Non-EU vendorVPNHeadquarters: IL

Hola VPN: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Hola VPN is a VPN application for web browsers, mobile phones, desktops and smart TVs. Users can select a country flag to appear to be located there. The VPN service runs on a peer-to-peer network: when a user opens geo-blocked content, the request is routed through the connections of other users in unblocked regions. The application is developed by Hola VPN Ltd, a company headquartered in Israel and founded in 2007, which also offers a separate browser product.

Under the peer-to-peer model, users of the unpaid service agree to become peers in the Bright Data residential proxy network, whereas paying users do not. From late 2014 Hola sold access to this bandwidth under the name Luminati, which was renamed Bright Data in 2021. Israel is outside the EU and EEA. The operator does not publish its ownership or data-hosting locations on its website. For a European organisation, the use of other users' connections for traffic of the unpaid service and the missing hosting and ownership details are the main points to weigh; no open-source licence is stated for the client.

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Sovereignty score

32 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-250
Headquartered outside the EU (IL)
Data residency SOV-30
No hosting in Europe (OTHER)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-340
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-630
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	IL (OTHER)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Yes — found adequate by the European CommissionVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	OTHERVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	NoVendor-stated
Category	VPN
Type	Product
Website	hola.org ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Hola VPN

The European alternatives to Hola VPN 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 VPN 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 Hola VPN

Hola VPN is headquartered in IL, outside the EU. Contracts and data therefore also fall under non-European law. The GDPR applies through contractual terms, but in a conflict with local legislation you have less certainty than with a European vendor.

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

Hola VPN 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 Hola VPN 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 Hola VPN?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Hola VPN include AdGuard VPN, AirVPN and Avast SecureLine VPN. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Hola VPN?

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

Is Hola VPN GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Hola VPN is headquartered in IL (OTHER) and hosts data in OTHER. 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 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

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".

We found none of these signals on the vendor's own site when we checked.

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

Checked on October 11, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

Digital sovereignty in VPN

VPN: Virtual private network — privacy protection, encrypted connection. 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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