EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceEmail (Personal)Headquarters: CH

Alps: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Alps is a minimalist, stateless webmail client written in Go. It connects to an existing IMAP server and uses an SMTP server for sending, so it needs no central database of its own. Organisations and mail providers can use it as the web interface for their mailboxes. It supports multiple tenants, a responsive theme, CalDAV and CardDAV integration and a lightweight plugin system in Lua or Go. It is server software that you run as a single Go program with a TOML configuration file.

Alps is maintained by Migadu-Mail GmbH, a Swiss company, and released under the MIT licence, which is OSI-approved. Because you run Alps on your own infrastructure in front of your own mail server, mailbox data stays with you and is not sent to the maintainer. Migadu also sells hosted email, but Alps itself has no vendor cloud. Development was supported by the NGI0 Commons Fund, which NLnet runs with funding from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme.

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Sovereignty score
94 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in Switzerland: Swiss law, recognised by the EU as adequate
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    Hosting in Switzerland only (recognised by the EU as adequate)
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-6100
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

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 16, 2026
Headquarters
CH (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
CHVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Email (Personal)
Type
Product
Website
github.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Alps

The European alternatives to Alps come from our knowledge base of over 9,500 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

42 European Email (Personal) 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 Alps

Alps is headquartered in Switzerland and falls under Swiss law, including the revised Swiss data protection act. Switzerland is not an EU member, but the European Commission recognises its level of data protection as adequate. Its Swiss headquarters does not by itself bring it under US legislation such as the CLOUD Act.

Alps hosts data in Switzerland only. Switzerland is not part of the EU or the EEA, so the GDPR does not apply there directly; the European Commission does recognise Swiss data protection as adequate, so personal data can go there without extra safeguards. Our model therefore scores it between EU hosting and hosting outside Europe. If you require strictly EU hosting, take this into account.

Alps is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Alps 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 Alps?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Alps include ABV, Betterbird and Bluewin Mail. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Alps?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Alps include Betterbird, Disroot and FairEmail. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Alps is headquartered in CH (EFTA) and hosts data in CH. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Alps 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 16, 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

In the changelog

Earlier changes to this page, as listed in the public changelog.

Digital sovereignty in Email (Personal)

Email (Personal): Personal email services — inbox, calendar, contacts. 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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8 European alternatives to Alps — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score