We're still figuring out a good, clear, honest pricing model for Enterprise that works well across company sizes (small - big), industries (healthcare vs telecom vs ...) and usage frequency (strategic vs operational planning).
We're happy to send you our pricing table version 1 (use contact us form on Timefold website), but we need your feedback if it fits your business model, deployment model, usage model, etc to validate our pricing model.
Could you elaborate on how OptaPlanner/Timefold wasn't ergonomic?
I 'd love to understand this better, so we can improve it in Timefold Community.
To help deal with new problems, we're creating out-of-the-box quickstarts for common use cases:
https://github.com/TimefoldAI/timefold-quickstarts
As for the Community/Enterprise split - we want to continue the open source project, but we need to eat too :)
Basically, the documentation was set up so that I could come in and do a bunch of the example problems fairly easily, but the part where I model my own problem and execute/solve that was always underserved. Or it felt like that to me anyway. I don’t have a background in the theory, but I can easily see that it could solve my problems if only I could figure it out.
> As for the Community/Enterprise split - we want to continue the open source project, but we need to eat too :)
Yeah, I don’t begrudge you that. It’s just that when I see that multithreading is locked away I just know that the moment I start using the product I’ll find out my toy problems are enterprise scale. Sort of like murpheys law, but for software features.
Thanks for the kind words about OptaPlanner. We've forked OptaPlanner as Timefold. We don't have a wedding seating example in timefold-quickstarts, yet.
Someone did an wedding seating planning implementation 10 years ago: https://github.com/juanignaciosl/wedding-tables-planner
but that's going to be very stale (still DRL files etc). It's probably better to start from the school-timetabling use-case in timefold-quickstarts and adjust that to your needs.
If you want to give Timefold a try locally - it should about twice as fast, still the open source version - try our single Maven or Gradle command on your codebase:
https://timefold.ai/upgrade-optaplanner-to-timefold
If you're interested in writing a blog around your Wedding Seating Planner (it looks very cool!), ping me on LinkedIn and we'll happily push it on our socials.
OptaPlanner, the open source planning optimization solver AI, typically used for Vehicle Routing, Maintenance Scheduling and Employee Scheduling, has been forked as Timefold by its own creator.
OptaPy (open source, https://www.optapy.org) solves similar use cases in Python, but using metaheuristics instead of traditional CP techniques, which helps for scaling out.
We're still figuring out a good, clear, honest pricing model for Enterprise that works well across company sizes (small - big), industries (healthcare vs telecom vs ...) and usage frequency (strategic vs operational planning).
We're happy to send you our pricing table version 1 (use contact us form on Timefold website), but we need your feedback if it fits your business model, deployment model, usage model, etc to validate our pricing model.