In this study, the performances of eight recent swarm intelligence techniques, accelerated particle swarm optimization (APSO), firefly algorithm, levy-flight krill herd, whale optimization algorithm (WOA), ant lion optimizer, grey wolf optimizer, moth-flame optimization algorithm and teaching-learning-based optimization algorithm (TLBO), are explored. Particle swarm optimization algorithm is also considered to benchmark the efficiencies. A final cost is considered as an objective function which deals with shallow footing optimization with two attitudes: routine optimization, and sensitivity analysis. Moreover, as a further study, the effect of the location of the column at the top of the foundation is examined by adding two spare design variables. To this end, three numerical case studies are simulated. Based on the final results TLBO showed an acceptable performance because of the lowest mean values and WOA demonstrated the weakest efficiency among the algorithms in this study.