The history of OptaPlanner

Geoffrey De Smet created OptaPlanner in 2006, as an open source project under the Apache License. It was the first solver that combines metaheuristics with incremental score calculation engine. That engine originally used Drools (an open source rule engine from Red Hat) for that score calculation.

Initially it was called Taseree, then Drools Solver, then Drools Planner and eventually OptaPlanner. Geoffrey worked on it in his spare time for 7 years. During that period, he joined Red Hat to work on Drools.

By 2013, OptaPlanner was already used across the globe.

In 2013, Red Hat assigned Geoffrey to work full time on OptaPlanner. Over the next 9 years, his team increased to 5 core developers, all paid by Red Hat.

From 2014, Red Hat sold a support on OptaPlanner, as part of the product subscriptions BRMS and BPM Suite. By 2022, OptaPlanner had over 15 000 unique IP downloads per month.

In 2019 IBM acquired Red Hat. In 2022, the BRMS and BPM Suite products moved to IBM, but dropped OptaPlanner support. This left OptaPlanner without a revenue stream. Without a future.

By 2023, active development on OptaPlanner halted.

In 2024, Red Hat announced the End of Life of OptaPlanner.

Later, the KIE release automation released two 10.x versions, with no bugfixes, security fixes nor any enhancements in OptaPlanner itself.

Geoffrey left Red Hat and cofounded Timefold to continue the OptaPlanner project. In 2023, they forked OptaPlanner as Timefold Solver, also open source under the Apache License. The core engineers of the OptaPlanner team joined Timefold soon after.

Timefold Solver still releases new features every month. Since OptaPlanner development flatlined, Timefold Solver fixed over 100 bugs and security issues. They replaced Drools with a purpose-built score calculation engine. To upgrade your code from OptaPlanner to Timefold, there’s a one-line command.

Meanwhile, Red Hat moved OptaPlanner’s source code to the Apache Foundation, where it lives as part of the KIE incubator heritage since 2023.

In 2025, the optaplanner.org website was removed, but its Apache licenced content was restored here on optaplanner.io to its former glory, to help legacy users.