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 Municipal IT Lead
Runs IT for a district administration with 900 staff, schools included, on servers in the municipal data centre. Follows BSI IT-Grundschutz and buys through public tenders, and the data protection officer will not sign off staff and device data on a US cloud. Wants an on-premise or open-source edition that is documented and maintained, a portal for teachers and clerks, assets linked to tickets, and a contract and price list the procurement office can put into a tender.
GLPI
OTOBO
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Service desk, incidents & requests
GLPI
Email collectors and the web portal bring tickets in; incidents and requests are handled; SLAs with escalation, an impact-urgency priority matrix, automated business rules, a knowledge base and reports by technician and category are all documented. We found no public information on chat or Teams intake, business hours, major incident handling, time tracking on tickets, AI assistance or an agent mobile app, so this sits a clear step above the solid multi-channel core but well short of the advanced tier.
OTOBO
Tickets arrive by email, phone and the self-service portal, with incidents and service requests kept apart, automatic prioritisation and routing, SLAs with calendar-based multi-level escalation, defined major incident processes with master-slave bundling, an integrated knowledge base and an agent dashboard with key figures — that is a working desk for our schools and offices. A free ticket load balancer add-on from a partner adds workload- and service-capability-based assignment, but we found no public information on time tracking per ticket, chat or Teams intake, a visual workflow builder or an agent mobile app.
Change, problem & release management
GLPI
Problem records link to incidents, changes and affected items with symptoms, causes and impacts, and changes carry statuses, a configurable minimum approval level and deployment and fallback plans — enough for basic ITIL discipline. We found no public information on standard, normal and emergency change types, a change calendar with blackout periods, release records, a CAB, an approval audit trail or any process certification, which is what our auditors would ask for.
OTOBO
Change and problem management exist as modules with approval and root-cause wording, changes are linked to incidents, configuration items and services, and all data accesses and changes are logged in tamper-evident, audit-ready storage — enough to start a Grundschutz conversation. We found no public information on standard, normal and emergency change types, a change calendar with blackout periods, a change advisory board workflow, release management or any process certification, and the captured forum threads on change approvals and change archiving show zero replies.
Assets, CMDB & discovery
GLPI
Hardware and software inventory with licences, contracts and a life cycle from stock to withdrawal, discovery via FusionInventory or OCS with SNMP network scanning, import from Active Directory and Entra ID, per-asset modification history and a graphical impact and dependency map exporting as PNG, with assets linked to the helpdesk and telemetry showing a 60,000-asset deployment. We found no public information on connectors such as Intune, SCCM or JAMF, or on licence compliance metering.
OTOBO
The integrated open-source CMDB ships with pre-built categories for locations, infrastructure, network, software, contracts and workplaces, a YAML editor for custom classes, relationship mapping from configuration items to users, incidents, problems and changes, a tree view, and import with continuous sync from auto-discovery, inventory, asset management and directory services via REST/SOAP — assets linked to tickets is exactly what I require. The life cycle from procurement to retirement and tamper-proof records are documented, but we found no public information on discovery for named platforms, connectors such as Intune, SCCM or JAMF, or software licence compliance and metering.
Self-service portal & service catalog
GLPI
A redesigned service catalog with hierarchical categories, illustrations, fuzzy search, pinned services, per-entity access control and knowledge base articles inside the portal is documented, together with incident reporting, service requests, multi-level approvals and single sign-on via OAuth2, CAS or SCIM. We found no public information on announcements and outage notices, satisfaction surveys, interface languages, a virtual agent or accessibility conformance, which our procurement office would ask about.
OTOBO
The portal offers a searchable service catalog with entitlement-based visibility across IT, HR, facilities and fleet, dynamic runtime-generated request forms with multi-step approvals, the user's own ticket overview with status, a knowledge base with keyword suggestions during ticket creation, a news ticker for major disruptions, single sign-on such as Kerberos, corporate-design branding and automatic satisfaction surveys — close to what our teachers and clerks need. We found no public information on a virtual agent, automated fulfilment such as password reset, per-item costs or delivery times, a WCAG accessibility statement, or the portal's available languages.
Deployment, integrations & multi-client operation
GLPI
This is open-source software we can download and run ourselves, with a self-hosted offer on the pricing page, a documented REST API with OAuth2 grants and endpoints for tickets, users and entities, webhooks, a plugin marketplace, and cloud plans on OVH with stated availability plus custom architectures including multi-site MySQL replication and geographic redundancy. We found no public information on feature parity between self-hosted and cloud editions, billing for managed service providers, a migration path from named tools, or a public status page.
OTOBO
OTOBO is 100 per cent open source, freely downloadable via Docker Hub and GitHub, and can run on-premise in our municipal data centre or as a managed cloud service, with a documented REST/SOAP API, Active Directory and LDAP authentication, role-based access via roles, groups and ACLs, a release support policy of at least three years, a documented step-by-step OTRS migration and a high-availability cluster in the Enterprise plan. For a regulated buyer the gaps are real: we found no public information on webhooks, SCIM provisioning, a public status page, named monitoring or remote support connectors, or a statement of feature parity between editions.
European sovereignty
GLPI
The contracting entity is TECLIB' SAS in Paris, hosting and daily backups sit on OVH in France, a data processing agreement exists, the terms commit to no transfer outside the EU or EEA, and subprocessors are named — OVH and Scaleway with French locations, plus Sendgrid for email relay and Stripe for payment, for which we found no stated location. We found no public information on security certifications such as ISO 27001 or BSI C5; the documented self-hosted open-source edition would keep our staff and device records on our own municipal servers, which is the chain my data protection officer can sign.
OTOBO
The contracting entity is Rother OSS GmbH of Leiblfing, registered at Amtsgericht Straubing, and the product is a fully open-source edition we can run on-premise, where the vendor states you retain full control over all your data — that puts every ticket, attachment and configuration item on the customer's own chain, which is what my data protection officer needs before any US cloud is even discussed. The vendor's own website, email and support servers sit in data centres in Germany and Switzerland, and subprocessors such as Rapidmail are named with their locations; we found no public information on the location of the managed cloud hosting, and no ISO 27001, BSI C5 or SOC 2 certification is stated.
Pricing transparency
GLPI
Two cloud prices are public — "19 € Excl. tax / month / user" from one user and "21 € Excl. tax / month / user" with a 25-user minimum for private cloud — with modules not sold separately and unlimited assets and end users, so the running cost per technician is visible. We found no public price for the self-hosted support subscription, dedicated architectures are on quote, storage overage refers to rates on another page, and the terms allow prices to be amended at any time without notice — that last point is a tender risk.
OTOBO
Three annual plans are public with exact figures — Entry 3.900€ pro Jahr, Professional 9.900€ pro Jahr and Enterprise 24.500€ pro Jahr — alongside unlimited service agents and incidents in every tier, service-request quotas of 10, 35 and 100, named support hours and response times, while the software and its add-ons are open source and license-cost free. What the procurement office still cannot compute for a tender: setup and onboarding, consulting and migration effort, the minimum contract term and VAT treatment — we found no public information on those.
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.