EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceEnterprise SearchHeadquarters: US

Apache Solr: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Apache Solr is an open source search platform built on Apache Lucene, offering full-text, vector and geospatial search. It supports distributed indexing, replicated data, load-balanced queries, automated failover and recovery and centralised configuration, along with faceting, spatial search, plugins, statistics and aggregations, and an admin user interface. SolrCloud is its mode for scaling out. Organisations use Solr to build search into websites, applications and internal systems. It is software rather than a service: you download a binary, run it with Docker, or automate deployment on Kubernetes with the Solr Operator.

Solr is a project of the Apache Software Foundation, a US nonprofit that holds the trademarks and supports the community through consensus-based decision making. The code is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Because you run Solr yourself, the location and jurisdiction of your data depend entirely on where you deploy it: on your own servers or with a European hosting provider, the data stays in Europe.

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Sovereignty score
69 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-210
    Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    No hosting in Europe (US)
  • 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-665
    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 5, 2026
HeadquartersUS (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionOnly for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingUSVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantNoVendor-stated
CategoryEnterprise Search
TypeProduct
Websitesolr.apache.org ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Apache Solr

The European alternatives to Apache Solr 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

21 European Enterprise Search 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 Apache Solr

Apache Solr 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.

Apache Solr 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.

Apache Solr 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 Apache Solr 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 Apache Solr?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Apache Solr include AddSearch, Cludo and Datafari. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Apache Solr?

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

Is Apache Solr GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Apache Solr is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. Its GDPR compliance is limited or unclear. 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 5, 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 Enterprise Search

Enterprise Search: Internal knowledge and document search across company tools, wikis and file stores. 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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8 European alternatives to Apache Solr — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score