The paper's head office is located at the Kompas Multimedia Towers, Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta.

General Ahmad Yani, then commander of the Indonesian Army, first suggested the paper to Frans Seda, a government minister and leader of the Catholic Party.

Yani encouraged Seda to publish a newspaper representative of the Catholic Party faction to counter the communist propaganda spearheaded by the PKI.

Kompas features the Panji Koming and Benny & Mice (until 2010) comic strips every Sunday.

The newspaper's sports division first delivered news via the internet in September 1988, covering the Seoul Olympics that year.

In 1993, while covering the Southeast Asian Games in Singapore, Kompas was the first Indonesian newspaper to send a picture online.

[4] Kompas was the first print media in Asia to create a digital newspaper version for the iPad.

However, in January 2011, the newspaper closed down regional sections and returned to a uniform edition nationwide.