Timefold offers three products. Timefold Solver is free and open source. It is a heuristic solver for vehicle routing, shift scheduling, and task scheduling, and provides embeddable binaries for JVM applications. Timefold Field Service Routing is a representational state transfer application programming interface (REST API) for scheduling installation and maintenance visits for technicians or home care staff. Timefold Employee Shift Scheduling is another REST API for assigning shifts to employees. Both APIs are available as a managed cloud service or as a self-hosted API platform.

Geoffrey De Smet and Maarten Vandenbroucke founded the project and announced it on May 2, 2023. The core OptaPlanner team moved to Timefold to keep the solver fast and production-ready.

Timefold Solver is distributed under the Apache License 2.0. Timefold also offers commercial enterprise editions and platform services for teams that need service level agreements (SLAs) and extra features.

OptaPlanner’s lineage starts in the mid-2000s with Geoffrey’s earlier Drools Planner work and evolves into the widely used Java solver OptaPlanner. Timefold continues that lineage while focusing development on the Java and Kotlin solver cores and on production scheduling APIs.

Timefold previously published a solver in Python, but later halted its active development. A community initiative called BlackOpsAI now maintains a legacy fork that preserves compatibility with the earlier Python solver so teams can continue using and contributing to a Python implementation.