[14] Support for Syzygy tablebases, previously available in a fork maintained by Ronald de Man, was integrated into Stockfish in 2014.

Stockfish supports up to 1024 CPU threads in multiprocessor systems, with a maximum transposition table size of 32 TB.

Other Stockfish-compatible graphical user interfaces (GUIs) include Fritz, Arena, Stockfish for Mac, and PyChess.

[20][21] For a while, new ideas and code changes were transferred between the two programs in both directions, until Romstad decided to discontinue Glaurung in favor of Stockfish, which was the stronger engine at the time.

[23] On 18 June 2014 Marco Costalba announced that he had "decided to step down as Stockfish maintainer" and asked that the community create a fork of the current version and continue its development.

[26][27][28] Changes to game-playing code are accepted or rejected based on results of playing of tens of thousands of games on the framework against an older "reference" version of the program, using sequential probability ratio testing.

After the inception of Fishtest, Stockfish experienced an explosive growth of 120 Elo points in just 12 months, propelling it to the top of all major rating lists.

[29] As of February 2025[update], the framework has used a total of more than 16,900 years of CPU time to play over 8.8 billion chess games.

[30] In June 2020, Stockfish introduced the efficiently updatable neural network (NNUE) approach, based on earlier work by computer shogi programmers.

Season 5 was notable for the winning Komodo team as they accepted the award posthumously for the program's creator Don Dailey, who succumbed to an illness during the final stage of the event.

[37] In TCEC Season 8, despite losses on time caused by buggy code, Stockfish nevertheless qualified once more for the Superfinal, but lost 46.5–53.5 to Komodo.

[37] In Season 22, Komodo Dragon beat out Leela to qualify for the Superfinal, losing to Stockfish by a large margin 59.5-40.5.

[37] In the third edition, Stockfish made it to the finals, but was defeated by Leela Chess Zero after blundering in a 7-man endgame tablebase draw.

Since then, its dominance has come under threat from the neural-network engines Leelenstein and Leela Chess Zero, but it has continued to perform well, reaching at least the superfinal in every edition up to CCC11.

Stockfish's strength relative to the best human chess players was most apparent in a handicap match with grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura (2798-rated) in August 2014.

Nakamura was the world's fifth highest rated human chess player at the time of the match, while Stockfish 5 was denied use of its opening book and endgame tablebase.