EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceStorage & BackupHeadquarters: US

Longhorn: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Longhorn is distributed block storage for Kubernetes, designed for cloud-native environments. It provides replicated persistent volumes for containerised workloads, with incremental snapshots and backups. Longhorn is installed and managed as software on the organisation's own Kubernetes cluster. It is aimed at platform teams that run stateful applications on their own clusters and want storage without a proprietary storage array. The software is licensed under Apache-2.0.

Longhorn is a CNCF Incubating project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Linux Foundation; the copyright is held by LF Projects, LLC. The project was originally developed by Rancher. Because the organisation runs the software itself, data stays in the storage it manages, without a cloud provider involved. The foundations behind the project are based in the United States. For a European organisation the source code is freely available, so the functionality and security can be checked independently.

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Sovereignty score
69 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-210
    Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    No hosting in Europe (US)
  • 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-665
    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 12, 2026
Headquarters
US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision
Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
USVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
NoVendor-stated
Category
Storage & Backup
Type
Product
Website
longhorn.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Longhorn

The European alternatives to Longhorn come from our knowledge base of over 7,800 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

34 European Storage & Backup 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 Longhorn

Longhorn 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.

Longhorn hosts data outside the EU (US). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

Longhorn 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 Longhorn 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 Longhorn?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Longhorn include Acronis, Atempo and Bacula Systems. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Longhorn?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Longhorn include Bacula Systems, Bareos and BorgBackup. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Longhorn is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. Its GDPR compliance is limited or unclear. 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 12, 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 Storage & Backup

Storage & Backup: Business storage, backup solutions, object storage and data recovery. 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 Longhorn — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score