Self-hosted / open sourceDatabase & Data ManagementHeadquarters: NL

Elastic: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Elasticsearch, developed by Elastic, is a distributed search and analytics engine for structured, unstructured and vector data. It offers full-text, semantic, hybrid and vector search plus real-time aggregations, and is used for application and e-commerce search, retrieval-augmented generation, log analytics, observability and SIEM. Kibana provides exploration and dashboards. You can run Elasticsearch yourself (locally, on Kubernetes or with your own orchestration) or use it as a managed service through Elastic Cloud, as Serverless or Hosted on AWS, Google Cloud or Azure.

Elastic N.V. is a Dutch company listed on the NYSE, with operational headquarters in both the Netherlands and San Francisco. Since the end of 2024 the Elasticsearch and Kibana source code has been available under the OSI-approved AGPL, in addition to the SSPL and the Elastic License 2.0. Elastic Cloud Hosted offers European regions, including Frankfurt, Paris and Ireland on AWS, the Netherlands and Belgium on Google Cloud, and the Netherlands and France on Azure. Self-hosting within the EU gives you full control over where your data is located.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Elastic pre-selected

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Sovereignty score

92 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-2100
Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
Data residency SOV-3100
No hosting in Europe (EU (Elastic Cloud on GCP/AWS/Azure EU regions), self-hosted anywhere)
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-690
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 2, 2026

Headquarters	NL (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model	Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting	EU (Elastic Cloud on GCP/AWS/Azure EU regions), self-hosted anywhereVerified by hand
Open-source	YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Compliance documents	2 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signal	FASTLY - Fastly, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
Category	Database & Data Management
Type	Product
Website	elastic.co ↗

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 Elastic

The European alternatives to Elastic 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

13 European Database & Data Management 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 Elastic

Elastic 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.

Elastic hosts data outside the EU (EU (Elastic Cloud on GCP/AWS/Azure EU regions), self-hosted anywhere). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

Elastic 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 Elastic 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 Elastic?

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

Are there open-source alternatives to Elastic?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Elastic include DuckDB, Firebird SQL, MariaDB and Meilisearch. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Elastic is headquartered in NL (EU) and hosts data in EU (Elastic Cloud on GCP/AWS/Azure EU regions), self-hosted anywhere. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Elastic 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".

Data Processing Agreement (DPA): elastic.co/trust
Security page / trust center: elastic.co/trust

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

ISO/IEC 27001Vendor-statedSOC 2Vendor-statedCSA STARVendor-statedTISAXVendor-stated

Links checked on September 21, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in Database & Data Management

Database & Data Management: Database systems, data warehousing, managed database services and data platforms. 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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