Self-hosted / open sourceCloud PaaSHeadquarters: DE

Cloudron: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Cloudron is a platform for installing, managing and securing web applications on your own server. You install Cloudron on a server from a provider of your choice, point a domain name at it and install apps from the Cloudron App Store, which also delivers updates and security fixes. The platform handles databases, DNS and certificates, and offers central user management with per-app access, a built-in mail server with calendar and contact sharing, a firewall and encrypted backups to external storage. Apps and entire servers can be moved to another provider.

Cloudron UG (haftungsbeschränkt) is based in Ergoldsbach, Germany. Because you choose where the server runs, you also decide where the data is held. According to the company, the app packages are open source and the platform code is source-available, with no specific licence named; it is therefore not open source in the strict sense. The code is published on the company's own GitLab instance so that you can inspect what runs on your servers.

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Sovereignty score

80 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-2100
Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
Data residency SOV-3100
EU-only hosting
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-380
Closed source, but self-hostable: encryption keys and runtime under your own control
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-680
Closed source, but self-hostable on your own infrastructure

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	DE (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	Self-hosted, e.g. in EU (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Compliance documents	1 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signal	DIGITALOCEAN-ASN - DigitalOcean, LLC, US (US)Technically measured
Category	Cloud PaaS
Type	Product
Website	cloudron.io ↗

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 Cloudron

The European alternatives to Cloudron 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

31 European Cloud PaaS 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 Cloudron

Cloudron is headquartered in DE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Cloudron runs on infrastructure you choose and control yourself. You decide where the data lives, including fully within the EU if you want — this is not a fixed hosting choice made by the vendor.

Cloudron is closed source, but you run the software yourself on your own infrastructure. The encryption keys and the runtime therefore stay under your own control, though you cannot audit or modify the source code. Ask about export options and open standards to limit software-level lock-in.

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

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Cloudron include alwaysdata, amazee.io and anynines (a9s). On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Cloudron?

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

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

Cloudron is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Cloudron 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 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".

Security page / trust center: cloudron.io/security.html

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

Links checked on September 21, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in Cloud PaaS

Cloud PaaS: Platform as a Service — managed runtimes, container orchestration, serverless. 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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