🆚 FreeBSD vs. Windows

Compare technologies based on real-world usage data *
FreeBSD
Windows

Type

Operating system
Operating system

About

FreeBSD is an open source Unix-like operating system designed for reliability, performance, and advanced networking across servers, desktops, and embedded systems.

It features a permissive BSD license, strong TCP/IP networking, a unified base system with an integrated package system offering over 30,000 third-party packages, the ZFS file system with snapshots and replication, the bhyve hypervisor, and jails for lightweight OS-level virtualization.

Windows is a family of proprietary operating systems from Microsoft used on personal computers, servers, and virtualized environments.

In its Windows Server editions, it combines web hosting through IIS with support for ASP.NET, application pools and SSL management, alongside Active Directory for centralized identity, Hyper-V virtualization, PowerShell automation, and hybrid cloud integration with Azure.

Headquarters

Boulder, Colorado, United States
Redmond, Washington, United States

Website

freebsd.org #22,440
microsoft.com/windows #3

Pricing

Free ✔️Open source
Free version ❌
Windows Server 2025
Standard edition$1,176
Datacenter edition$6,771

Categories

Operating Systems › Rank #9
Operating Systems › Rank #2

Popularity

Determined by the number of sites using each technology.

The Windows operating system is 80 times more popular than FreeBSD.
Total websites

Market share

Operating Systems

Popularity by country

Determined by the number of sites detected from each country.

Windows is more popular than FreeBSD in all countries.
United States
China
United Kingdom
Italy
Turkey
India
Netherlands
Germany
Canada
Brazil

Awards

Popularity by domain category

Determined by the number of sites in each category.

Windows is more popular than FreeBSD in all market segments.
Business
Marketing/Merchandising
Education/Reference
Online Shopping
Health
Internet Services
Travel
Software/Hardware
Public Information
Sports

Top sites

Top-ranked sites that use these technologies.

Name
Rank
#5,673
#8,668
#10,255
#17,667
#23,639
View more ➝
Name
Rank
#73
#74
#101
#188
#227
View more ➝

See also

* According to recent studies, many of online reviews are fake.
When making your decision, it is better to rely on data that cannot be falsified.
Our service evaluates the popularity of technologies by the number of websites using them.

Statistics were last calculated on .
For details, see our methodology and disclaimer.