OTRS vs Znuny

OTRS

The category label says Customer Service & Helpdesk, so a ticket engine presumably exists, but three homepage captures never mention a queue, a routing rule, an SLA timer or search — not one engine feature is evidenced, so I can't go past 'the engine exists'.

Znuny

Queues are documented as permission objects with ticket ownership, priorities, pending and close states, and moving or splitting tickets between teams — a real status model, not a shared mailbox. Mail is dispatched to queues either by a fixed selection or by the To: field, and I found no public information on SLA timers with breach warnings, escalation chains, macros and triggers, or full-text search across ticket bodies. Split and move are there; everything my SLA reporting would need is invisible to me.

OTRS

Not one channel fact in the evidence — even email-to-ticket is unconfirmed, and the only channel-adjacent quotes (web forms, video conferencing via a US provider) describe OTRS's own website, not the product's queue.

Znuny

Everything captured on channels is mail collection: any number of mailboxes over the standard IMAP and POP3 variants plus MSGraph, with OAuth2 tokens, folder selection and scheduled fetches. A permission granting access to phone screens hints that agent-logged calls become tickets, though I found no public information on chat, a customer portal, messengers or social channels landing in the same queue with a shared history.

OTRS

The single KB-shaped fact is that OTRS's own website has FAQs you can view after registering; nothing on article workflow, agent suggestions, review dates or deflection reporting for the product, so knowledge as a managed asset is entirely unevidenced.

Znuny

The captured pages cover queues, mail collection and permissions, and I found no public information on a knowledge base, help centre, article workflow, suggestions to agents or customers, or deflection reporting. Nothing captured indicates that tickets are reduced as well as organised.

OTRS

There is a published privacy statement, a named external DPO and stated retention periods — but every one of them governs OTRS's own marketing and website data, not the ticket archive; the product gets no evidenced retention rules, agent roles, audit log or executable deletion path for a requester.

Znuny

Access control is the documented strength: seven queue-level permissions from read-only to full access, plus extended permissions such as close and pending that only apply once implemented, so agent visibility can genuinely be scoped per queue. Against that, I found no public information on retention periods, a deletion path for a requester's data, subject-rights support, an audit log of ticket access, or a data processing agreement.

OTRS

No API, no webhooks, no SCIM, no sandbox, no rate limits, and not one named CRM, shop or identity connector on any captured page — there isn't even an integrations page to read a partner form off. In the world this sheet gives me, context is copied in by hand and I can wire nothing.

Znuny

This is the criterion that decides my purchase, and I found no public information on a REST API, webhooks, SCIM, documented rate limits, a sandbox, SSO, or named connectors for CRM, shop or identity systems. The only machine interfaces captured are inbound X-OTRS mail headers that set ticket data without a filter, and MSGraph mail collection with OAuth2 — clever paths, but not surfaces I can build a CRM or order-management link against. Integration work appears to route through Znuny Professional Services and the community forum, which to me is a conversation where I want documentation.

OTRS

The contracting entity is solidly German — OTRS GmbH, Oberursel, HRB 143059 at Amtsgericht Frankfurt — which is real, but product hosting is unstated and the archive's own subprocessor chain is absent; the privacy policy itself concedes processors outside the EU and forum hosting partly outside the EU, and the named web-stack subprocessors include Google Inc., LinkedIn Corp and Vimeo in the US.

Znuny

The German contracting entity is fully evidenced — Znuny GmbH in Berlin, commercial register Charlottenburg under HRB 139852 B, VAT identification number DE281642846, named managing directors — and the software is a free download, so I could keep the ticket archive on my own EU infrastructure. I found no public information on hosting arrangements, a subprocessor list, or certification, and ownership and data residency are recorded as unknown.

OTRS

Three homepage captures plus the legal and privacy pages contain no price, no tier, no per-agent number, no billing period — the annual invoice is uncomputable from public pages alone.

Znuny

"Free as free can be" is about as computable as a headline price gets: the software is a free download with the current release and an LTS release listed, so the licence line of my annual invoice is zero at any agent count. Beyond that I cannot compute the invoice: Znuny Professional Services is offered and I found no public information on its pricing, nor on what the guaranteed long-term support costs or to whom it applies.