EU Sovereignty Score
Non-EU vendorCollaborationHeadquarters: US

LiveKit: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

LiveKit is an open-source framework and developer platform for realtime voice, video and AI-agent applications. Its core is an open-source WebRTC SFU written in Go on top of Pion, which moves audio, video and data between people, devices and AI models. LiveKit Cloud is the hosted service, with agent hosting, an inference gateway, phone numbers and observability. The server is a single binary that you can run yourself with Docker or Kubernetes (Helm charts are available).

LiveKit is provided by LiveKit Incorporated, with an address in San Francisco, USA. According to its privacy policy, the company is based in the United States and processes personal data there. The server is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and can run on your own infrastructure in Europe. In LiveKit Cloud, you choose the European Union (Frankfurt) region when creating a project for session analytics and observability data such as traces, logs, transcripts and recordings; this region is then fixed.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with LiveKit pre-selected
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Sovereignty score
71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-210
    Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
  • 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
HeadquartersUS (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionOnly for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelVendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Hosting signalCLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
CategoryCollaboration
TypeProduct
Websitelivekit.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 LiveKit

The European alternatives to LiveKit 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

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 LiveKit

LiveKit is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

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

LiveKit 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 LiveKit 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 LiveKit?

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

Are there open-source alternatives to LiveKit?

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

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

LiveKit is headquartered in US 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 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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8 European alternatives to LiveKit — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score