Tucows (originally an acronym for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software that has long since been dropped) was formed in Flint, Michigan, USA in 1993. It incorporated in Pennsylvania and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The company is perhaps most well known for its popular website directory of shareware, freeware, and demo software packages available to download. A system of mirror sites are maintained to allow the traffic to the site to be distributed among several world wide server locations. Tucows contains software for many major computer platforms including Windows, Linux and Macintosh, and also older versions of Windows (most notably the Windows 3.x series).

However, by 2007, Tucows' business model has evolved to becoming the holder of a portfolio of premium internet names, a direct navigation advertiser, a seller of premium domain names, a wholesale domain name registrar to ISPs, and a provider of internet services, including email, anti-spam tools, web-publishing tools, billing solutions.

The Tucows logo is two cows' heads, a play on the homophone "two cows". Additionally, their ratings system uses cow icons.