OR-Tools CP-SAT
Shares rank 2 of 6 optimization solvers by recommenders
People recommend it for solving hard scheduling and constraint problems quickly, and several say it handles difficult cases well.
People recommend it for solving hard scheduling and constraint problems quickly, and several say it handles difficult cases well.
7 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 86%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Solves hard problems quickly
“Most cases I've tried can be solved reasonably quickly when using OR-Tools CP-SAT”
Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle (2006)” “CP-SAT handles it pretty well.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Using OR-Tools CP-SAT for Scheduling Problems” Enthusiastic fans among users
“Found minizinc/CP-SAT recently and I’m obsessed”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge” “I'm a big fan of the CP-SAT solver.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Using OR-Tools CP-SAT for Scheduling Problems”
Other optimization solvers people recommend
The four most recommended other optimization solvers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Z3 SMT solver | 24 | 2 | 92% | 9 | — | Approved |
| OR-Tools CP-SATThis page | 6 | 1 | 86% | 3 | — | — |
| MiniZinc | 6 | 1 | 86% | 5 | — | — |
| Google OR-Tools | 6 | 4 | 60% | 3 | — | — |
| Gurobi | 6 | 0 | 100% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
All 7 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Found minizinc/CP-SAT recently and I’m obsessed”
“It allows me to put a host in maintenance mode and distribute all virtual machines away across the remaining hosts, it's really awesome.”
“Most of the latencies we saw were spent in the presolve phase which scaled with overall input size.”
“I'm a big fan of the CP-SAT solver.”
“CP-SAT handles it pretty well.”
“CP-SAT does a great job accepting hints and cuts down the search time significantly if the hint is good.”
“Most cases I've tried can be solved reasonably quickly when using OR-Tools CP-SAT”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.