One side read from the vendor, one side we could not read at all

MARG ERP5 vs Tally: we read Tally’s own price list, and MARG’s website reset our connection five times

These are the two accounting packages a growing Indian business is most often handed as a choice, and they are legitimate buys with long histories. The problem with most published comparisons of them is that they quote a price for whichever vendor loaded and a shrug for the one that did not. We did the opposite and we are showing you the shape of it: every Tally figure below is read from Tally’s own buy page with the URL named, and this page carries zero MARG prices because we could not read a MARG document, not because MARG has none.

NoxOrigin publishes this page and is not one of the products compared in it. We have no stake in which of these two you choose, we do not make a general ledger, and we are not going to tell you that our product beats either of them at accounting. Last verified: 4 October 2026. Tally’s commercial site at tallysolutions.com/buy-tally/ returned HTTP 200 and every Tally figure on this page is read from it, quoted as printed, with the billing basis stated beside each one. On MARG, the correct finding is that the document was unreadable to us, and that is a different claim from MARG not publishing a price. Five requests across two hostnames and two paths returned no HTTP status at all, and we re-requested after the first failure rather than concluding on one try. If you have found a MARG price somewhere, it may well exist. It is simply not a figure we verified, and we will not publish it as though we had.

Evidence and method

One vendor read at source, one vendor unread

What we verified

Tally, from its own buy page at tallysolutions.com/buy-tally/, which returned HTTP 200. We read a rental ladder with three durations and two lifetime prices, each carrying the vendor’s own +18% GST line, plus a stated entry point of “plans starting at INR 750” and a paid cloud-access add-on priced separately. We publish the figures as printed, the billing basis beside each one, and no tax-inclusive total.

One thing we could not read even on the page we did load: which named edition each price node attaches to. So the table below carries the prices and deliberately carries no edition names, rather than pairing a price with a plausible-sounding product name.

What we could not verify

MARG ERP5, entirely. Every request to www.margsoftware.com and margsoftware.com reset at the connection, on five attempts and including one with TLS 1.2 and HTTP/1.1 forced, across the root and two in-site paths. The hostname resolves, so the failure happens after DNS, and we cannot say from where. The one address that answers is plain HTTP, and what it serves is a 2019 mirror of itself, 2,098 bytes, with no price on it.

The consequence is a one-sided table, and we would rather show you a lopsided table with an honest MARG column than a balanced-looking one built on a MARG figure we cannot stand behind. Every MARG answer has to come from MARG.

What growth actually changes

The questions a growing business should ask before it compares prices

This section is not a claim about either vendor. It is the checklist that a price comparison for a growing business tends to skip, written so that you can put it to MARG, to Tally, and to any other accounting package on your shortlist — including ours, though we do not make a ledger and so we fail the first question on it.

The price you can read is the price of today, not of next year

A growing business does not buy a product once. It buys the same product again next year, with more users, more companies, and possibly more branches. That is why a page showing one figure is answering a smaller question than the one a growing business is asking. Tally's buy page is the rare case where both bases sit on one page, a per-month rental ladder and a lifetime price, and this page publishes both. What neither figure tells you is what the second year costs, which for a rental is the next node on the ladder and for a lifetime is something we could not read from the page.

Users are where a per-person charge shows up

The moment a second person needs access, the question becomes whether that person is included or separately charged, and whether the charge is per user, per company or per location. This is a structural difference between products, not a discount question, and it is the single most expensive thing to get wrong when you are comparing an accounting package. Tally's page does not state a user unit in the offer nodes we read, so we do not assert one. Ask each vendor for the per-user, per-company and per-location basis in writing, because a figure without its unit is not a price.

Multi-company and multi-branch growth is a different requirement

Once a business holds more than one company or more than one branch, the question stops being billing and becomes consolidation: how many companies the licence covers, how many branches, and whether reporting reads across them or has to be exported and merged by hand. The number of entities you may hold is a licence term, and it is a term that matters more at eighteen months than at purchase. We could not read it for either product, so it is a question on the table below rather than a claim in the table.

