[2] The project was originated by Jive Software around 2002, partly in order to support their FastPath web-based customer support tool, as Jive Messenger, and renamed to Wildfire in 2005.

[5] After Jive Software handed the Openfire project to the Ignite Realtime community, the Ignite Realtime Foundation was founded[6] to govern its projects.

Openfire continued to be developed under a community model, as part of the Ignite Realtime Foundation.

Most administration of the server is done through a web interface, which runs on the ports 9090 (HTTP) and 9091 (HTTPS) by default.

Openfire allows multiple server instances to work together in one clustered environment.