EU sovereignITSMHeadquarters: DE

OTRS: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

OTRS is a service management platform for customer service, IT service management, information security management and cyber defence. The vendor lists ready-made solutions for help desk, customer service, IT service management, office and HR management, and STORM for cybersecurity incident management. Capabilities include ticket management, automation and reporting, ITIL-aligned processes, a CMDB, security incident and vulnerability management, a business process management system, knowledge management, AI ticket summaries and a Kanban view. OTRS can be taken on-premise or as a managed service.

The website names OTRS GmbH as the legal entity, and the company is based in Germany. In December 2024 EasyVista, a company backed by the French investor Eurazeo, completed the acquisition of a majority stake in OTRS Group. OTRS's trust centre lists hosting providers by region: Hetzner and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in Europe, plus other providers in North America and Asia-Pacific. OTRS states that it currently holds neither ISO 27001 nor SOC 2 certification. Organisations should therefore have the hosting country and provider for their contract confirmed.

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Sovereignty score

59 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-2100
Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
Data residency SOV-350
Hosting inside and outside Europe (EU, US, OTHER)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-360
Key management with a European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-645
Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 9, 2026

Headquarters	DE (EU)	Verified by hand
Ultimate parent company	FR	Verified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (EU)	Verified by hand
Data hosting	EU, US, OTHER	Verified by hand
Open-source	No	Verified by hand
GDPR-compliant	Yes	Vendor-stated
Compliance documents	1 published, see below	Vendor-stated
Hosting signal	DIGITALOCEAN-ASN - DigitalOcean, LLC, US (US)	Technically measured
Category	ITSM
Type	Product
Website	otrs.com ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to OTRS

The European alternatives to OTRS come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

25 European ITSM vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with OTRS

OTRS is headquartered in DE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data. The ultimate owner is based in FR, also within Europe.

OTRS hosts data in EU, US, OTHER. Exactly what stays within the EU — and what does not — is defined by the vendor's data processing agreement and sub-processor list, not by a setting you control yourself; check those documents for the precise scope, including backups, logs and support access.

OTRS is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs OTRS together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to OTRS?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to OTRS include Ardoq, Axxerion (Spacewell Workplace) and ADOIT. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to OTRS?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to OTRS include CMDBuild and Combodo iTop. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is OTRS GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

OTRS is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU, US, OTHER. That makes OTRS an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 9, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

Security page / trust center: otrs.com/trust-center/

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

Links checked on September 21, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in ITSM

ITSM: IT Service Management — ticketing, CMDB, asset management. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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