EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceTesting & QAHeadquarters: US

Cucumber: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Cucumber is an open-source test framework for behaviour-driven development (BDD). Teams write automated acceptance tests in plain language, in the Gherkin format, so that non-programmers can read them too. According to the project site, Cucumber supports many platforms, including Java, JavaScript, Ruby and .NET. It is a library that runs locally or in a CI pipeline; the project has no central cloud service. Its code, such as Cucumber-JVM, is released under the MIT licence.

Cucumber began as a Ruby project and was acquired by SmartBear in 2019. In December 2024 SmartBear transferred the name, trademarks and the cucumber.io domain to the US-based Open Source Collective, a non-profit that holds the project on behalf of the community. Because the software runs wherever you install it and sends no customer data to a vendor, jurisdictional exposure is limited to the stewarding organisation and the project's dependencies. SmartBear also offers commercial products around Cucumber, which are outside this overview.

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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 11, 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
Testing & QA
Type
Product
Website
cucumber.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Cucumber

The European alternatives to Cucumber 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

29 European Testing & QA 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 Cucumber

Cucumber 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.

Cucumber 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.

Cucumber 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 Cucumber 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 Cucumber?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Cucumber include aqua cloud, BTC Embedded Systems and Cantata. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Cucumber?

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

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

Cucumber 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 11, 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 Testing & QA

Testing & QA: Software testing, test automation, browser testing and quality assurance. 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 Cucumber — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score