Named after the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, the company was founded in April 1993 by twin brothers Ben and Jonathan Finn to market the eponymous music notation program they had created.

In August 2006 the company was acquired by Avid, to become part of its Digidesign division, which also manufactures the digital audio workstation Pro Tools.

In July 2012, Avid announced plans to divest its consumer businesses, closed the Sibelius London office, and removed the original development team,[2][3][4] despite a 11,590-strong 'Save Sibelius' petition spearheading a campaign led by Derek Williams that included extensive protests on Facebook and elsewhere.

They started developing the software (entirely in assembly language) in the summer of 1986, just after they left school, and continued while studying at Oxford and Cambridge universities, respectively.

It required considerably less than 1 MB of memory (as its files only occupied a few KB per page of music), and the combination of assembly language and the Archimedes' ARM processor meant that it ran very quickly.

A unique feature of the Sibelius GUI at that time was the ability it gave the user to drag the entire score around with the mouse, offering a bird's eye of the score, as distinct from having to use the QWERTY input keyboard arrow keys, or equivalent, to scroll the page.

The first concert performance from a Sibelius score was the premiere of Plus Loin for chamber orchestra by David Robert Coleman, copied by Emsley.

Other early adopters included composer John Rutter, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, and publisher Music Sales.

In July 2012, Avid announced plans to divest itself of its other consumer businesses, closed the Sibelius London office, and laid off the original development team,[3][15] amid an outpouring of user protest, then recruited a new team of programmers to continue Sibelius development in Montreal, Canada and Kyiv, Ukraine.

[24] It supports any MIDI device, and allows Virtual Studio Technology (VST) and Audio Units plug-ins to be used as playback instruments, giving users access to third-party sample libraries.

[55] It uses the same technology as Scorch to allow Sibelius users to share music online directly from within the program, and addresses compatibility issues.

Lite notation based on Sibelius is included in Avid's Pro Tools audio editing software.