EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignEnterprise SearchHeadquarters: ES

Empathy.co: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Empathy.co is a search and product discovery platform for online retailers. Its offering covers commerce search with merchandising tools, along with AI search, navigation and conversational discovery features. Retailers use it on their web shops to help shoppers find products. The company describes its AI search as running on a private, self-hosted cloud under EU governance.

The operating company is Empathy Systems Corporation S.L.U., a Spanish company registered in Asturias. Its ownership is not stated on the website, and no non-EU parent is named. Its privacy policy refers to the GDPR and states that transfers to US applications are made under GDPR guarantees, but it does not name the hosting region or the providers used. European retailers should ask for the hosting location and the list of sub-processors before signing, since these determine where shopper data is processed.

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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 11, 2026
Headquarters
ES (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
Category
Enterprise Search
Type
Product
Website
empathy.co ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Empathy.co

The European alternatives to Empathy.co 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 Empathy.co

Empathy.co is headquartered in ES 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 Empathy.co scores best on data residency.

Empathy.co 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 Empathy.co 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 Empathy.co?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Empathy.co 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 Empathy.co?

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

Is Empathy.co GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Empathy.co is headquartered in ES (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Empathy.co 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 11, 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 Empathy.co — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score