More GST registrations is a licence term too

In India, growth frequently means a second GST registration before it means a second employee. A product that handles one registration well can become the wrong product at the moment you add the second, and the number of registrations allowed is a term worth reading on the page rather than discovering in month fourteen. Tally's buy page carries 'Invoicing and e-way bills' as a section label, and Busy describes handling multiple GSTINs in a single company, but neither of those statements is a count of how many are allowed. We publish no count for either product here.

The renewal and the migration cost are the real growth costs

The expensive mistakes in accounting software are rarely the purchase. They are the renewal that nobody expected, and the migration that took a quarter. Ask each vendor what a renewal costs in the second and third year, what a data export looks like and in what format, and what a competitor's data import covers before you commit. A page that publishes a price but not a renewal basis has answered half the question, and for a business that expects to still be running in three years the half it did not answer is the more expensive half.

Dimension by dimension

What Tally’s page states, and what to ask MARG

The Tally column is sourced from the buy page named at the top of this section. The MARG column is a question list, not an answer key, because we hold no verified MARG source to answer it from. Where we could not read something from Tally’s page either, we say so in the Tally column rather than filling it.

Dimension	Tally (verified 4 October 2026)	MARG (ask MARG directly)
Purchase basis	Two bases on the same page. A rental ladder, with 3 Month, 12 Month and a second 12 Month node, and two Lifetime nodes. The page also carries the sentence “Start small or go big with flexible plans starting at INR 750”, so it advertises an entry point below the first node we could price.	Ask whether MARG is sold as a perpetual licence, a subscription, or both, and ask for the current edition list in rupees with the basis printed beside each figure. A figure without its basis is not a price.
Published figures and billing cycle	3 Month, printed INR 2,250 with a base amount of INR 2,138 and an effective price of 712.5 per month. 12 Month, printed INR 9,000 with a base amount of INR 8,100 and an effective price of 675 per month. A second 12 Month node, printed INR 27,000 with a base amount of INR 24,300 and an effective price of 2,025 per month. Lifetime, INR 22,500. A second Lifetime node, INR 67,500. Every node carries the vendor’s line “+18% GST”. We publish both figures on each rental node as printed and do not adjudicate between them.	Ask for the same thing from MARG: each edition, each figure, and the interval it covers. If MARG quotes you a number without an interval, ask again before you compare it to anything on this page.
What the second year costs	The page does not state a renewal price or a renewal basis on the offer nodes we read, so we publish no year-two figure. For a rental the next node on the ladder is the obvious next step, and for a lifetime node we could not read what follows it. Ask Tally what the second and third year costs on each basis.	Ask MARG the same question, and ask specifically whether the licence is a one-time purchase, an annual renewal, or a rental, because the answer determines whether your total cost of ownership is the figure on the page or a multiple of it.
Users, companies, and branches	The offer nodes we read do not state a per-user, per-company or per-location unit, so we assert none. The page does carry ‘Add TallyPrime Cloud Access + INR 1,800 for 3 months’ marked auto-renew, which tells you a cloud-access add-on is a separate recurring charge and that it renews on its own.	Ask how many users, companies and branches each MARG edition includes, what each additional one costs, and whether the count is per company or per installation. Get it in writing, because this is the term that changes the total most.
GST registrations	The page carries ‘Invoicing and e-way bills’ as a section label, which is a marketing string on a buy page rather than a specification, and it states no count of how many registrations may be held. We publish no count and make no compliance claim.	Ask how many GST registrations a MARG company record can hold, and ask the separate question of what the product generates and what it files, because those are two different capabilities and a vendor page routinely blurs them.
Statutory filing	Not answered by the page we read. A buy page carrying ‘Invoicing and e-way bills’ as a section label does not tell us whether Tally generates, prepares, submits or merely stores a return, and we are not going to infer it from a heading.	Ask MARG the same question in the same four words: generate, prepare, submit, store. Take the answer from MARG in writing.
General ledger and financial statements	Not stated on the offer nodes we read. The page is a price list with navigation, not a specification sheet, so the ledger question — chart of accounts, trial balance, balance sheet, period locking — has to be asked rather than read here.	Ask which statements MARG produces, in what period-close model, and what your accountant needs to see at year end. If a ledger is your deciding requirement, this is the question that decides the purchase.
How it is installed and operated	The page offers both a rental ladder and Lifetime nodes, and sells cloud access as a paid add-on, which is consistent with a desktop product and a cloud option. We did not read an installation statement, so we do not assert a deployment model.	Ask whether MARG runs on your own machine, on a local network, or in the cloud, and what changes operationally if your office internet drops on a billing day.
Support model	The page states no support model at all, so we publish none. Ask Tally what channels exist, whether a partner in your city does implementation, and what onboarding is included or billed.	Ask MARG the same, and ask specifically what happens in the first ninety days, because for a growing business the onboarding period is when a wrong fit costs the most.
Getting your existing data in	Not stated on the page we read. We publish no migration claim for Tally.	Ask what a competitor’s data import covers, in which direction, and what a business has to re-key. Migration is the most commonly underestimated cost in this category and it is worth more than a few thousand rupees of licence difference.
Who operates it day to day	Unknown from the page we read. It is a price list with no operational detail, so ask who installs upgrades, who backs up the data, and what happens to your numbers if you stop paying — a question that lands very differently on a lifetime node than on a rental.	Ask the same, and note that the answer you get is also the answer to whether you will need a local partner, which is often a decisive reason a growing Indian business keeps an incumbent.

