Self-hosted / open sourceAIHeadquarters: US

CVAT: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

CVAT is an open-source annotation platform for computer vision and audio AI, used to turn images, video, 3D data and audio into labelled training datasets. It is offered as CVAT Community, a self-hosted edition under the MIT licence, as CVAT Online, a managed cloud platform, and as CVAT Enterprise for self-hosted deployments. The project began as an internal Intel tool, was released as open source in 2018 and became an independent company, CVAT.ai, in 2022.

CVAT.ai Corporation lists a US office in Wilmington, Delaware, and an EU office in Paphos, Cyprus, and its terms of use are governed by Delaware law. The company states compliance with the GDPR and the CCPA, but its public pages do not say where CVAT Online stores customer data. European organisations that need their data to stay in the EU can run the MIT-licensed Community edition on their own infrastructure instead of using the cloud service.

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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 12, 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	YesVendor-stated
Category	AI
Type	Product
Website	cvat.ai ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to CVAT

The European alternatives to CVAT 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

69 European AI 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 CVAT

CVAT 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.

CVAT 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.

CVAT 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 CVAT 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 CVAT?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to CVAT include Acapela Group, Aleph Alpha and Almato. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to CVAT?

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

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

CVAT is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. 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 12, 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 AI

AI: Artificial intelligence — large language models, translation, generative AI. 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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