Formie 4 - Beta 1

Verbb Team June 2026 6 min read

Formie 4 is almost here, and today we're opening up the first public beta for Craft 5.

This first beta is a little different from our usual "here's a mountain of shiny new things" release post. There are absolutely shiny new things coming in Formie 4, but Beta 1 is deliberately focused on the foundations: upgrading real sites, preserving existing forms and submissions, and getting the new plugin, docs, starters, and frontend packages into your hands early enough for proper testing.

If you want to jump straight in, check out the Formie 4 Beta upgrade guide for install steps and migration notes.

Why A Beta?

Formie 4 is a major release, and major releases are where the boring details matter.

Historically, major Formie versions have lined up pretty neatly with major Craft versions. Craft 5 is a little different. With Craft's move toward longer-term support (opens new window), and Craft 6 (opens new window) already on the horizon, Formie for Craft 5 still has a long runway ahead of it.

That makes Formie 4 the right time to do some deeper foundation work, rather than waiting for the next Craft major to justify the change. So, rather than holding everything until one big stable launch, we're starting the Formie 4 beta period with migration testing.

Beta 1 is all about answering a few important questions on real projects:

Do existing Formie 3 sites upgrade cleanly?
Can Formie 2 sites move directly to Formie 4 without upgrading through Formie 3 first?
Are forms, submissions, notifications, integrations, settings, and templates preserved as expected?
Are the new docs and frontend packages clear enough for developers to start building against?

Thrilling stuff, we know. But this is the sort of work that makes the exciting stuff possible without making your future self sad.

What's In Beta 1?

Beta 1 includes the current Formie 4 plugin, updated documentation, early starter projects, and the first public beta path for the new frontend package stack.

The focus for this release is compatibility and confidence. Existing behaviour should remain familiar, while the internals have been reshaped for Formie 4's new architecture and the betas that follow.

A Lot Has Changed Under The Hood

There are some substantial changes in Formie 4, but most of them are in service of making the plugin more stable, more flexible, and easier to keep improving. After all, we're setting foundations for the next 5 years (opens new window).

We'll cover the bigger feature story in more detail as the beta continues, but the highlights so far include:

A new form builder, fully accessible and responsive.
A revamped content model for forms and submissions.
Finishing the move away from Craft fields and field layouts for Formie's own field system, which started in Formie 3.
A new front-end and package stack, built for popular (or no) frameworks.
More robust save/resume behaviour.
Better foundations for submission workflows and future feature releases.

But the best news of all is the compatibility work. Formie 4 aims to be as non-breaking as possible, so we've built compatibility layers to keep existing templates and extension points moving through the transition.

Migration From Formie 3

If you're already running Formie 3 on Craft 5, this is the main upgrade path we want tested first.

We've been testing Formie 3 to Formie 4 upgrades locally, including forms, fields, submissions, notifications, integrations, settings, and template-facing behaviour. The goal is that a typical Formie 3 site should be able to move to the beta, run migrations, and keep working as expected.

As always with a beta: test this on a copy of your site first. Your production site deserves a calmer Tuesday.

Direct Migration From Formie 2

We've also added support for upgrading directly from Formie 2 on Craft 4 to Formie 4 on Craft 5.

That means you shouldn't need to step through a Formie 2 -> Formie 3 -> Formie 4 upgrade chain just to get onto the new major version. This is a big one for older projects, and we would especially love feedback from teams maintaining long-running Craft 4 sites.

With Craft 4 nearing end-of-life, there won't be a matching Formie 2 release for this work. Formie 4 is the path forward for Craft 5, and the direct migration path is there so Craft 4 sites have a clearer way to make that move.

If you have a site with large forms, older submissions, custom templates, integrations, payments, or a few years of honest production weirdness, you're exactly who we want to hear from.

New Frontend Packages

Formie 4 also introduces a new frontend package stack for teams building more custom frontends around Formie.

For Beta 1, the important pieces are:

These packages are part of the bigger Formie 4 frontend direction, and Beta 1 is the first chance to try them alongside the plugin and docs. If you're rendering forms outside the default Twig flow, or you're building with React, Vue, or Web Components, we'd love your feedback on the setup, API shape, and docs.

Starters And Examples

We're also publishing starter projects and examples to make Formie 4 easier to test outside an existing project.

The framework starters show how the new frontend packages fit into real projects, including both server-rendered forms where Formie still owns the HTML, and client-rendered forms where your app renders the UI from Formie's form definition.

We've also put together examples for common frontend patterns where Formie is still rendered by Craft, but the surrounding page has its own reactive or transitional behaviour:

Who Should Pay Closer Attention?

If you're using Formie in the usual way, building forms in the control panel, rendering them with the standard templates, receiving submissions, sending notifications, and connecting built-in integrations, we're aiming for the upgrade to feel uneventful.

That's the whole point of this beta. We want existing forms to keep behaving like existing forms.

You'll want to spend more time with the Formie 4 Beta upgrade guide if your project includes:

Custom Formie fields.
Custom integrations, captchas, or payment providers.
Custom front-end JavaScript that hooks into Formie events.
Heavily customized Twig templates.
Direct usage of Formie's PHP APIs in your own module or plugin.
Headless or JavaScript-rendered forms using the new frontend packages.

Those projects are exactly the ones where beta feedback is most useful, because they tend to touch the edges of the system that a normal form setup never needs to think about.

What's Coming Next?

After Beta 1, the Formie 4 beta train will move into more feature-focused releases.

We're planning dedicated beta chunks for builder organisation and defaults, notifications and status workflows, dynamic option sources, file uploads, runtime integrations, spam and captcha controls, payments, surveys/polls/quizzes, localization, headless/API work, performance, accessibility, and final polish.

That's the bigger Formie 4 story, and we'll talk more about those pieces as each beta lands. For now, the best thing we can do is make sure the upgrade path is solid.

How To Try It

Follow the Formie 4 Beta upgrade guide for full instructions.

Back up your database and project files.
Test on a local, staging, or disposable copy of the site.
Install the beta with Composer composer require verbb/formie:"^4.0.0-beta.1"
Run migrations.
Check forms, submissions, notifications, integrations, templates, and frontend behaviour.
Send us anything weird.

You can report issues on GitHub (opens new window), or get in touch through Verbb support.

Get Testing!

Formie 4 Beta 1 is available now for Craft 5. It's not the final Formie 4 launch, and it's not trying to be. This beta is about getting real upgrade feedback early, tightening the docs, and making sure the foundation is ready for the feature betas that follow.

A massive thanks in advance to everyone who tests the beta and sends feedback. Forms can be deceptively simple until they are quietly holding half a business together, so your real-world projects make a huge difference here.

Onward to Formie 4.