SurveyJS vs Tally Comparison: Everything You Need to Know Before Choosing

SurveyJS is a family of JavaScript form and survey libraries that developers embed directly into their own web applications, rather than a hosted SaaS product. It consists of four components that work together: Form Library, an MIT-licensed open-source library for designing and rendering dynamic, data-driven, multi-language forms; Survey Creator, a visual drag-and-drop designer that lets non-technical staff build and modify forms themselves; Dashboard, for visualising and analysing responses; and PDF Generator, for saving completed forms as PDF documents. All libraries are published on GitHub and run natively in React, Angular, Vue 3, Knockout, jQuery and vanilla JavaScript, distributed as npm packages or as scripts and stylesheets. The four products share a design token system and reusable themes, with adapters for Bootstrap, Material UI and shadcn/ui so forms match an existing design system with minimal custom CSS. Accessibility standards including WCAG, Section 508 and ARIA are supported, and an AI integration allows natural-language form generation, translation and content suggestions. The defining characteristic of SurveyJS is data sovereignty. Because the libraries run entirely inside the customer's application, nothing is stored on third-party servers — the organisation decides where form schemas, response data, uploaded files, user roles and access rules live, connecting the libraries to its own backend, database, authentication and audit logging. This makes it a common choice in healthcare, finance, government, legal and other regulated sectors that must satisfy GDPR, HIPAA or internal security policies, and it removes the usage limits that hosted platforms impose: unlimited forms, unlimited responses and unlimited users with no pricing tiers tied to volume. Licensing follows the same logic. The core Form Library is free even for commercial use under MIT; Survey Creator, Dashboard and PDF Generator require a commercial developer licence purchased once and held perpetually, with an annual renewal only if continued updates and professional support are wanted. A free full-scale Creator demo lets teams generate JSON survey schemas and run them through the free Form Library at no cost. A free version and trial are available, with commercial licences starting from around EUR 499.