Self-hosted / open sourceOffice & ProductivityHeadquarters: US

Horde: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Horde is a free, open-source suite for webmail, calendar, contacts and tasks, which also serves as a set of reusable PHP libraries. Its applications are built from independent components and include webmail, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes and time tracking. It provides a responsive web interface and supports CalDAV, CardDAV and ActiveSync clients. Horde is software you host yourself; the website offers a Quickstart guide for installation and a demo.

Horde is an independent, community-maintained project rather than the product of a single vendor with a paid enterprise tier. The software is licensed under the LGPL and GPL. The core team consists of a few developers, including people with ties to Germany and the United States; a legal entity, Horde, LLC, is named without a stated jurisdiction. B1 Systems GmbH of Germany sponsors the project and offers hosting, support and feature development. Because you run Horde on your own infrastructure, you decide where the data resides, for example within the EU.

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

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Sovereignty score

71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
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-675
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 4, 2026

Headquarters	US (US)	Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework	Verified by hand
Sovereignty model	Open-source, distributed	Verified by hand
Data hosting	EU	Verified by hand
Open-source	Yes	Verified by hand
GDPR-compliant	Yes	Vendor-stated
Hosting signal	HETZNER-AS - Hetzner Online GmbH, DE (DE)	Technically measured
Category	Office & Productivity
Type	Product
Website	horde.org ↗

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 Horde

The European alternatives to Horde 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

30 European Office & Productivity 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 Horde

Horde 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.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Horde scores best on data residency.

Horde 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 Horde 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 Horde?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Horde include Ashampoo Office, Calligra Suite and Craft Docs. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Horde?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Horde include Calligra Suite, CryptPad, EGroupware, Euro-Office, eXo Platform and Framasoft (Framapad/Framacalc). These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Horde is headquartered in US and hosts data in EU. The vendor states it is GDPR-compliant, but the data falls under non-EU jurisdiction. 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 4, 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 Office & Productivity

Office & Productivity: Office software, word processing, spreadsheets and groupware. 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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