beehiiv vs Formidable Forms

beehiiv publishes a monthly digest alongside individual feature entries, and the two tell different stories. The dated digests through April 2026 cover Webinars, Automations v4, On-Demand Ads and the first beehiiv MCP. A separate set of changelog entries - carrying no publish date, so they sit outside the dated timeline - adds beehiiv MCP v2, an AI writing assistant in the editor, a rebuilt analytics dashboard with custom ranges and export, an SEO toolkit, a card-level site design editor and referral program upgrades.

Two lines are running at once. The first is agent access: MCP shipped in March as a premium-sounding analyst-in-a-box, and v2 removed both the waitlist and the paid-plan requirement, which is a distribution decision rather than a feature one. The second is the steady conversion of beehiiv from a newsletter sender into a web publishing platform - the SEO toolkit, the card editor, and native website analytics only make sense if the newsletter's website is the product surface that matters. Monetisation keeps widening in parallel through Webinars, On-Demand Ads and podcast hosting.

The most likely next move is deeper agent capability on top of the now-ungated MCP - write actions and workflow automation rather than the reporting and analysis framing v1 used. Note that the individual feature entries carry no dates in the feed, so the ordering of the recent releases relative to the April digest cannot be established from these entries.