Non-EU vendorEnterprise SearchHeadquarters: US

Glean: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Glean is an enterprise AI platform that connects to an organisation's applications and data, such as Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, GitHub and Salesforce. Employees can search across all sources while existing user permissions continue to apply; Glean also offers assistants and agents and supports multiple language models. Infrastructure is separated per customer (single-tenant).

Glean is headquartered in Palo Alto, California (United States). It has two delivery models. With Glean Hosted, the service runs in a dedicated Glean tenant on Google Cloud, in multiple GCP and AWS regions. With Customer Hosted, Glean runs as a managed service inside the customer's own GCP or AWS account, so data stays within the customer's environment; Glean retains support access for debugging. The software itself is not open source. Even when hosted in the customer's own cloud, the supplier remains a US company that operates the service.

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

Mastodon LinkedIn Bluesky X Email

Sovereignty score

17 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
Data residency SOV-30
No hosting in Europe (US)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-320
Key management with a non-European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-615
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 September 27, 2026

Headquarters	US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	USVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	NoVendor-stated
Hosting signal	CLOUDFLARESPECTRUM - Cloudflare London, LLC, US (US)Technically measured
Category	Enterprise Search
Type	Product
Website	glean.com ↗

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 Glean

The European alternatives to Glean 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

Is Glean one of many dependencies?

Score your whole stack in about three minutes. Free, no account needed.

Assess your stack →View a sample report (opens in a new tab)

Why digital sovereignty matters with Glean

Glean is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

Glean hosts data outside the EU (US). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

Glean 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 Glean 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 Glean?

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

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

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

Glean is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. Its GDPR compliance is limited or unclear. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

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 September 27, 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.

Also in this category

See all →

Open in the alternatives dashboard Missing a vendor? Submit it Are you this vendor? You can also become a sponsor on the Enterprise Search page — with no effect on your score