OTRS vs Znuny

OTRS

The evidence proves the category label — 'Customer Service & Helpdesk' on the homepage — and nothing else: no queue, no routing rule, no SLA timer, no macro, not a word on whether search reaches ticket bodies. I judge by the hundredth reply, and I can't put a routing model in front of a team that this sheet doesn't show. One point for the label, and that's charity.

Znuny

Real queue machinery: queues are permission objects you can group by department, service or country, tickets carry ownership and priority, teams hand off by moving or splitting tickets, and the queue view drills down through My Queues. Mail is dispatched by queue or recipient field, which is routing of a sort. But I found no public information on SLA timers, escalation chains, macros or full-text search across ticket bodies — the parts that decide whether ticket ten thousand gets found.

OTRS

The word 'helpdesk' is the only reason to believe email lands anywhere; no chat, phone, portal, messenger or social channel appears in any of the six captured pages. I can't even confirm one shared queue, let alone a customer switching channels mid-issue without starting over.

Znuny

The email side is documented in depth — IMAP and POP3 variants, Microsoft Graph, OAuth2 tokens, any number of mailboxes with folder-level selection — and a phone permission puts phone-call screens into the same queues, so a call is a ticket rather than a separate inbox. Beyond that I found no public information on chat, a customer portal, messengers or social, so the customer has no second way in that these pages show.

OTRS

The only knowledge content anywhere is 'viewing FAQs' on OTRS's own website — that's their marketing, not a help centre my customers could search. No article workflow, no agent suggestions, no deflection reporting: as this sheet shows it, answers live in agents' heads and old tickets, which is the definition of the floor.

Znuny

I found no public information on a knowledge base, help centre or article workflow — the description covers corporate-level ticket management and the fork lineage, full stop. As far as the captured pages show, answers live in agents' heads and old tickets.

OTRS

The GDPR practice on display is real but entirely about OTRS GmbH's own website: stated retention periods (trial data 3 years, emails 10 years for tax), a named external DPO, and a long subprocessor list with SCCs for the US ones. Nothing executes on the product side — no agent roles, no queue visibility, no ticket redaction, no audit of who opened which ticket, and no signable DPA confirmed in the Trust Center. The vendor polices its own cookies well; the ticket archive is silent.

Znuny

The pages document genuinely fine-grained, executing access control: seven basic queue permissions from read-only to full write, plus extended ones for close, pending, bounce, forward and compose, all bound to queues and groups. On the protection side I found no public information on a stated retention period, a deletion path for a requester's data, an audit log of who opened which ticket, or a data processing agreement.

OTRS

The only integrations named anywhere are the vendor's own marketing stack — Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, 6sense, LinkedIn pixels — which serve their ads, not my tickets. No CRM connector, no API docs, no webhooks, no SSO: as far as this sheet goes, context gets copied in by hand.

Znuny

The only outward-facing machinery shown is mail collection — including Microsoft Graph and OAuth2 authentication — and X-OTRS headers that can set ticket data from an incoming message. I found no public information on a documented REST API, webhooks, CRM or shop integrations, or single sign-on.

OTRS

The imprint puts the contracting entity squarely in Germany — OTRS GmbH, Oberursel, registered at Amtsgericht Frankfurt, VAT DE-numbered — and third-country processing is at least named with SCCs. But hosting for customer instances is stated nowhere (the pipeline marks residency unknown), and the published subprocessor list is website trackers, not the product chain, so I can't tell a buyer where the ticket archive would sleep. German entity gets it above the 3 anchor; unproven hosting keeps it well short of 5.

Znuny

The contracting entity is a German GmbH in Berlin with a commercial register entry and VAT ID, and the software is a free download you host yourself, so the ticket archive sits on infrastructure the customer chooses. I found no public information on ownership, hosting arrangements or any subprocessor list, which keeps this below the evidenced-in-full mark.

OTRS

Three separate homepage captures and a full legal sweep, and not one euro figure, tier name or per-agent price appears anywhere. I can't compute an annual invoice for eight agents from what I was shown, which means every tier is a sales conversation as far as this sheet goes.

Znuny

The price is one word and it is public: 'Software is free', 'Free as free can be', with download and guaranteed long-term support on the same page, so any agent count computes to the same software invoice. The single unpriced line is professional services, which the homepage names without a figure.