end of the pipe: you keep your own form markup on your own site, and mailcontact is the inbox it posts to.
The two overlap on exactly one job: collecting messages from a website. If that's the job you're hiring for, the real question is whether you want a hosted form builder or a lightweight inbox behind your own HTML, paired with a real project email address like yourproject@mailcontact.app.
what is tally
Tally is an excellent hosted form builder. You compose forms the way you'd write a Notion page, publish them as hosted pages or embeds, and get conditional logic, multi-step flows, and a generous free tier at the time of writing. For surveys, job applications, registrations, and anything with branching questions, it's one of the best tools in its class.
The trade-off is where the form lives: Tally renders the form UI for you, and submissions land in Tally's dashboard. If you've already designed a contact form that matches your site, or you want messages from a public email address in the same place, a form builder isn't quite the shape of the problem.
side by side
Every Tally figure below was checked against their own pricing page on . Found something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.
| mailcontact | Tally | |
|---|---|---|
| Core model | One inbox per project, fed by your own forms and email | A hosted form builder with form pages and embeds |
| Inbound email address | Included: yourproject@mailcontact.app works from the first second | Not offered; forms only |
| Where messages live | A unified inbox per project, plus notifications | Tally's submissions dashboard, per form |
| Notifications | Discord, Slack, email, and webhooks | Email notifications, plus integrations at the time of writing |
| Setup | Point your existing HTML form at an endpoint: your markup, your styling | Build the form in Tally's editor, then share or embed it |
| Maturity | New: currently in beta, launching soon | Established, polished, and actively developed |
the honest take
faq
It's a different model rather than a hard migration. Instead of embedding a Tally form, you write (or keep) your own HTML form with name, email, subject, and message fields and point it at your mailcontact endpoint. For a simple contact form, that's a few lines of markup. And until the configurable post-submit redirect ships at launch, submit via fetch to keep visitors on your page.
No. mailcontact doesn't render form UI. It's the receiving end for your own markup. If you need a form builder with hosted pages, logic, and multi-step flows, Tally is the better tool for that job.
There's a free tier to get started (a form, an auto-generated email address, and up to 2 projects), with a Pro plan priced at launch for custom addresses and higher volume.
They overlap only on collecting messages from a website. Tally is built for designing forms of any complexity; mailcontact is built for receiving: your own contact form plus a real email address, in one inbox with notifications.
more comparisons
Forms and a real email address, together, with notifications where you live. Launching soon. Be the first to know.