Self-hosted / open sourceBPM & WorkflowHeadquarters: US

Cadence: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Cadence is an open-source durable execution engine that lets developers write fault-tolerant, long-running workflows as code. Workflows and activities are defined in languages such as Go and Java. Cadence persists the execution history, retries failed activities automatically and resumes workflows from the point of failure, without separate message queues. State can be stored in Cassandra, PostgreSQL or MySQL, with OpenSearch supported for search. Cadence is not a hosted service but software that you deploy yourself, for example with Docker or with Helm charts on Kubernetes.

Cadence originated at Uber, a US company, and is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. It is a CNCF project, and its copyright notice names "Cadence a Series of LF Projects, LLC", which points to neutral foundation governance rather than control by a single vendor. Because you run Cadence yourself, your own infrastructure determines where data resides: on European servers, execution history and workflow data stay in Europe. There is no vendor cloud service whose hosting location would need to be checked.

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

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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 (self-host, multi-cloud)
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 4, 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	Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting	self-host, multi-cloudVerified by hand
Open-source	YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Category	BPM & Workflow
Type	Product
Website	cadenceworkflow.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Cadence

The European alternatives to Cadence 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

22 European BPM & Workflow 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 Cadence

Cadence 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.

Cadence hosts data outside the EU (self-host, multi-cloud). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

Cadence 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 Cadence 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 Cadence?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Cadence include Albato, ARIS and Automatisch. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Cadence?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Cadence include Automatisch, Ofelia (Bonita) and Flowable. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Cadence is headquartered in US and hosts data in self-host, multi-cloud. 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 4, 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 BPM & Workflow

BPM & Workflow: Business process management, workflow automation and process modelling. 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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