FET is free. The rest of the job is not.
FET solves the hard computational part and costs nothing, which is a real thing to weigh and we will not pretend otherwise. What a school still does by hand around it is why people ask us about it.
FET is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3
uses a fast and efficient timetabling algorithm
Read from lalescu.ro/liviu/fet on 3 October 2026. FET is a serious piece of free software maintained in the open, and we would rather describe it accurately than score points off it.
What the algorithm was never going to do for you
A teacher’s request is never granted at the cost of a class’s free hour.
Schedula first searches for the week with the fewest free hours stuck in the middle of a class’s day, locks the best it finds, and only then reads a single teacher request. So a teacher’s day off cannot be paid for with a class’s free hour: the stage that places teacher requests may only search inside what the students already won. Late starts are locked the same way, second. That is the default order, and your school can change it.
The loudest teacher stops winning.
Schedula does not chase the average, because an average lets one delighted teacher hide three unhappy ones. It lifts the teachers who got the least of what they asked for first, and holds a floor under them. Every teacher gets their own number: the share of what they asked for that they actually got.
The September argument becomes arithmetic.
When a teacher asks why someone else got their Friday, you have a figure for both of them, produced by the same rule. You are no longer defending a judgement call you made at midnight in August — you are reading out a number that was applied to all of them identically.
You can overrule it without breaking it.
Move a lesson and the rules are checked again before it lands. A move that would break one is stopped, and you are told which rule; a legal one shows what it costs before you commit. A level-group hour moves as a single piece, so you cannot half-move one. Undo works. You stay in charge of the week without the fear that fixing one thing quietly broke another.
It tells you what cannot work, with the fix beside it.
Before it builds anything, Schedula reads your numbers and names what cannot work: which class, which teacher, which hour, with the fix beside it. And a minimum number of lessons a day is a firm rule: it will refuse to build rather than quietly hand a class a two-lesson day. You exempt a day deliberately or not at all.
The school, not a data file.
FET works from a file you assemble and re-assemble. In Schedula the school itself lives in one place — classes, teachers, curriculum hours, rules — teachers fill in their own week from a private link, and admin, editor and viewer share it. A desktop file is one person at a time.
Five questions worth asking of any timetabler, ours included
Every one of these is answerable about Schedula in a sentence. Put them to whoever you are paying now, and to us.
When a teacher’s request is granted, can it ever leave a class sitting idle in the middle of the day? If the answer is “it’s weighted”, the answer is yes.
What is the LOWEST teacher satisfaction score in my building — not the average?
If my staffing cannot produce a legal week, when do I find out, and will it tell me which teacher and which hour?
If I move one lesson in August, what stops me breaking a rule I set in June?
Can two people work on the same week at the same time?
Where FET is stronger
- It is free, and it will still be free in a year when your budget is not.
- It is open source under AGPL v3 — you can read exactly what it does, run it offline on Windows, Linux or macOS, and nobody can withdraw it from your country.
- For a technically confident timetabler who is comfortable in a constraint editor, it is a genuinely good tool, and a school that already has one of those people may simply not need us.
Questions schools ask
Is FET actually any good?
Yes. It is capable software with a well-regarded algorithm, maintained in the open, and it costs nothing. If price is the constraint that matters most to you, start there.
Then why would a school pay for Schedula?
Because the algorithm was never the whole job. Collecting what every teacher can and cannot do, keeping the school’s data in one place, letting more than one person work on the week, publishing it, and changing it safely afterwards — that is the part that eats a summer, and it is the part we do.
Does FET work in Hebrew?
Partly. FET lists Hebrew among its interface languages and notes that some languages are only partly translated. In version 7.11.1, released on 2 October 2026, 332 of its 13,657 interface strings are marked as translated into Hebrew, about 2%, with unreviewed drafts for about 1,100 more; the rest appears in English. Its Arabic translation is complete. Schedula is Hebrew and English throughout, right to left included.
What does it cost?
Tell us the size of your school and we come back with a number.
Stop spending your summer on this.
Get my school set upTell us about your school and we take it from there