Widely used free and commercial systems that provide functionality comparable to the Scheduler include

• WhenToWork,
• Cyber Matrix,
• Asc Timetables,
• Mimosa,
• Lantiv Timetabler,
• FET

Each of these systems provides a wide variety of timetabling and scheduling functionality. In terms of such functionality, the goal for the Scheduler is to provide the important core features found in these tools, not the full range of features found in all of them. The Scheduler does provide modest functional improvements in three areas, when compared to most commercially available tools. These improvements are:

1. more flexibility for administrators to manually or automatically generate and modify schedules given a set of constraints
2. more constraints essential to university faculty including the ability to specify ranked course preferences
3. an interface and platform suitable for administrators new to the academic environment

The goals for the Scheduler relating to sound pedagogical development are not met by any of the above systems. Unlike all the systems except for FET, the Scheduler will feature public domain source code.

A detailed review of each related tool follows in these subsections:

• WhenToWork review
• Cyber Matrix review
• Asc Timetables review
• Mimosa review
• Lantiv Timetabler review
• FET review