Self-hosted / open sourceVirtualisation & ContainersHeadquarters: CA

Incus: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Incus is a manager for system containers, application containers and virtual machines. Administrators run containers and VMs side by side on shared storage and networks and manage them through a command-line client or a single REST API, on anything from one machine to a cluster. The code is written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Incus is installed on your own Linux servers; upstream does not ship packages, so they come from Linux distributions or third-party repositories.

Incus started as a community fork of LXD after Canonical decided to take LXD away from the Linux Containers project, which adopted Incus and hosts it as a community-led alternative. No single vendor owns it. Zabbly, a company based in Canada, offers commercial support and packages and sponsors the project infrastructure. Because you operate Incus yourself, workloads and data stay wherever you run it, including EU data centres, and no vendor-run cloud service is involved. The open source code can be audited, and support is available from the community or from Zabbly.

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

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Sovereignty score

77 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-250
Headquartered outside the EU (CA)
Data residency SOV-3100
No hosting in Europe (self-hosted)
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-665
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 6, 2026

Headquarters	CA (OTHER)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Yes — found adequate by the European CommissionVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting	self-hostedVerified by hand
Open-source	YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Category	Virtualisation & Containers
Type	Product
Website	linuxcontainers.org ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Incus

The European alternatives to Incus 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 Incus

Incus is headquartered in CA, 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.

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

Incus 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 Incus 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 Incus?

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

Are there open-source alternatives to Incus?

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

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

Incus is headquartered in CA (OTHER) and hosts data in self-hosted. 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 6, 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/lxc/incus/security/policy
Supported versions: linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/support/

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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