EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceData Platform & WarehouseHeadquarters: NL

DuckDB: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

DuckDB is an analytical SQL database (OLAP) that runs in-process: it is embedded in your application rather than operated as a separate server. It uses a SQL dialect inspired by PostgreSQL, reads and writes formats such as CSV, JSON, Parquet and Iceberg locally and in object storage, and offers client APIs for languages including Python, Java, Go, Node.js, R and Rust. You run the software yourself, from edge devices to large multi-core servers.

DuckDB is released under the MIT licence. Its intellectual property and trademarks are held by the DuckDB Foundation, a non-profit incorporated in the Netherlands and based in Amsterdam. The engine is developed by DuckLabs (formerly DuckDB Labs), an Amsterdam company that sells enterprise support. In August 2026 DuckLabs announced that it is joining Amazon Web Services; the team stays in Amsterdam and the projects remain open source. Because DuckDB runs inside your own environment, data stays where you deploy it; for a support contract, the announced AWS affiliation is relevant to the legal assessment.

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Sovereignty score
94 / 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-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-6100
    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 September 20, 2026
HeadquartersNL (EU)Verified by hand
Data hostingSelf-hosted, e.g. in EU (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Hosting signalCLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
CategoryData Platform & Warehouse
TypeProduct
Websiteduckdb.org ↗

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 DuckDB

The European alternatives to DuckDB come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 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

12 European Data Platform & Warehouse 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 DuckDB

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

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so DuckDB scores best on data residency.

DuckDB 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 DuckDB 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 DuckDB?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to DuckDB include Exasol, Falkor and Garage. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to DuckDB?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to DuckDB include Garage, MonetDB and Stackable Data Platform. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

DuckDB is headquartered in NL (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes DuckDB 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 September 20, 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 Data Platform & Warehouse

Data Platform & Warehouse: Lakehouses, cloud data warehouses, data-lake storage and analytical databases for enterprise-wide analysis. 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 DuckDB — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score