Non-EU vendorCMSHeadquarters: US

Medium: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Medium is an online publishing platform where authors write and publish articles and blogs. It offers a text editor, organisation of posts by topic, publications that work like shared magazines, and a membership model that gives readers access to paywalled articles. Authors can earn money through its Partner Program. The platform runs entirely as SaaS in the browser and through iOS and Android apps; self-hosting is not possible.

Medium is run by A Medium Corporation, a privately held American company based in San Francisco, founded in 2012. According to a summary of its privacy policy, personal data is processed in the United States and other jurisdictions, with reference to adequacy decisions or standard contractual clauses. The vendor does not name a European storage region. For a European organisation this means US jurisdiction and little control over where data is stored; an own website or a self-hosted CMS offers more control.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Medium pre-selected

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Sovereignty score

17 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
Data residency SOV-30
No hosting in Europe (US)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-320
Key management with a non-European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-615
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 October 11, 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	Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	USVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	NoVendor-stated
Category	CMS
Type	Product
Website	medium.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Medium

The European alternatives to Medium 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

39 European CMS 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 Medium

Medium 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.

Medium 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.

Medium 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 Medium 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 Medium?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Medium include Ametys, Bolt CMS and caisy. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Medium?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Medium include Ametys, Bolt CMS, Cockpit CMS, Contao and django CMS. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Medium 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 11, 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

Cyber Resilience Act

Public signals that relate to the EU Cyber Resilience Act. They do not count towards the score. A missing line means "not found publicly".

We found none of these signals on the vendor's own site when we checked.

For products in scope of the CRA, CE marking is required from 11 December 2027; this cannot be checked yet.

Checked on October 11, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

Digital sovereignty in CMS

CMS: Content management systems — websites, headless CMS, digital experience platforms. 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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