Groff contains a large number of helper programs, preprocessors, and postprocessors including eqn, tbl, pic and soelim.

Groff development of new features is active, and is an important part of free, open source, and UNIX derived operating systems such as Linux and 4.4BSD derivatives — notably because troff macros are used to create man pages, the standard form of documentation on Unix and Unix-like systems.

OpenBSD has replaced groff with mandoc in the base install, since their 4.9 release,[7] as has macOS Ventura.

groff is an original implementation written primarily in C++ by James Clark and is modeled after ditroff, including many extensions.

The first stable version, 1.04, was announced in November 1991. groff was developed as free software to provide an easily obtained replacement for the standard AT&T troff/nroff package, which at the time was proprietary, and was not always available even on branded UNIX systems.