Self-hosted / open sourceVirtualisation & ContainersHeadquarters: DE

Gardener: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Gardener is a managed Kubernetes service that lets organisations run fully managed clusters at scale on their own installation, across many infrastructures. It provisions clusters with the same configuration on platforms such as OpenStack, metal-stack, IronCore, STACKIT, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud, and adds self-healing, auto-scaling and fleet-wide version and guardrail controls. Clusters are managed through a UI or kubectl, and control plane components run as workloads in separate "seed" clusters instead of on dedicated master machines.

Gardener is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence and was presented in 2018 by SAP engineers. It is now neutrally governed under the NeoNephos Foundation, an initiative of Linux Foundation Europe, which is based in Brussels and was launched in 2025 to support digital autonomy in Europe. Gardener is software that an organisation or provider operates itself, so the location of clusters and data depends on the infrastructure chosen.

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

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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 October 2, 2026

Headquarters	DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model	Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting	EUVerified by hand
Open-source	YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal	AMAZON-02 - Amazon.com, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
Category	Virtualisation & Containers
Type	Product
Website	gardener.cloud ↗

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 Gardener

The European alternatives to Gardener 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

20 European Virtualisation & Containers 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 Gardener

Gardener 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 Gardener scores best on data residency.

Gardener 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 Gardener 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 Gardener?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Gardener include APPUiO (VSHN), Giant Swarm and Harvester. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Gardener?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Gardener include Giant Swarm, Harvester, IncludeOS, K3s, Kamaji, Kubermatic and Linbit DRBD/LINSTOR. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Gardener is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Gardener 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

Cyber Resilience Act

Public signals that relate to the EU Cyber Resilience Act. They do not count towards the score. A missing line means "not found publicly".

Report a vulnerability: github.com/gardener/gardener/security/policy
Supported versions: gardener.cloud/docs/gardener/deployment/version_skew_policy/
Organisation behind the open-source project: NeoNephos Foundation

For products in scope of the CRA, CE marking is required from 11 December 2027; this cannot be checked yet.

Checked on October 9, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

Digital sovereignty in Virtualisation & Containers

Virtualisation & Containers: Virtualisation platforms, container management, Kubernetes distributions and hypervisors. 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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