EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceIdentityHeadquarters: DE

Kanidm: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Kanidm is an identity management platform written in Rust that centralises accounts, authentication and authorisation so other applications do not have to handle them. It supports passkeys (WebAuthn), acts as an OAuth2/OpenID Connect provider for single sign-on, and offers RADIUS for network and VPN authentication. It also provides a read-only LDAPS gateway for legacy systems, SSH key distribution and Linux/UNIX integration, including offline authentication. Administration is done on the command line, and users manage much themselves through a web interface.

Kanidm is open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and is designed to be self-hosted. It is a community project rather than a product of a company with its own cloud service. Development started in 2018 under William Brown, who works in Australia, and more than forty other people have contributed. Because you run the software on your own infrastructure, your organisation decides where identity data resides and no vendor gains access to it. Self-hosting does mean taking responsibility for operations, updates and support.

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 July 2, 2026
Headquarters
DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal
FASTLY - Fastly, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
Category
Type
Product
Website

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 Kanidm

The European alternatives to Kanidm 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

58 European Identity vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

Is Kanidm one of many dependencies?

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Kanidm

Kanidm is headquartered in DE 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 Kanidm scores best on data residency.

Kanidm 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 Kanidm 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 Kanidm?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Kanidm include Adnovum, Airlock and Auðkenni. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Kanidm?

Our list of EU alternatives to Kanidm is mostly commercial options. Browse the category on the map for open-source choices.

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

Kanidm is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Kanidm 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 July 2, 2026.

Sources

This record was checked via the vendor's website and legal notice during the full audit of June and July 2026. Source links have been recorded per record since 20 September 2026.

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 Identity

Identity: Identity and access management — SSO, MFA, directory services. 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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8 European alternatives to Kanidm — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score