When Tally is the better-documented buy

When a price you can read and a basis beside it is what you need

On the evidence we could gather, Tally wins the documentation question outright, and it is not close. Its own page carries a rental ladder with three durations, two lifetime prices, a tax line on every node, a stated entry point, and a separately priced cloud add-on that states its own duration and its own auto-renew behaviour. That is a price list you can budget from without a phone call, and for a growing business that is a real advantage before any feature is discussed.

It is the better buy when the deciding factor is commercial transparency: what it costs, on what basis, with GST stated. Take the figures above to Tally and confirm them, because a price list read from a web page is evidence of what the page says rather than of what a quotation will contain.

When MARG may be the better buy

The honest answer is that we cannot tell you, and here is what to ask

We read nothing from MARG, so we will not manufacture a case for it from impressions. What we can tell you is which reasons are real reasons to keep an incumbent accounting package in India, and they are not marketing reasons. A business whose accountant already knows the product is buying a familiarity that never appears on a price list. A business with a working local partner who will come to the office is buying a support model that a page cannot describe. And a business heading into a busy filing season is buying continuity, because switching during peak is how a good decision becomes a bad quarter.

If any of those describe you, and MARG is the incumbent, then the comparison is not really MARG against Tally — it is a decision about whether to disturb something that works. Confirm with MARG that it meets these needs today, at today’s price, before you assume that it does. And if you are a genuinely growing business with no incumbent, we would rather you asked us what your actual problem is than bought either of these to solve a problem neither of them is for.

Reading the price lists carefully

Four things that change what a published figure means

Every figure on this page is a pre-GST figure

Tally’s buy page carries “+18% GST” on each offer node we read, so the published number is what you add tax to, not what you pay. We publish no total on this page, and we publish the line as the vendor writes it. On one node the page also prints a parenthetical rupee figure that does not reconcile with 18 percent of the price beside it, and our read of that character was not clean, so rather than publish a total we are publishing the absence of one.

A lifetime price is not a total cost of ownership

Tally publishes two Lifetime nodes, at INR 22,500 and INR 67,500, both marked “+18% GST”. A lifetime figure tells you what the licence costs. It does not tell you what a renewal costs, because the page does not state one, and it does not tell you what the paid cloud add-on costs each year, which is a separate line on the same page at INR 1,800 for three months on an auto-renew basis. A growing business should read a lifetime price as the start of a total, not the whole of it.

