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 MSP Owner
Owns a managed service provider with twenty-two technicians and sixty client companies, from dental practices to a logistics firm with nine sites. Every client has its own contract, its own SLA and its own devices, and every hour has to end up on an invoice. Wants one desk with client data kept apart, the RMM and remote support tool connected, time and contracts billed, a portal per client, and a price per technician that still works when the team doubles.
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 requests are told apart, and there are SLAs and OLAs, escalation, an impact-urgency priority calculation, automated assignment rules, a knowledge base and reports by technician, category and request. We found no public information on a visual workflow builder, major-incident handling with user communication, an agent mobile app, AI assistance, or time tracking on tickets.
OTOBO
Tickets arrive by email, phone and self-service portal with automatic prioritisation, routing and SLA assignment; escalations run on working-time calendars with template notifications, major incidents get separate processes with master–slave ticket bundling, and a free load-balancer add-on distributes tickets by availability, workload and service capability. Queues with custom statuses, response templates, an agent KPI dashboard and automatic CSAT surveys round it out, but the workflow engine and Kanban board appear only as plans in the university case study. We found no public information on time tracking per ticket, an agent mobile app or AI classification — without time on the ticket my technicians' hours never reach an invoice.
Change, problem & release management
GLPI
Problem records carry symptoms, causes and impacts and link to tickets, changes and affected assets, while changes run a full lifecycle with twelve statuses, validation requiring a configurable minimum number of approvals, deployment and fallback plans, and cost estimation. We found no public information on standard, normal and emergency change types, a change calendar with blackout periods, a change advisory board workflow, release records, or an ITIL process certification.
OTOBO
Change and problem management are named modules — changes planned, approved and executed, recurring problems traced to root causes — with changes and problem tickets linked to incidents, configuration items and services, catalog approval processes, and tamper-proof audit logging. We found no public information on standard, normal and emergency change types, risk and impact assessment, a change calendar or blackout periods, a change advisory board, release management, or an ITIL process certification. For a regulated client I could not show an auditor a complete change trail from these pages.
Assets, CMDB & discovery
GLPI
Inventory covers hardware, software, licences, contracts, virtualization and network ports, with a documented life cycle from stock to withdrawal, per-asset modification history, custom asset types, discovery through FusionInventory or OCS Inventory plugins, and user import from Active Directory or Entra ID. The graphical impact and dependency analysis available as a tab on every asset, exportable as PNG, is the map I need when a switch dies at a client site. We found no public information on licence compliance or metering, or connectors to Intune, SCCM, JAMF or cloud platforms.
OTOBO
The open-source CMDB ships with pre-built categories for Location, Infrastructure, Network, Software, Contract and Workplace, a YAML editor for class definitions, relationships from any CI to users, incidents, problems, changes and services, a hierarchical tree view, and the full asset lifecycle from procurement to retirement. Data flows in from auto-discovery, inventory, asset management, directory services and product databases via REST/SOAP with continuous sync. Those sources stay generic, though: we found no public information on discovery for named platforms, connectors to Intune, SCCM, JAMF or cloud accounts, or software licence compliance and metering — the pieces I need across sixty client fleets.
Self-service portal & service catalog
GLPI
The redesigned service catalog has hierarchical categories, illustrations, fuzzy search with typo tolerance, pinned services and a knowledge base in the same unified search, and the portal lets users report incidents and track resolution, submit service requests and reserve equipment. Catalog configuration and access filtering run per entity with inheritance, which is how I would give each client its own front door. We found no public information on announcements and outage notices, satisfaction surveys, a virtual agent, automated fulfilment, or accessibility conformance.
OTOBO
Employees and customers get a branded portal with a searchable catalog spanning IT, HR, facilities and fleet, entitlement-based service visibility, runtime-generated request forms, multi-step approvals, an end-user knowledge base with keyword suggestions during ticket creation, a ticket-status widget, a news ticker for major disruptions, Kerberos single sign-on and automatic CSAT surveys. Visibility of tickets, services and knowledge areas can be restricted per customer or organisational unit — exactly the separation my sixty client contracts need. We found no public information on automated fulfilment for named requests, a virtual agent, deflection measurement or accessibility conformance.
Deployment, integrations & multi-client operation
GLPI
A documented API with OAuth clients and endpoints for tickets, users, entities and status, webhooks, a plugin marketplace, single sign-on with SCIM provisioning, Active Directory and Entra ID synchronisation, and both a managed cloud and a self-hosted open-source download give me two ways to run it, and the entity model with routing to a destination entity is the multi-client separation I operate on. We found no public information on connectors to RMM or remote support tools, time and contract billing for MSPs, a public status page with uptime history, or a stated feature parity between the cloud and self-hosted editions.
OTOBO
It runs on-premise or as a managed cloud service, the code is 100% open source with Docker recommended and a documented REST/SOAP API, authentication binds to Active Directory, LDAP or a customer database with single sign-on, roles, groups and ACLs gate access, and the OTRS migration tool, database switches and evening or weekend scheduling are documented in detail. Multi-client visibility separation is stated outright. We found no public information on webhooks, an integration marketplace, SCIM, a public status page, connectors to named RMM, monitoring or Microsoft 365 tools, or time and contract billing for service providers — the billing piece is what my invoicing stands on.
European sovereignty
GLPI
The contracting entity is a French company in Paris, cloud hosting runs on named OVHcloud infrastructure in France with Scaleway as a second host, the terms state no transfer of personal data outside the EU or EEA, a data processing agreement is referenced, breach notification is promised, and data is destroyed or returned on termination. Subprocessors are named, though the email relay and the payment provider are listed without a location, and we found no public information on security certifications in the vendor's own name.
OTOBO
The contracting entity is Rother OSS GmbH in Leiblfing, registered at Amtsgericht Straubing under HRB 12744, the vendor's own website, email and support portal run in data centres in Germany and Switzerland, and website subprocessors — Rapidmail in Germany, Google Analytics with IP anonymisation — are named with data processing agreements signed. The self-hosted, fully open-source edition is documented to leave full control of all data with the customer, which puts the whole chain on my own servers. We found no public information on where the managed cloud service hosts customer instances, a data processing agreement covering the hosted product, or any ISO 27001, BSI C5 or SOC 2 certification I could show a client.
Pricing transparency
GLPI
Public cloud is "19 € Excl. tax / month / user" starting with one user, private cloud is "21 € Excl. tax / month / user" with a twenty-five-user minimum, assets and end users are unlimited, modules are not sold separately, there is a 45-day trial, one month's notice on termination, and storage overages are invoiced at published rates — a per-technician model with free requesters is exactly how I price my own service. The dedicated architectures are based on a quote, and the captured pages show a subscriptions page for self-hosting without its figures and describe no onboarding or setup fees.
OTOBO
Three public tiers — Entry at 3.900€ pro Jahr, Professional at 9.900€ pro Jahr, Enterprise at 24.500€ pro Jahr — list unlimited incidents and unlimited service agents, quotas for support-entitled users (2, 4, 6) and service requests (10, 35, 100), response times from 4 Std. down to 0,5 Std., support hours and an HA cluster at Enterprise; the software and its add-ons are open source and licence-free, and the load balancer add-on is free of charge. Flat annual pricing with no per-agent fee is exactly what works when my team doubles. We found no public information on minimum term, VAT treatment, or setup, onboarding and migration fees — the migration effort for OTRS 7/8 is "determined individually for each case".
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.