The self-organizing migrating algorithm (SOMA) is a population-based meta-heuristic that belongs to swarm intelligence. In the last 20 years, we can observe two main streams in the publications. First, novel approaches contributing to the improvement of its performance. Second, solving the various optimization problems. Despite the different approaches and applications, there exists no work summarizing them. Therefore, this work reviews the research papers dealing with the principles and application of the SOMA. The second goal of this work is to provide additional information about the performance of the SOMA. This work presents the comparison of the selected algorithms. The experimental results indicate that the best-performing SOMAs provide competitive results comparing the recently published algorithms.