The rental ladder restarts, it does not continue

The rental nodes run 3 Month at a printed INR 2,250, 12 Month at a printed INR 9,000, and a second 12 Month node at a printed INR 27,000, with the page’s own effective-per-month figures of 712.5, 675 and 2,025. Those effective figures are the vendor’s, printed beside the prices, and they are the numbers to compare a rental against a lifetime price over a realistic horizon. Which node is right for a growing business is a cash-flow decision rather than a feature decision, and it is worth modelling at eighteen months rather than choosing on the first figure you see.

An unreadable page is a statement about our access, not about MARG

We want to be precise about the wording on this page, because the sentence “MARG does not publish a price” is a claim about a real company that we have not earned. What we know is that five requests to MARG’s own site returned no HTTP status, that the hostname resolves, that one plain-HTTP address serves a 2,098-byte 2019 mirror, and that we have no MARG document to read. That is a failure to reach, and we are publishing it as exactly that. If you can load MARG’s site and it publishes a price, then this page is wrong in a way we would like to be told about — write to us and we will correct it in public rather than quietly.

FAQ

Questions buyers ask us first

What does Tally cost, according to Tally?

Read from https://tallysolutions.com/buy-tally/ on 4 October 2026, which returned HTTP 200. The page carries a rental ladder and a lifetime price. Rental: 3 Month printing INR 2,250 with a lower base amount of INR 2,138 and an effective price of 712.5 per month; 12 Month printing INR 9,000 with a base amount of INR 8,100 and an effective price of 675 per month; and a second 12 Month option printing INR 27,000 with a base amount of INR 24,300 and an effective price of 2,025 per month. Lifetime: INR 22,500 and a second lifetime price of INR 67,500. Every one of those price nodes on the page carries the line '+18% GST'. The page also states 'Start small or go big with flexible plans starting at INR 750', and lists 'Add TallyPrime Cloud Access + INR 1,800 for 3 months' on an auto-renew basis. Two honest caveats. First, each rental node prints two rupee figures and we publish both as printed rather than deciding which one is the invoice price; the lower one is the value carried in the page's own data-baseamount attribute. Second, we could not read which named edition each price node attaches to, so this page publishes the prices and does not attach an edition name to them.

What does MARG ERP5 cost?

We are not going to answer that with a number, because we could not read one. MARG's own website did not serve us a document: https://www.margsoftware.com/ and https://margsoftware.com/ and the in-site paths https://www.margsoftware.com/erp-software/ and https://www.margsoftware.com/erp5/ each returned no HTTP status at all, with curl reporting 'Recv failure: Connection reset by peer'. That is five attempts across two hostnames and two paths, one of them with TLS 1.2 and HTTP/1.1 forced, and we re-requested after the first failure rather than concluding on one try. The name is not dead: DNS resolves both www.margsoftware.com and margsoftware.com to 49.50.109.45, so the reset happens after resolution and we cannot say from where. The plain-HTTP address does respond with HTTP 200, and that response is why we are explicit that a 200 here is not evidence of a working site: the document opens with 'Mirrored from margsoftware.com/ by HTTrack Website Copier/3.x, Wed, 08 May 2019' and is 2,098 bytes end to end with no price on it. So the accurate statement is that we could not read a MARG price, not that MARG does not publish one. Any MARG figure you meet elsewhere, including one on a page that looks like MARG's, is not a figure we verified.

Is it fair to compare these two when one of them could not be read?

It is fair to compare what each vendor makes public, and it is not fair to pretend the comparison is balanced. We think the honest form of this page is a one-sided evidence table: the Tally column is filled from Tally's own page, and the MARG column is a list of questions to put to MARG, because we have no verified MARG source to answer them from. What we will not do is fill the MARG column from memory, from a reseller page, or from another vendor's marketing. A reseller or partner site restating a vendor's price is evidence that a price exists somewhere, and it is not evidence of what that price is today. Take the Tally figures to Tally and the MARG answers to MARG, in writing, before you budget on either.

Which one should a growing business buy?

