Actran is being developed by Free Field Technologies, a Belgian software company founded in 1998 by Jean-Pierre Coyette and Jean-Louis Migeot.

[2] The development of Actran started in 1998 when Jean-Pierre Coyette, now professor of the Louvain School of Engineering – Université catholique de Louvain, and Jean-Louis Migeot, now professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and past president of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium - Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, cofounded the Free Field Technologies SA software company.

The original idea was to develop a finite element-based simulation tool for vibro-acoustic applications able to overcome the limitations of the then dominant Boundary Element Method.

A central feature of Actran was the use of Infinite Elements (IE) as an alternative to BEM for modelling non-reflecting boundary conditions and calculating the far field.

[9] Actran is written in the Python and C++ languages and is compatible with both Linux and Windows operating systems.