As of 2 Nov 2026, the panel rates GLPI 3/5 and OTOBO 3/5 in IT Service Management. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick GLPI and 2 pick OTOBO. GLPI scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (Change, problem & release management, Assets, CMDB & discovery, Pricing transparency, plus 2 more). OTOBO scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (Self-service portal & service catalog and Service desk, incidents & requests). Provenance — GLPI: EU-Made; OTOBO: EU-Made. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
On the criterion means, GLPI is ahead in five of seven: change and problem 4.5 to 4.0, assets and CMDB 6.5 to 6.0, deployment and integration 6.3 to 6.2, sovereignty 7.2 to 7.0, and pricing transparency 6.7 to 6.3 — the first two and pricing with no judge leaning OTOBO. OTOBO is ahead on service desk, 6.2 to 5.8 with two judges leaning its way, and above all the self-service portal, 6.0 to 5.2 with five judges leaning OTOBO and one tie. Sovereignty and deployment are genuine splits: two judges lean GLPI, one OTOBO, three tie. The weighted totals split as well — of the five judges with recorded totals, three (change manager, solo admin, skeptic) come out higher for GLPI and two (service-desk lead, public-sector IT) for OTOBO; the MSP owner's totals were not recorded. No overall winner: the split is the answer.
Choose GLPI if
You need broad asset coverage: assets and CMDB stands at 6.5 vs 6.0 with three judges leaning GLPI and none OTOBO, and the GLPI verdict cites hardware and software inventory, FusionInventory or OCS discovery, and a PNG-exportable impact analysis.
Your team runs changes formally: change and problem scores 4.5 vs 4.0 — the weakest criterion for both products, with the verdicts finding no public information on change types or a CAB for either — and three judges lean GLPI while none lean OTOBO.
You pay per user: published prices run '19 € Excl. tax / month / user' starting with 1 user and '21 € Excl. tax / month / user' for 25 or more, with a 45-day free trial; pricing transparency is 6.7 vs 6.3 with two judges leaning GLPI and none OTOBO.
You weigh sovereignty: the mean is 7.2 vs 7.0 with two judges leaning GLPI, one OTOBO and three ties, and the GLPI verdict cites a French contracting entity, OVH cloud hosting in France, and terms stating no personal data is transferred outside the EU or EEA.
You integrate heavily: deployment and integration is 6.3 vs 6.2 with two judges leaning GLPI and one OTOBO, and the GLPI verdict lists a REST API with webhooks and a plugin marketplace.
Choose OTOBO if
Your front line is the ticket queue: the service desk mean is 6.2 vs 5.8 with two judges leaning OTOBO and none GLPI, and the OTOBO verdict records tickets by email, phone and portal, calendar-based SLA escalations and a free load-balancer add-on.
Your users must serve themselves: the self-service portal is 6.0 vs 5.2 with five judges leaning OTOBO and one tie — the largest lean count on any criterion in the table.
You must run on-premise: the OTOBO verdict documents on-premise operation to keep full control over all data with the codebase fully downloadable, and one judge leans OTOBO on deployment and integration.
You are a service-desk lead buying for your own operation: that judge's weighted total is 6.2 for OTOBO vs 5.9 for GLPI, the widest recorded gap.
You buy for public-sector IT: that judge's weighted total is 6.3 for OTOBO vs 6.2 for GLPI.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Change & Configuration Manager
Change and configuration manager at a regional bank that answers to BaFin and, since January 2025, to DORA. Chairs the weekly change advisory board and has to show an auditor who approved which change, which services it touched and which incident it caused. Wants change types with real approvals, risk read from a CMDB that knows how systems depend on each other, problem records tied to incidents, and an audit trail that can be exported.
GLPI
This judge's pick
OTOBO
Criterion by criterion
Service desk, incidents & requests
GLPI
Tickets arrive by email collectors and the web interface, incidents and service requests are handled as distinct objects, and SLAs with OLAs, an impact-urgency priority matrix, business-rule assignment, configurable automatic actions and escalation are documented, alongside a knowledge base, technician calendars and reports by technician, category and request. I found no public information on a visual workflow builder, major-incident handling with communication to affected users, time tracking on tickets, AI classification or an agent mobile app — the mobile capabilities named are device and application management for the fleet, not the service desk.
OTOBO
Intake by email, phone and portal with automatic prioritisation, routing and SLA assignment, calendar-based multi-level escalations, master/slave bundling for major incidents with automatic notification of affected creators, an agent knowledge base, CSAT surveys and KPI dashboards are all documented, and a free load-balancer add-on distributes tickets by workload, priority and service capability. We found no public information on time tracking, AI assistance or an agent mobile app, and the workflow engine itself is listed only as planned, which holds this below the top band.
Change, problem & release management
GLPI
The change module carries a full status chain from evaluation through approval to qualification and closing, validations with a configurable minimum approval count, deployment and fallback plans with a checklist, cost estimation and links to problems, tickets, impacted items, projects and the knowledge base, while problem records hold symptoms, causes and impacts and tie back to their incidents and changes. What I must show an auditor — standard, normal and emergency change types, a change calendar with blackout periods, a CAB record, release and deployment records, or a named ITIL process certification — is something I found no public information on.
