Self-hosted / open sourceCollaborationHeadquarters: DE

Kopano: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Kopano Cloud is a groupware product for email, calendar, notes, tasks and contacts, aimed at organisations and service providers that want to run or offer their own mail environment. It includes native Outlook connectivity, a web client, ActiveSync for mobile devices, POP3/IMAP, a REST API and a sync agent for LDAP and Active Directory. The software is delivered as a stack of OCI containers (Docker) that runs in the customer's own environment and can also be deployed multi-tenant.

Kopano Cloud succeeds Kopano Groupware (formerly Zarafa), which was supported until 31 March 2025. That older version was open source under the AGPL; Kopano Cloud is not, and is offered under a commercial licence. Because the product ships as containers, the customer decides where the data is hosted, for example in a European data centre or on-premises. The vendor emphasises GDPR compliance and European privacy law. For a European organisation this means control over the hosting location, but also reliance on a single commercial vendor for further development.

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Sovereignty score

80 / 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-380
Closed source, but self-hostable: encryption keys and runtime under your own control
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-680
Closed source, but self-hostable on your own infrastructure

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 9, 2026

Headquarters	DE (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	Self-hosted, e.g. in EU (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Compliance documents	1 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signal	HETZNER-AS - Hetzner Online GmbH, DE (DE)Technically measured
Category	Collaboration
Type	Product
Website	kopano.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 Kopano

The European alternatives to Kopano 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

37 European Collaboration 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 Kopano

Kopano 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.

Kopano runs on infrastructure you choose and control yourself. You decide where the data lives, including fully within the EU if you want — this is not a fixed hosting choice made by the vendor.

Kopano is closed source, but you run the software yourself on your own infrastructure. The encryption keys and the runtime therefore stay under your own control, though you cannot audit or modify the source code. Ask about export options and open standards to limit software-level lock-in.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Kopano 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 Kopano?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Kopano include BigBlueButton (self-host), CryptPad and Nextcloud Deck. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Kopano?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Kopano include BigBlueButton (self-host), CryptPad, Nextcloud Deck, FluffyChat and HedgeDoc. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Kopano is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Kopano 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 October 9, 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".

Security page / trust center: kopano.cloud/data-protection/

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

Links checked on September 21, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in Collaboration

Collaboration: Team communication, file sharing, video conferencing, document editing. 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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