EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceCybersecurityHeadquarters: US

ClamAV: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

ClamAV is an open-source antivirus toolkit for detecting trojans, viruses and other malware. It is designed especially for scanning e-mail on mail gateways. It consists of a multi-threaded daemon (clamd), a command-line scanner and a signature-database updater, all built on a shared scanning library, plus an on-access client for Linux. The project tests the software on Linux distributions, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows. You install and operate ClamAV yourself as server software.

ClamAV is brought to you by Cisco Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Jose, California (United States), and is released under the GNU GPL version 2; the source code is on GitHub. Because the software runs on your own systems, files are scanned locally. The updater fetches signature updates through the project's distribution. According to the documentation, files submitted to Cisco for review are not shared outside Cisco and are kept indefinitely. Security releases appeared in 2026, the latest being 1.5.4 in August.

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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 14, 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
USVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
NoVendor-stated
Category
Cybersecurity
Type
Product
Website
clamav.net ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to ClamAV

The European alternatives to ClamAV come from our knowledge base of over 8,400 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

181 European Cybersecurity 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 ClamAV

ClamAV 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.

ClamAV 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.

ClamAV 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 ClamAV 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 ClamAV?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to ClamAV include Actalis, Advenica and Aikido Security. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to ClamAV?

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

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

ClamAV 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 14, 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".

We found none of these signals on the vendor's own site when we checked.

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

Checked on October 14, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

In the changelog

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

Digital sovereignty in Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity: Threat detection, endpoint protection, SIEM, vulnerability management. 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 ClamAV — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score