EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignPaymentsHeadquarters: SE

Klarna: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Klarna is a Swedish fintech and bank that offers payment products to consumers and merchants. Consumers can pay immediately, pay later or pay in instalments, and in some markets use cards, savings and banking features. Merchants get checkout and payment tools. The services are delivered as hosted services through apps, web checkout and merchant integrations; Klarna is not open source and offers no self-hosting.

Klarna was founded in Stockholm and is headquartered there. Its banking subsidiary, Klarna Bank AB, holds a Swedish banking licence and is supervised by Finansinspektionen. The group holding company, Klarna Group plc, is incorporated in England and Wales with a registered office in London, and its shares have been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since September 2025. For a European organisation it is therefore worth checking which group entity and which jurisdiction apply to the contract and the data.

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Sovereignty score
71 / 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-360
    Key management with a European vendor
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-655
    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 July 2, 2026
Headquarters
SE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Compliance documents
2 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signal
AMAZON-02 - Amazon.com, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
Category
Payments
Type
Product
Website
klarna.com ↗

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 Klarna

The European alternatives to Klarna 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

99 European Payments 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 Klarna

Klarna is headquartered in SE 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 Klarna scores best on data residency.

Klarna 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 Klarna 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 Klarna?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Klarna include Adyen, Alma and Autopay. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Klarna?

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

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

Klarna is headquartered in SE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Klarna 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".

Data Processing Agreement (DPA)
klarna.com/us/privacy/
Subprocessor list
cdn.klarna.com/1.0/shared/content/legal/terms/0/en_us/privacy

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

Links checked on September 23, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in Payments

Payments: Payment services, payment gateways, online payments and financial transactions. 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 Klarna — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score