No counter tracks installed BSD systems, so BSD usage statistics rest on four partial lenses: W3Techs website scans, DistroWatch page hits, the opt-in FreeBSD Community Survey and the projects’ own release records. This report reads each one as of October 2026 and keeps them apart.
It covers FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD, including hardware support, security errata, package trees and foundation finances.
BSD Usage Statistics
How Widely Is BSD Used on the Web in 2026?
BSD runs 0.1% of websites whose operating system W3Techs can identify, based on its 15 October 2026 reading. The wider Unix family, which includes both Linux and BSD, stands at 92.2%.
FreeBSD accounts for 94.8% of BSD-based sites. OpenBSD holds 5.0%, and NetBSD and DragonFly BSD sit at 0.1% each.
These figures are shares of surveyed websites, not machines or people. Linux’s reading in the same survey is broken down in this Linux web server share report.
| BSD system | Share of BSD-based websites |
|---|---|
| FreeBSD | 94.8% |
| OpenBSD | 5.0% |
| NetBSD | 0.1% |
| DragonFly BSD | 0.1% |
Source: W3Techs, 15 October 2026
W3Techs BSD Readings Since December 2025
FreeBSD’s share of BSD sites has edged down across three W3Techs snapshots, while BSD’s overall share has held at 0.1%.
Unix’s share of known-OS sites moved from 90.7% to 92.0% to 92.2% across the same dates.
| W3Techs reading date | FreeBSD share of BSD-based websites |
|---|---|
| 30 December 2025 | 95.6% |
| 16 August 2026 | 95.1% |
| 15 October 2026 | 94.8% |
Source: W3Techs, readings dated 30 December 2025, 16 August 2026 and 15 October 2026
FreeBSD Tops BSD Entries on DistroWatch With 397 Daily Hits
DistroWatch averages page hits per day over the trailing 12 months and counts one hit per IP address per day. The site says its ranking reflects visitor interest, not usage or market share.
FreeBSD ranks 25th overall with 397 hits per day, the highest among BSD-based entries. GhostBSD, built on FreeBSD, places 83rd with 175, ahead of OpenBSD at 107th with 130.
NetBSD ranks 133rd with 102 hits per day, and DragonFly BSD ranks 260th with 59. FreeBSD-based OPNsense and pfSense draw 62 and 34.
| Rank | Entry | Based on (per DistroWatch) | Hits per day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | FreeBSD | Independent | 397 |
| 83 | GhostBSD | FreeBSD | 175 |
| 107 | OpenBSD | Independent (forked from NetBSD) | 130 |
| 128 | MidnightBSD | FreeBSD | 106 |
| 133 | NetBSD | Independent | 102 |
| 199 | HardenedBSD | FreeBSD | 74 |
| 246 | OPNsense | FreeBSD | 62 |
| 260 | DragonFly | FreeBSD | 59 |
| 276 | FuguIta | OpenBSD | 57 |
| 359 | BSDRP | FreeBSD | 41 |
| 405 | pfSense | FreeBSD, m0n0wall | 34 |
| 411 | XigmaNAS | FreeBSD | 33 |
| 414 | DynFi | FreeBSD | 31 |
Source: DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking, last 12 months, read 15 October 2026
BSD Usage by Deployment: Servers Lead the 2025 FreeBSD Survey
| Main FreeBSD platform | All, 2024 | All, 2025 | Professional users, 2025 | Personal users, 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Servers | 50% | 49% | 65% | 44% |
| Desktops | 18% | 17% | 8% | 20% |
| Laptop | 14% | 16% | 7% | 20% |
| Cloud | 6% | 7% | 8% | 6% |
| Storage appliances | 5% | 4% | 4% | 4% |
| Network appliances | 5% | 4% | 5% | 4% |
| Embedded platforms | <1% | 1% | 2% | 1% |
| Other | 1% | 2% | 1% | 2% |
Source: FreeBSD Core Team and FreeBSD Foundation, 2025 Community Survey (fielded April to May 2025)
Servers are the main platform for 49% of 2025 respondents and 65% of professional users. Desktops and laptops each account for 20% of personal users, against 8% and 7% for professionals.
The anonymous, opt-in survey collected 2,127 substantially complete returns and is unweighted. Its stated maximum error range is ±2.1% at 95% confidence.
Personal users rose to 70% of the sample from 65% in 2024. The report says promotion by an OS journalist focused on Linux users may help explain that rise.
Daily-driver use fell from 43% to 40%, which the report attributes to the larger personal-user share.
