EU sovereignSearch EnginesHeadquarters: DE

Ecosia: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Ecosia is a search engine and browser from Berlin focused on sustainability. Search results come from partners: Microsoft Bing, the European search index initiative EUSP and, depending on region and browser and with consent, Google. Advertising comes from Yahoo! and Microsoft Advertising, among others. According to the company, Ecosia spends 80 per cent of its profits on planting trees and on climate and biodiversity projects. It also offers an AI chat and its own browser. The service is delivered as a hosted service through the web and apps.

Ecosia GmbH is based in Berlin. The founder transferred shares to the Purpose Foundation and, together with a co-owner, gave up the right to sell the company or take profits out of it. Ecosia receives IP addresses and search queries and passes them to its search partners, including the US company Microsoft; it anonymises the IP address internally within a maximum of seven days. Server locations are not stated. Ecosia is offered only as a hosted service.

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Sovereignty score

71 / 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-360
Key management with a European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-655
Closed source, runtime with the vendor

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 2, 2026

Headquarters	DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	EUVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal	CLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
Category	Search Engines
Type	Product
Website	ecosia.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 Ecosia

The European alternatives to Ecosia 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

15 European Search Engines 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 Ecosia

Ecosia 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.

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

Ecosia is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

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

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Ecosia include Lilo, MetaGer and Najdi.si. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Ecosia?

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

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

Ecosia is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Ecosia 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 2, 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 Search Engines

Search Engines: Search engines — privacy-friendly web searching. 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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