EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceGIS & GeospatialHeadquarters: UA

Leaflet: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library for interactive, mobile-friendly web maps. It has no external dependencies and supports tile, WMS, marker, popup, vector, image-overlay and GeoJSON layers, drag panning and zooming, keyboard navigation, and popups and markers customisable with CSS. Developers include the library in their website or application; it runs in the visitor's browser. The map tiles come from a tile source that the developer chooses.

Leaflet is released under the BSD-2-Clause licence. It was created in 2010 by Volodymyr Agafonkin, a Ukrainian developer, and is now developed by a group of maintainers and a community of contributors. There is no company with a commercial service behind the library: you can bundle it yourself and serve it from your own server. For privacy, the choice of tile source and map data matters most, because these receive requests from your users' browsers.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Leaflet pre-selected
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Sovereignty score
79 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-250
    Headquartered outside the EU (UA)
  • 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 9, 2026
HeadquartersUA (OTHER)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionNo — no adequacy decisionVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Hosting signalFASTLY - Fastly, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
CategoryGIS & Geospatial
TypeProduct
Websiteleafletjs.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 Leaflet

The European alternatives to Leaflet come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 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

45 European GIS & Geospatial 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 Leaflet

Leaflet is headquartered in UA, 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.

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

Leaflet 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 Leaflet 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 Leaflet?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Leaflet include 52°North, Camptocamp and GRASS GIS. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Leaflet?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Leaflet include 52°North, Camptocamp, GRASS GIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, QGIS, WhereGroup and lat/lon. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Leaflet is headquartered in UA (OTHER) 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 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".

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 GIS & Geospatial

GIS & Geospatial: Geographic information systems, map visualisation and spatial data analysis. 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 Leaflet — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score