Clashfinder vs Lumela: Festival Clash Timetables vs a Full Group Trip App

A few weeks before a festival, someone in the group drops a Clashfinder link in the chat. Everyone builds their own list of must-see acts, the tool flags which ones overlap, and for exactly that job — seeing your clashes before you're standing between two stages regretting a choice — it's hard to beat.

But the festival is one day (or three) inside a longer trip: flights, a place to stay, a shared budget, and a group that needs to find each other once they're actually on site. That's where the comparison gets interesting, because Clashfinder was never built to follow you there.

What Clashfinder actually does#

Clashfinder is a free, community-built site for making printable timetables for festivals and conferences. Anyone can build a "clashfinder" for an event, and from there you pick the acts you want to see; the tool highlights your personal schedule in up to four colours and flags any sets that overlap. Multiple people can edit the same event timetable — Clashfinder queues editors one at a time with an inactivity timeout, so a crowd-sourced schedule doesn't get stepped on mid-edit.

Your picks sync across devices through an anonymous ID (no account required), and from the timetable you can export to JSON, XML, ICS, CSV, TSV or XLSX, or build a Spotify playlist straight from the acts you picked. Core use is free; donating 50p or more unlocks a premium status that adds statistics for any clashfinder you view.

There's no official Clashfinder app — the site has a responsive mobile view, but that's it from Clashfinder itself. An independent developer built an unofficial companion, Clashfinder Pal, for iOS and Android: it downloads a festival's schedule for offline use, sends notifications before your picked acts start, and includes a feature called "Palfinder" — described by its developer as a customisable digital beacon to help find friends, plus the ability to share your highlighted schedule by QR code or over WhatsApp/iMessage/SMS.

What Clashfinder doesn't try to do#

None of this is a knock on Clashfinder — it's honest about its scope. There's no group chat, no expense splitting, no shared packing list or document storage, and no live location sharing built into the product itself. It's a personal schedule tool that happens to be shareable, not a shared trip space. Once the festival's over, there's nothing left to open — the clashfinder was for that one event.

Where Lumela covers the same ground, and then some#

Lumela's festival lineup planner does the same core job — picking the acts you care about and flagging clashes — but it lives inside a group that's already using Lumela for the rest of the trip: splitting the cost of the campsite or Airbnb, keeping tickets and ID scans in shared document storage, assigning who's bringing the tent poles, and seeing everyone's live location on one map once you're actually on site and someone wanders off between sets.

When Clashfinder is the right call#

If all you need is to walk into one festival with a clash-free personal schedule, and your group is coordinating everything else over a group chat and a shared folder, Clashfinder does that one job well, for free, and has for years. Building a quick clashfinder and sharing the link is less setup than onboarding a group onto a new app for a single day.

When you need something more#

Once there's a flight to book, a place to split, a packing list nobody wants to re-type in the group chat, or a festival site big enough that "where did everyone go" becomes a real question, the trip has outgrown a single-event scheduling tool. That's the gap Lumela is built to close: the same clash-free lineup planning, inside the one place the group is already splitting costs, storing documents and finding each other.

A concrete version of this: six people land for a three-day festival, split between two tents and an Airbnb a short drive away. Each of them still wants their own clash-free lineup for the three stages running at once — that part doesn't change. What does change is everything around it: who paid for the Airbnb and who still owes their share, whose ticket PDF is buried in an email nobody can find at the gate, and whether the two people who went looking for water are actually still at the same stage or already walking back. A link to a clashfinder answers none of that; it was never supposed to.

For festivals specifically, pairing a clash-free lineup with the rest of a group's logistics is covered in more detail in how to plan a festival lineup with friends, and for a full event walkthrough, see the 2026 Beonix festival group trip guide.