Among respondents who use FreeBSD on a desktop or laptop, 86% run a CI/CD system, and GitHub Actions leads at 35%. Wider adoption data sits in these CI/CD tool market share figures.
Workload Attributes Ranked by Professional and Personal Users
ZFS is the top attribute for both groups, chosen by 70% of professional and 68% of personal users. Access to security patches follows at 65% and 61%.
Professional users weight firewall features higher, at 51% against 43%. On Linux, the comparable packet-filtering framework is nftables.
Respondents could pick up to eight attributes, so shares overlap. ZFS reaches 88% among respondents whose main system is a storage appliance.
By workload, storage leads at 61% of all respondents and web serving follows at 58%. The survey lists nginx and Apache as web-serving examples; nginx’s wider footprint is covered in this reverse proxy usage report.
Source: FreeBSD 2025 Community Survey, workload and attribute questions (multi-select), 2025
Architecture Support: 57 NetBSD Families, 13,044 OpenBSD amd64 Packages
NetBSD 11.0 lists supported binary distributions for 57 system families, from aarch64 to the Sharp Zaurus. It is also the project’s first stable release with 64-bit RISC-V support.
OpenBSD 7.9 publishes install notes for 14 platforms and ships 13,044 pre-built amd64 packages. Eight of the nine package architectures gained packages over 7.8; powerpc64 fell from 9,698 to 9,507.
The aarch64 set reached 12,883 packages in 7.9, and riscv64 reached 11,142.
Source: OpenBSD 7.8 release page (October 2025) and 7.9 release page (May 2026); NetBSD 11.0 announcement (30 July 2026)
CPU Architectures FreeBSD Respondents Plan to Run
Almost every 2025 respondent, 97%, plans production amd64 use in the next 12 months. Planned aarch64 use fell from 42% to 38%.
| Architecture | 2024 respondents | 2025 respondents |
|---|---|---|
| 64-bit x86 (amd64) | 97% | 97% |
| 64-bit ARM (aarch64) | 42% | 38% |
| 64-bit RISC-V (riscv64) | 7% | 6% |
| 32-bit x86 (i386) | 7% | 6% |
| 32-bit ARM (armv7) | 7% | 5% |
| 64-bit Power | 2% | 2% |
Source: FreeBSD Community Survey, planned production use in the next 12 months (multi-select), 2024 and 2025
Which BSD Releases Are Current in October 2026?
| Project | Current release | Release date | Project’s description |
|---|---|---|---|
| FreeBSD | 15.1-RELEASE | 16 June 2026 | Second release of the stable/15 branch |
| OpenBSD | 7.9 | 19 May 2026 | 60th release |
| NetBSD | 11.0 | 30 July 2026 | Nineteenth major release |
| DragonFly BSD | 6.4.2 | 9 May 2025 | Bug-fix release in the 6.4 series |
Source: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD release pages, read 15 October 2026
FreeBSD 15.1 followed 15.0, released 2 December 2025. OpenBSD 7.9 followed 7.8, released 22 October 2025.
NetBSD shipped two releases on older branches after 11.0: 9.5 on 31 August 2026, which ended support for netbsd-9, and 10.2 on 15 September 2026.
The NetBSD team published 11.0 with documented open security issues and said it aimed to ship 11.1 within two months. No 11.1 release appears on the project homepage as of 15 October 2026.
DragonFly’s homepage, last edited in October 2025, still lists 6.4.2. It says DPorts is based on the FreeBSD 2024Q3 ports branch, with 2025Q2 work in progress.
OpenBSD 7.9 raised the amd64 CPU limit to 255 and fixed a bug on machines with more than 512GB of RAM. NetBSD’s new MICROVM kernel boots in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs, per its release notes.
Source: OpenBSD 7.9 release page (May 2026); NetBSD 11.0 announcement and homepage; DragonFly BSD homepage, read 15 October 2026
Linux-Derived Code in Current BSD Releases
FreeBSD 15.1’s iwlwifi and other LinuxKPI wireless drivers are based on Linux 7.0. OpenBSD 7.9 moved its drm(4) graphics drivers to Linux 6.18.22.
NetBSD 11.0 expanded compat_linux(8) with calls including epoll, statx, clone3 and inotify, and added a native memfd_create system call.
Linux also shapes intake: 17% of 2025 FreeBSD survey respondents first found the system while researching an alternative OS, and 54% of that group wanted a Linux alternative.
