EU sovereignVPNHeadquarters: IT

AirVPN: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

AirVPN is a VPN service that supports OpenVPN and WireGuard and is aimed at individuals and technically minded users who want to route their internet traffic through an encrypted tunnel. You use the service through AirVPN's own client Eddie for Windows, macOS and Linux, or through the command-line client Hummingbird. Eddie includes DNS-leak protection and a network lock. According to AirVPN, it keeps no connection or traffic logs.

AirVPN is an Italian provider and therefore subject to EU law, including the GDPR. No foreign parent company is known. Its servers are located in several countries, both inside and outside the EU, so where your traffic exits depends on the server you choose. The service itself is not open source, but the source code of the Eddie client is available on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 licence. No independent audit of the logging policy is known.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with AirVPN pre-selected

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Sovereignty score

71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-2100
Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
Data residency SOV-3100
EU-only hosting
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-655
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 1, 2026

Headquarters	IT (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	EUVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal	OVH - OVH SAS, FR (FR)Technically measured
Category	VPN
Type	Product
Website	airvpn.org ↗

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 AirVPN

The European alternatives to AirVPN come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 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

21 European VPN 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 AirVPN

AirVPN is headquartered in IT and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so AirVPN scores best on data residency.

AirVPN 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 AirVPN 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 AirVPN?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to AirVPN include AdGuard VPN, Avast SecureLine VPN and Avira Phantom VPN. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to AirVPN?

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

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

AirVPN is headquartered in IT (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes AirVPN 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 1, 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

Cyber Resilience Act

Public signals that relate to the EU Cyber Resilience Act. They do not count towards the score. A missing line means "not found publicly".

Report a vulnerability: airvpn.org/security_policy/
security.txt: airvpn.org/.well-known/security.txt

For products in scope of the CRA, CE marking is required from 11 December 2027; this cannot be checked yet.

Checked on October 9, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

Digital sovereignty in VPN

VPN: Virtual private network — privacy protection, encrypted connection. 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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