We cannot answer that, and the reason is not diplomacy: we can only see one side. What we can tell you is that the growth question is a different question from the price question, and the price list only answers part of it. Growth changes how many people use the product, how many companies and branches it holds, how many GST registrations it carries, and whether a new person joining next year triggers a new charge. A lifetime figure published today tells you nothing about any of those, and a per-year figure tells you only about the per-year one. If your deciding requirement is a published, purchasable price list in rupees with both a rental and a lifetime basis on the same page, Tally is the better-documented buy today, and we can hand you the arithmetic. If your deciding requirement is something else, we cannot tell you whether MARG meets it, and you need MARG's answer rather than ours.

Do both handle Indian GST?

We quote rather than adjudicate, and only one of the two sides can be quoted. Tally's buy page carries the section labels 'Invoicing and e-way bills', 'Connected services' and 'Business operation' as navigation on the page, and Busy, a third-party vendor, markets a migration path with the words 'Import Data from Excel, Tally or Marg', which tells you both products are widely installed in India without telling you what either one does. Those are marketing strings on a page and in a competitor's advert, which is a weaker class of evidence than a product manual or a specification sheet, so we make no compliance or certification claim about either product. For MARG we have no vendor text at all, so we publish no MARG capability claim in either direction. Ask both vendors in writing what they generate and what they file, and take the answer from them.

Is NoxOrigin an alternative to either of these?

No. NoxOrigin makes neither MARG nor Tally, and both are accounting-ledger products with a decade or more of installed base in India. NoxOrigin has no general ledger, does not do double-entry bookkeeping, a chart of accounts, a trial balance or a balance sheet, and it does not file GST returns, does not generate or submit e-invoices or e-way bills, records no TDS or TCS, determines no place of supply, and holds no bank connection or credentials. Bank reconciliation and day-end close are assisted-setup maturity rather than a self-serve switch. An invoice and a payment are different records, and 'paid' is a projection of allocations rather than a status on the invoice. There is no timesheet record and no payroll, no change-request, milestone or deliverable record, no contract editor and no e-signature, so a scope change is a new quote on the same project. Merge policy is a setup decision where detection flags candidates and a human reviews them, and nothing merges automatically. Expenses are Nox-Billings only and purchasing and stock movement are in Commerce. Our published platform pricing is Starter at INR 800 per month for three users, Growth at INR 1,600 for ten, and Agency at INR 5,000 for twenty-five across three workspaces, and that is the platform only; NoxCRM, Nox-Billings and Nox-Tickets are scoped custom deployments with no list price and none of them carries the platform price.

Sources checked

What we read, and what we could not

Attempted on 4 October 2026. Every Tally figure above comes from one document, the buy page, named per figure. MARG appears here as an entry we could not use rather than as a citation behind any claim, because we could not read a MARG document, and a page that publishes nothing because it could not reach something is making a claim about the vendor that the vendor’s own website may well contradict.

Tally

Tally's own buy page, every price node we read

Requested at https://tallysolutions.com/buy-tally/ on 4 October 2026. It returned HTTP 200 at 311,613 bytes. Every Tally figure on this page came out of that one document. The page carries five offer nodes as structured data, identified by a data-baseamount attribute: 2138, 8100, 22500, 24300 and 67500. Read in the surrounding markup they are, in the vendor's own words: '3 Month' with INR 2,250, a base amount of INR 2,138, '+18% GST' and 'Effective price 712.5/Month'; '12 Month' with INR 9,000, a base amount of INR 8,100, '+18% GST' and 'Effective price 675/Month'; 'Lifetime' at INR 22,500 with '+18% GST'; a second '12 Month' with INR 27,000, a base amount of INR 24,300, '+18% GST' and 'Effective price 2025/Month'; and a second 'Lifetime' at INR 67,500 with '+18% GST'. The page also states 'Start small or go big with flexible plans starting at INR 750' and lists an add-on line reading 'Add TallyPrime Cloud Access + INR 1,800 for 3 months' marked auto-renew. We publish each rental node's two rupee figures as printed rather than choosing between them, and we attach no edition name to any node because we could not read the label the page binds to it.

