Beast Wars: Transformers was one of the earliest fully CGI television shows, produced by Mainframe Entertainment of Vancouver, marking the first time a Transformers series featured computer-animated characters.

The show's production companies, Mainframe Entertainment and Alliance Atlantis, also created ReBoot, the world's first fully computer-animated TV series, which ran from 1994 to 2001.

Several actors voiced multiple characters, such as Scott McNeil who played Rattrap, Dinobot, Waspinator, Silverbolt and Dinobot II, and Garry Chalk who voiced both Optimus Primal and the original G1 Megatron.

Production designer Clyde Klotz won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation in 1997 for his work on Beast Wars, and the show itself won a Daytime Emmy that same year.

IGN's 2011 retrospective on the Transformers franchise praised Beast Wars for featuring some of the best writing and story development in the franchise despite reusing the basic story template of earlier series.

Traditionally animated Japanese spin-off series Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo were created to fill the gap while seasons 2 and 3 of Beast Wars were being translated into Japanese as Beast Wars: Metals.

A third Beast Wars video game was in development for the PlayStation 2 but was scrapped during pre-production, with no official explanation given for its cancellation.

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura said in June 2017 that a Beast Wars film adaptation was not planned, expressing that he found the concept of animal-based Transformers hard to reconcile with the franchise's usual vehicle-based robots; the concept was later reworked into Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023), a Bumblebee sequel featuring the Maximals.