OTOBO
Change and problem management are named modules tied to incident management, CIs can be mapped to incidents, problem tickets and changes, multi-step approval processes and tamper-proof auditable logging are documented. We found no public information on change types such as standard, normal or emergency, risk assessment reading affected services from the CMDB, a change calendar, a CAB or known-error records, and a forum thread locates change documentation only in the ITSM change package.
Assets, CMDB & discovery
GLPI
Hardware, software and data-centre inventory with a lifecycle from stock to withdrawal, a complete modification history per asset, agentless dynamic inventory plus FusionInventory or OCS Inventory plugins, import from Active Directory and Entra ID, contracts, budgets and licences, and a graphical impact-and-dependency analysis that can be saved and exported as PNG give a real picture of what a change touches. I found no public information on connectors such as Intune, SCCM, JAMF, VMware or cloud accounts, or on software licence compliance and metering.
OTOBO
The integrated open-source CMDB ships with predefined, extendable CI classes for location, infrastructure, network, software, contract and workplace, a YAML editor, relationships from CIs to incidents, problems, changes, users and services, a relationship tree, the full lifecycle from procurement to retirement, and continuous import via REST/SOAP from auto-discovery, inventory, asset management, directory services and product databases. What I would need for outage and audit decisions — a service map used for impact analysis, discovery documented per platform, licence compliance and CMDB data-quality rules — we found no public information on.
Self-service portal & service catalog
GLPI
The redesigned catalog offers hierarchical categories, illustrations, pinned services and fuzzy real-time search, with knowledge base articles integrated and unified search, incident reporting with real-time progress tracking, service requests, resource reservation, branding, per-entity access control and single sign-on. I found no public information on approval steps per catalog item, announcements and outage notices, satisfaction surveys, several portal languages or a virtual agent.
OTOBO
The portal is documented with a catalog spanning IT, HR, facilities and fleet, entitlement-based visibility, runtime-generated forms per request type, multi-step approvals, ticket status and history for requesters, keyword-driven knowledge base suggestions, a news ticker for major disruptions, single sign-on and automatic CSAT surveys. We found no public information on portal languages, a virtual agent, automated fulfilment such as password reset, or accessibility conformance.
Deployment, integrations & multi-client operation
GLPI
A self-hosted download sits beside cloud and private offers, the OAuth2-secured REST API v2 is documented down to ticket, user, entity and profile endpoints with webhooks and a plugin marketplace, single sign-on runs via CAS, X509, oAuth or SCIM, entity-based permissions with recursivity separate tenants, and per-plan availability, RPO and RTO figures are published. I found no public information on feature parity between the editions, time and contract billing for managed service providers, named RMM or monitoring connectors, or a public status page with uptime history.
OTOBO
On-premise operation and a managed cloud service are both offered, the software is 100 per cent open source and installable via Docker with public multilingual documentation, and the OTRS migration path is documented down to version handling, database switches and scheduling; REST/SOAP APIs, Active Directory and LDAP authentication, single sign-on, two-factor, roles, groups and ACLs, multi-client visibility restrictions and an enterprise high-availability cluster are evidenced. We found no public information on webhooks, SCIM provisioning, named monitoring or remote-support connectors, or a public status page.
European sovereignty
GLPI
The contracting entity is TECLIB' S.A.S. in Paris, cloud instances are hosted by OVH in France with backups retained there, the subprocessors are named — OVH and Scaleway for hosting, Sendgrid for the email relay, Stripe for payment — a data processing agreement is published with a commitment not to transfer data outside the EU or EEA, breach notification and destruction or return of data are written down, and a self-hosted download exists. I found no public information on security certifications for the service or on the locations of the email relay and payment subprocessors.
OTOBO
The vendor is a German GmbH registered at Amtsgericht Straubing, its own servers for website, email and support portal run in Germany and Switzerland, subprocessors are named with locations and signed data processing agreements (Rapidmail exclusively in Germany, Google, hosting providers), and a documented on-premise open-source edition keeps records on our own servers — the path a bank under DORA would take. We found no public information on where the managed cloud service processes customer data, no stated security certification such as ISO 27001 or BSI C5, and the privacy policy is dated December 2019.
Pricing transparency
GLPI
Cloud tiers are public at "19 € Excl. tax / month / user Starting with 1 user" and "21 € Excl. tax / month / user" for 25 or more users, with unlimited assets and end users, a single price covering all modules, VAT treatment and one-month notice stated, plus a 45-day free trial. Dedicated architectures are priced on a quote, and I found no public information on the self-hosted subscription amounts or on onboarding and setup fees.
OTOBO
All three support tiers are published as flat annual figures — Entry 3.900€ pro Jahr, Professional 9.900€ pro Jahr, Enterprise 24.500€ pro Jahr — with unlimited agents and incidents, per-tier support hours, response times and service-request quotas, while the software itself, the add-ons and forum support are free of charge and pricing is explicitly not agent-based. We found no public information on minimum term, VAT treatment, onboarding, the cost of exceeding a service-request quota, or pricing for the managed service.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
GLPI
OTOBO
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 2 Nov 2026, the panel rates both 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick GLPI and 2 pick OTOBO. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is GLPI or OTOBO European?
GLPI is European (EU-Made). OTOBO is European (EU-Made). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do GLPI and OTOBO store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — GLPI: Default not stated; pages mention France. OTOBO: Default not stated; pages mention Germany and Switzerland.