Open the source

Tally

The GST treatment on Tally's buy page, and what we did not compute

Every price node on the buy page carries the text '+18% GST', so each figure on this page is a pre-GST number and the number actually paid is that figure plus GST at the rate the vendor states. On one node the page also prints a parenthetical rupee figure that does not reconcile with 18 percent of the price beside it, and our extraction of that character was not clean, so we publish no tax-inclusive total anywhere on this page. We publish the line as the vendor writes it and stop there, which is also why no figure here is quoted as 'what you will pay'.

Open the source

Could not load

MARG's own website, five attempts across two hostnames and two paths

This is the half of the page where we publish nothing, so the attempts are recorded in full rather than summarised as 'no pricing'. https://www.margsoftware.com/ and https://margsoftware.com/ both returned no HTTP status, with curl reporting 'Recv failure: Connection reset by peer', and so did the in-site paths https://www.margsoftware.com/erp-software/ and https://www.margsoftware.com/erp5/. We re-requested after the first failure, including one request with TLS 1.2 and HTTP/1.1 forced, rather than concluding on a single try. The name resolves: both www.margsoftware.com and margsoftware.com resolve to 49.50.109.45, so the reset happens after resolution and we cannot say from where. The one address that answers is the plain-HTTP one, and an HTTP 200 there is not evidence of a working site: the document opens with 'Mirrored from margsoftware.com/ by HTTrack Website Copier/3.x [XR&CO'2014], Wed, 08 May 2019' and is 2,098 bytes with no price in it. We publish no MARG figure, no plan name, no pricing unit and no feature claim, because we read none.

Open the source

Third party, not the vendor

A competitor names both products as migration sources

Busy Software's own homepage carries a line reading 'Upgrade to BUSY Magic: Import Data from Excel, Tally or Marg to BUSY Magic with minimal effort', at https://busy.in/. We cite this for one narrow purpose and no other: it is third-party evidence that Tally and MARG are both established installs that Indian businesses migrate away from, which is why both appear on a 'growing business' shortlist. It is a competitor's advert, it says nothing about either product's features, editions or prices, and we publish no Tally or MARG fact from it.

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NoxOrigin

The sibling comparison that carries the same MARG finding, and our own pricing

Our earlier page at /compare/marg-vs-zoho-books-for-small-business reached the same MARG result independently, recording the same connection reset across four requests and the same 2019 mirror. Two pages on this site agreeing on a negative finding is worth stating, and it is also a check on us: a claim that a vendor is unreadable is a claim about the vendor, so it has to be repeatable. We publish no MARG price on either page, and neither page treats an unreadable page as evidence of an absent price. Our own published INR plan list is at /pricing, and it is platform only.

Open the source

NoxOrigin

Our own published platform pricing, for the disclosure at the end of this page

Platform only, and deliberately not comparable to an accounting product with a general ledger. Starter INR 800 per month for three users in one workspace, Growth INR 1,600 for ten users, Agency INR 5,000 for twenty-five users across three workspaces. NoxOrigin has no general ledger and does not file GST returns, does not generate e-invoices or e-way bills, records no TDS or TCS, and holds no bank connection. NoxCRM, Nox-Billings and Nox-Tickets are scoped custom deployments with no list price, and none of them carries the platform price.

Open the source

Related resources

Keep comparing before you decide

MARG vs Zoho BooksThe same MARG reachability finding, against a vendor that publishes rupees.Odoo vs TallyThe same Tally questions, against an open-source ERP route.Tally vs Zoho BooksTally's commercial site, the hostname lesson, and the ledger category boundary.TallyPrime alternativeThe same verification standard applied to a narrower Tally question.Zoho Books vs BusyA hosted ledger against a desktop perpetual licence, with renewal figures.NoxOrigin vs ERPNextWhere the open-source ERP route is the right shape of purchase.All comparisonsEvery neutral comparison we publish, with the same sourcing standard.