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 Solo IT Admin
The whole IT department of a 160-person engineering firm, with a part-time trainee on Thursdays. Requests come in by email, Teams and in the corridor, and the asset list is a spreadsheet nobody trusts. Has no time for an ITIL project: wants email and Teams turned into tickets, a simple portal with answers to the common questions, laptops and licences found automatically, a setup that takes days rather than months, and a price they can read off the website.
GLPI
This judge's pick
OTOBO
Criterion by criterion
Service desk, incidents & requests
GLPI
Mail receivers turn our support mailboxes into tickets and the portal takes the web ones, with incidents and requests told apart, auto-categorisation, rule-based assignment, SLAs with escalation, an impact-and-urgency priority matrix, recurring tickets, technician calendars and reports by technician and category. What I want most — intake from Teams or chat — I found no public information on, nor on business hours, major-incident handling or a mobile app for agents.
OTOBO
Email, phone and the self-service portal all create tickets, with automatic prioritisation, routing and SLA assignment, working-hours calendars behind multi-level escalations, queues with custom statuses, master-slave bundling for major incidents and a free ticket load balancer that distributes by workload and service capability — most of my week in one box. The agent dashboard shows KPIs, and knowledge base and response templates are integrated. We found no public information on Microsoft Teams or chat intake, time tracking on tickets, AI suggestions or a mobile app for agents.
Change, problem & release management
GLPI
Problems link to their incidents with symptoms, causes and impacts, and changes get a full status ladder, a configurable approval threshold, deployment and fallback plans with a checklist, cost estimation, and links to tickets, items and projects. I found no public information on standard, normal and emergency change types, a change calendar with blackout periods, known-error records or who-approved-what audit trails, so it reads ITIL-flavoured rather than audit-ready.
OTOBO
Change and problem management exist as named modules, change requests link to incidents and configuration items, multi-step approvals run from the service catalog, and general audit logging is described. We found no public information on standard, normal and emergency change types, a change calendar, known-error records, CAB workflows or an ITIL process certification, and a forum thread notes change management is documented only as the OTOBO ITSM Change Management package.
Assets, CMDB & discovery
GLPI
This is the part that would replace my untrusted spreadsheet: inventory of computers, screens, printers, phones and software, a lifecycle from stock to withdraw, a complete modification history per asset, network discovery and local inventory via FusionInventory or OCS, user import from Active Directory or Entra ID, and a graphical impact and dependency analysis on each asset, exportable as PNG. Budgets, contracts, suppliers and licences are tracked, but I found no public information on Intune, SCCM or JAMF-style connectors or on licence metering.
OTOBO
The integrated open-source CMDB ships with predefined, customizable CI categories (Location, Infrastructure, Network, Software, Contract, Workplace), a YAML editor for class definitions, relationships linking CIs to users, tickets, changes and services, a hierarchical relationship tree, and a stated lifecycle from procurement to retirement. Imports and continuous sync run via web services and REST/SOAP from named source types including auto-discovery, inventory and directory services — but we found no public information on named discovery platforms or connectors such as Intune or SCCM, or on software licence compliance.
Self-service portal & service catalog
GLPI
The redesigned catalog is a proper front door for my 160 users: hierarchical categories with illustrations, fuzzy search, pinned services, knowledge base articles in a unified search, incident reporting with real-time status tracking, equipment reservations, and per-entity configuration with single sign-on. I found no public information on automated fulfilment like password reset, a virtual agent, announcements, satisfaction surveys or accessibility conformance.
OTOBO
Employees get a searchable service catalog with authorisation-based visibility, dynamic request forms, multi-step approvals, a knowledge base with keyword suggestions during ticket creation, ticket-overview and news-ticker widgets for outage notices, single sign-on and automatic CSAT surveys — that covers the questions my 160 people actually ask. Corporate-design customization and multi-tenant visibility restrictions are documented. We found no public information on a virtual agent, automated fulfilment such as password reset, portal languages or accessibility conformance.
Deployment, integrations & multi-client operation
GLPI
There is a documented API with OAuth clients and endpoints for tickets, users and profiles, plus webhooks, a plugin marketplace, SCIM, Entra ID and LDAP synchronisation, a 45-day trial, and a self-hosted download edition next to the cloud, with availability of 97–99% by tier and free data migration included. I found no public information on feature parity between the editions, MSP time-and-contract billing, RMM connectors or a public status page.
OTOBO
The whole product is 100% open source: download it free, install via Docker, run on-premise or as their managed cloud service, with a documented REST/SOAP API, single sign-on, role/group/ACL permissions, Active Directory and LDAP authentication, and multi-tenant visibility separation. The OTRS migration path is documented in unusual detail with published release and support timelines, and the Enterprise tier includes a high-availability cluster. We found no public information on a public status page, SCIM, webhooks, or named Microsoft 365/Teams, monitoring or RMM integrations.
European sovereignty
GLPI
Teclib' is a Paris company under French law, the cloud runs on OVH and Scaleway in France, the subprocessors are named — including SendGrid for mail relay and Stripe for payment — a data processing agreement exists, personal data stays in the EU/EEA, and destroy-or-return on exit is written into the terms; a self-hosted open-source download is documented as well. I found no public information on ISO 27001, SOC 2 or C5 certification for Teclib' itself, and the countries of the SendGrid and Stripe links are not stated.
OTOBO
Rother OSS GmbH is a German company with a commercial register entry at Amtsgericht Straubing, and the on-premise open-source edition is documented to keep full control of all your data on your own servers — that is the chain I would actually run. Their own website, email and support portal servers sit in data centres in Germany and Switzerland, with data processing agreements signed with the hosting providers and a German newsletter provider. We found no public information on where the managed cloud stores customer ticket data, a published product data processing agreement, or security certifications such as ISO 27001.
Pricing transparency
GLPI
Finally a price I can read off the page: 19 € excluding tax per month per user from one user on the public cloud, 21 € excluding tax per month per user from 25 users on private, with unlimited assets and end users, every module in a single price, disk space per tier, annual billing, a one-month termination notice and a 45-day free trial. The self-hosted subscription price and the dedicated-architecture option are on quote or behind a separate subscriptions link, and the terms say prices may change at any time without notice.
OTOBO
The software is licence-free and downloadable, service agents and incidents are unlimited on every tier with no agent-based pricing, and the support subscriptions are printed on the page: Entry 3.900€ pro Jahr, Professional 9.900€ pro Jahr, Enterprise 24.500€ pro Jahr, with the inclusion ladder spelled out (service requests 10/35/100, support-entitled users 2/4/6, response times and support hours). A free community edition and free forum support exist, and a case study states there are no hidden costs or add-ons. We found no public information on minimum term, VAT treatment, or the cost of the managed cloud, consulting or training.
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.