Source: FreeBSD 15.1 announcement (June 2026); OpenBSD 7.9 release page (May 2026); NetBSD 11.0 announcement (July 2026); FreeBSD 2025 Community Survey
OpenBSD Errata for Releases 7.8 and 7.9
OpenBSD lists 70 errata for 7.8 and 34 for 7.9 through 7 October 2026. Security fixes account for 42 and 22 of those entries.
| Release | Errata listed | Security fixes | Reliability fixes |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenBSD 7.8 (22 Oct 2025) | 70 | 42 | 28 |
| OpenBSD 7.9 (19 May 2026) | 34 | 22 | 12 |
Source: OpenBSD 7.8 and 7.9 errata pages, entries through 7 October 2026
The first 36 errata for 7.8 predate the 7.9 release. Since 2 June 2026, both releases have received matching patches, which feed a -stable branch OpenBSD maintains for one year after each release.
Four 7.8 errata deal with phasing out the pledge(2) “tmppath” promise, which 7.9 retired.
How Active Is the BSD Package Ecosystem in 2026?
FreeBSD’s Ports Collection held 37,958 ports in the first-quarter 2026 status report, up from 37,163 in the previous report. The main branch logged 8,970 ports commits from 166 committers that quarter.
FreeBSD Foundation-sponsored commits rose in every category between the first and second quarters of 2026.
| Quarter | Sponsored src commits | Sponsored ports commits | Sponsored doc commits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2026 | 555 | 83 | 16 |
| Q2 2026 | 638 | 120 | 31 |
Source: FreeBSD Status Reports, first and second quarters of 2026
Container tooling is entering the tree: the Q2 2026 report lists dockerbox, docker-cli, docker-compose and docker-buildx as available ports. Linux-side trends appear in this container runtime market share report.
NetBSD’s pkgsrc, which also runs on Linux, macOS and illumos, released its 92nd quarterly branch, 2026Q3, on 23 September 2026 with over 29,000 packages.
| pkgsrc branch | Release number | Packages added | Packages updated (distinct) | Packages removed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025Q3 | 88th | 138 | 1,293 | 13 |
| 2026Q2 | 91st | 187 | 2,004 | 45 |
| 2026Q3 | 92nd | 142 | 1,918 | 63 |
Source: pkgsrc release announcements, September 2025, June 2026 and September 2026
The 2026Q3 announcement also notes that NetBSD 9 binary packages were removed after that branch reached end of support on 31 August 2026.
FreeBSD Foundation Spent $862,364 More Than It Raised in 2024
The FreeBSD Foundation reported 2024 revenue of $1,739,644 against expenses of $2,602,008, according to its IRS Form 990 as extracted by ProPublica. Contributions supplied $1,453,539, or 83.6% of revenue.
Expenses have exceeded revenue each year since 2022. Net assets stood at $4,026,908 at the end of 2024, down from $5,280,629 at the end of 2022.
Source: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, IRS Form 990, fiscal years 2020 to 2024
OpenBSD Foundation Fundraising Goals, 2020 to 2026
The OpenBSD Foundation set a $400,000 goal for its 2026 campaign, unchanged from 2025. Goals stood at $300,000 from 2020 to 2022 and $350,000 in 2023 and 2024.
The foundation’s activities page lists 2026 fundraising as ongoing. Its most recent published donation total, $398,928, covers 2022.
Source: OpenBSD Foundation campaign pages (2020 to 2026) and activities page, read 15 October 2026
FAQs
Is BSD still used in 2026?
Yes. BSD runs 0.1% of websites with an identifiable operating system (W3Techs, 15 October 2026), and FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD each shipped a new release between May and July 2026.
Which BSD is the most popular?
FreeBSD leads both public measures. It holds 94.8% of BSD-based websites (W3Techs, 15 October 2026) and draws 397 daily DistroWatch page hits over 12 months, against 5.0% and 130 for OpenBSD.
How many people use FreeBSD?
No source counts them. The opt-in 2025 FreeBSD Community Survey received 2,127 complete returns; 40% of respondents called FreeBSD their daily driver, and 49% named servers as their main platform.
What is FreeBSD used for most?
Storage leads at 61% of 2025 survey respondents, followed by web serving at 58%, then development and firewall, proxy or router work at 53% each. Respondents could select several workloads.
Is there a reliable BSD user count that Reddit threads can cite?
No. W3Techs measures websites, DistroWatch measures page visits it says do not reflect usage, and the FreeBSD survey reflects 2,127 self-selected respondents. None counts installed BSD systems.
