EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceDatabase & Data ManagementHeadquarters: FR

Heurist: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Heurist is a web-based platform that lets humanities researchers design, manage, analyse and publish structured databases themselves, without a programmer. It is built with PHP, JavaScript and MySQL and is intended for linked humanities research data. It is delivered as server software that you install yourself; free hosted services for researchers also exist.

Heurist was originally developed at the University of Sydney. Since 2024 the project has been managed by Heurist Network, a non-profit association under French law based in Paris. The source code is published on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 licence and is actively updated. According to the README, the most widely used hosted server is provided by Huma-Num in France. If you install Heurist yourself, your research data stays on your own server and you decide where it is located; with the free hosted service it sits with the provider of that server.

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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 14, 2026
Headquarters
FR (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
Self-hosted, e.g. in EU (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Database & Data Management
Type
Product
Website
heuristnetwork.org ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Heurist

The European alternatives to Heurist come from our knowledge base of over 8,400 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

14 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 Heurist

Heurist is headquartered in FR 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 Heurist scores best on data residency.

Heurist 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 Heurist 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 Heurist?

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

Are there open-source alternatives to Heurist?

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

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

Heurist is headquartered in FR (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Heurist 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 14, 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

In the changelog

Earlier changes to this page, as listed in the public changelog.

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.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to Heurist — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score