Non-EU vendorHRHeadquarters: US

15Five: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

15Five is a performance management and employee engagement platform for HR teams and managers. It covers performance reviews, one-to-one meetings, check-ins and OKRs, engagement surveys with analytics, compensation insights, and development planning. It also offers an AI assistant for managers and AI-supported review workflows, and it integrates with HRIS and single sign-on systems. The product is delivered as SaaS by 15Five, Inc., based in San Francisco.

As a US company, 15Five is subject to US jurisdiction, including the CLOUD Act. Its sub-processor list names Amazon Web Services for hosting, together with Cloudflare and Snowflake, all US-based providers, and no EU data region is described. The privacy policy states that customers can request a data processing agreement incorporating Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers from the EU, Switzerland and the UK to the United States. Performance and engagement data is personal data about employees, so European organisations should review these transfer mechanisms and the sub-processor list, and compare HR tools that host in the EU, before adopting it.

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Sovereignty score

17 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
Data residency SOV-30
No hosting in Europe (US)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-320
Key management with a non-European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-615
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 13, 2026

Headquarters	US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	USVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Category	HR
Type	Product
Website	15five.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to 15Five

The European alternatives to 15Five come from our knowledge base of over 8,000 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

65 European HR 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 15Five

15Five is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

15Five hosts data outside the EU (US). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

15Five 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 15Five 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 15Five?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to 15Five include absence.io, AFAS and AlexisHR. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to 15Five?

Our list of EU alternatives to 15Five is mostly commercial options. Browse the category on the map for open-source choices.

Is 15Five GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

15Five is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. The vendor states it is GDPR-compliant, but the data falls under non-EU jurisdiction. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

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 13, 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".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in HR

HR: Human resources — personnel management, payroll, recruiting. 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.

Also in this category

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