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 Service Desk Lead
Leads a team of eight agents at a machine builder with 1,400 employees across three plants in Germany and one in Poland. Most tickets still arrive by email, and the same printer and VPN questions come in every Monday. Wants incidents and requests told apart, SLAs that escalate on their own, a portal with a catalog people actually use, answers that deflect the Monday tickets, and reports the IT director reads without a spreadsheet.
GLPI
OTOBO
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Service desk, incidents & requests
GLPI
Email collectors and the web interface bring tickets in, incidents and requests are handled as distinct types, and automated business rules assign them with SLA and OLA escalation, an impact-urgency priority calculation, wait reasons and statistics per technician, category and request — that is the working spine my team needs. We found no public information on chat or Teams intake, major-incident handling with communication to affected users, a visual workflow builder, time tracking on tickets or an agent mobile app, so it clears the middle level clearly but not the one above.
OTOBO
Tickets arrive by email, phone and the self-service portal, incidents and service requests are kept apart, and SLAs carry response and solution times with multi-level escalations on working-time calendars — automatic escalation is documented, not promised. Major incident processes with separate escalations and notifications, master–slave ticket bundling, configurable queues, response templates and a free load balancer assigning by workload and service capability lift this above the solid core. We found no public information on time tracking on tickets, a visual workflow builder, AI suggestions or an agent mobile app.
Change, problem & release management
GLPI
Problems are documented as the source of their incidents with symptoms, causes and impacts referenced, and changes carry a full status life cycle, multi-level validation with a configurable minimum number of approvals, deployment and fallback plans, cost estimation and links to tickets, problems, impacted assets and knowledge base articles. We found no public information on standard, normal and emergency change types, a change calendar with blackout periods, a CAB, release and deployment records, or a named process certification, which is where this stops for an auditor.
OTOBO
Problem and change management are named modules — recurring causes identified and eliminated, changes planned, approved and carried out — with the CMDB mapping relationships between CIs and incidents, problems and changes, multi-step approvals described and the ITSM Change Management package carrying its own documentation. We found no public information on change types, risk assessment, a change calendar, release and deployment records or known errors, so this stays near the basic end.
Assets, CMDB & discovery
GLPI
The inventory covers computers, screens, printers, network equipment and phones with a life cycle from stock to withdraw, per-asset modification history, discovery via the FusionInventory and OCS Inventory plugins, user imports from Active Directory and Entra ID, and assets linked to the helpdesk; the graphical impact and dependency analysis with configurable depth and PNG export is genuinely useful for plant outages. We found no public information on connectors to Intune, SCCM or JAMF, or on software licence compliance and metering, so I score it one notch above solid.
OTOBO
The open-source CMDB ships with predefined, extendable CI categories (Location, Infrastructure, Network, Software, Contract, Workplace), a YAML editor for class definitions, relationship mapping to users, tickets, changes and services, a tree visualization, and the full asset life cycle from procurement to retirement for IT and non-IT assets, with data synced via webservice and the REST/SOAP interface from auto-discovery, inventory, directory services and product databases. We found no public information on discovery for named platforms, connectors such as Intune, SCCM or JAMF, or software licence compliance.
Self-service portal & service catalog
GLPI
The service catalog has hierarchical categories, illustrations, fuzzy real-time search, pinned services and a knowledge base unified with the search; users report incidents, submit requests through forms with attachments, reserve loaner equipment, and the portal is customizable with single sign-on via oAuth2, CAS or SCIM. We found no public information on announcements and outage notices, satisfaction surveys, a virtual agent, automated fulfilment such as password reset, several languages, or accessibility conformance, which is what would deflect our Monday tickets.
OTOBO
The portal offers a searchable, authorization-based service catalog spanning IT, HR, facilities and fleet, runtime-generated ticket forms, multi-step approvals, an end-user knowledge base with keyword suggestions during ticket creation, ticket status overview, a news ticker for major disruptions, corporate-design branding, single sign-on and automatic CSAT surveys, with visibility restricted per customer or organizational unit. We found no public information on automated fulfilment such as password reset, a virtual agent, measured deflection, portal languages or accessibility conformance.
Deployment, integrations & multi-client operation
GLPI
There is a documented API v2 with OAuth clients, grant types, scopes and endpoints for tickets, users, entities and profiles, plus webhooks, a plugin marketplace, SCIM, Active Directory and Entra ID integrations, profile- and entity-based permissions with recursion, and both a cloud service with published availability of 97% or 99% and a downloadable open-source self-hosted edition. We found no public information on feature parity between the editions, Microsoft 365 or Teams integrations, named monitoring or RMM connectors, MSP billing, migrations from named tools, or a public status page, so the level sits above mid but not near the top.
OTOBO
One 100% open-source codebase runs on premise — with full control over all your data — or as a managed cloud service, with Docker installation recommended, downloads via Docker Hub, sources or FTP, and a published release cadence with support-end dates per version of at least three years. A REST/SOAP API with web services, authentication against Active Directory, LDAP or a customer database, single sign-on, role/group/ACL permissions, multi-client visibility separation and a step-by-step migration from OTRS are documented. We found no public information on webhooks, SCIM, monitoring or remote-support connectors, or a public status page.
European sovereignty
GLPI
Teclib' SAS contracts from Paris under French law, cloud hosting runs on OVH in France with Scaleway also named, the terms state that no personal data is transferred outside the EU or EEA, a data processing agreement exists with breach notification and data return or destruction written down, and the open-source edition can be downloaded and self-hosted. We found no public information on security certifications such as ISO 27001, and the Sendgrid email relay and Stripe payment subprocessors are listed without their locations, which holds this just under the top of the range.
OTOBO
The contracting entity is Rother OSS GmbH, registered at Amtsgericht Straubing with its seat in Leiblfing, Germany, and on-premise operation is documented as keeping full control of all data, so records stay on the customer's own servers. The vendor's website, email system and support portal run in data centres in Germany and Switzerland, with named subprocessors (Rapidmail in Germany, Google under a signed data processing agreement) and contracts with the hosting providers. We found no public information on where the managed cloud service hosts customer data, product-level subprocessors, a customer data processing agreement, or security certifications.
Pricing transparency
GLPI
Public cloud is priced at '19 € Excl. tax / month / user' from one user and private cloud at '21 € Excl. tax / month / user' with a 25-user minimum, with unlimited end users and assets, all modules in a single price, a 45-day free trial, prices in EUR excluding VAT, annual billing and one month's termination notice — my technician count times the rate is the whole cloud bill. Dedicated architectures are quote-based, and we found no public information on prices for the self-hosted subscription, so an on-premises annual cost is not computable from public pages alone.
OTOBO
Three support tiers are published with exact annual prices — Entry 3.900€ pro Jahr, Professional 9.900€ pro Jahr, Enterprise 24.500€ pro Jahr — including support-entitled users, unlimited service agents and incidents, service-request quotas, response times and support hours, while the software downloads free with no license costs, add-ons are open source and free of charge, and there is explicitly no agent-based pricing. Managed-service hosting, consulting, training and migration pricing are not published, and minimum term and VAT treatment are not stated; we found no public information on setup or onboarding fees.
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.