EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignEnterprise SearchHeadquarters: NL

Elasticsearch: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine from Elastic. Together with Kibana it underpins three solution areas: search, observability (including log analytics and infrastructure monitoring) and security (including SIEM and endpoint security). Organisations use it for search features in applications, for searching company data and for analysing logs. You can run it yourself, locally or on Kubernetes, or use Elastic Cloud in a serverless or hosted form. Elastic Cloud is also sold through the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces.

Elastic N.V. is a Dutch-American company, founded in Amsterdam in 2012 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Elastic Cloud runs on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, with European regions such as Frankfurt, Ireland, the Netherlands and Paris, so the underlying infrastructure belongs to US providers. Elasticsearch is available under ELv2 and SSPL; in 2024 Elastic announced that it was adding the AGPL as an open-source licence. Self-hosting gives a European organisation full control over location and keys.

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Sovereignty score
82 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-350
    Hosting inside and outside Europe (EU, US, self-host)
  • 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 4, 2026
Headquarters
NL (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
EU, US, self-hostVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Enterprise Search
Type
Product
Website
elastic.co ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Elasticsearch

The European alternatives to Elasticsearch 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

21 European Enterprise Search 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 Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch 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.

Elasticsearch hosts data in EU, US, self-host. Exactly what stays within the EU — and what does not — is defined by the vendor's data processing agreement and sub-processor list, not by a setting you control yourself; check those documents for the precise scope, including backups, logs and support access.

Elasticsearch 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 Elasticsearch 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 Elasticsearch?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Elasticsearch include AddSearch, Cludo and Datafari. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Elasticsearch?

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

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

Elasticsearch is headquartered in NL (EU) and hosts data in EU, US, self-host. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Elasticsearch 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 4, 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 Enterprise Search

Enterprise Search: Internal knowledge and document search across company tools, wikis and file stores. 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 Elasticsearch — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score