Non-EU vendorHRHeadquarters: GB

Breathe HR: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Breathe is a cloud-based HR platform for small and medium-sized businesses. It combines holiday and absence tracking, rota and time tracking, performance management, recruitment and onboarding, document management with e-signatures, expense management and an integration with Xero payroll. It also includes health and safety tools, e-learning with UK-specific courses, a mobile app and an AI assistant (early access) that answers employee questions from company policies. Breathe is delivered as SaaS and is aimed at the UK market.

The company is based in Horsham, United Kingdom. According to the vendor's security page, the platform runs on Amazon Web Services, with data held in a London data centre and a failover site in the UK. Breathe states that it holds ISO 27001 certification. The United Kingdom is outside the EU, so European organisations need to assess transfers of personal data to the UK separately. Breathe is not open source.

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Sovereignty score

32 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-250
Headquartered outside the EU (GB)
Data residency SOV-30
No hosting in Europe (OTHER)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-340
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-630
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	GB (OTHER)Verified by hand
Ultimate parent company	USVerified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Yes — found adequate by the European CommissionVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	OTHERVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal	CLOUDFLARESPECTRUM - Cloudflare London, LLC, US (US)Technically measured
Category	HR
Type	Product
Website	breathehr.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 Breathe HR

The European alternatives to Breathe HR come from our knowledge base of over 7,800 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

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 Breathe HR

Breathe HR is headquartered in GB, outside the EU. Contracts and data therefore also fall under non-European law. The GDPR applies through contractual terms, but in a conflict with local legislation you have less certainty than with a European vendor. The ultimate owner is based in US. Foreign control undermines part of the certainty a European headquarters offers.

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

Breathe HR 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 Breathe HR 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 Breathe HR?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Breathe HR include Mirro, PayFit and Protime. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Breathe HR?

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

Is Breathe HR GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Breathe HR is headquartered in GB (OTHER) and hosts data in OTHER. 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 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".

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.

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