Self-hosted / open sourceVirtualisation & ContainersHeadquarters: DE

metal-stack: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

metal-stack is an open-source bare-metal cloud stack. It consists of microservices that implement Metal as a Service, so physical servers in a data centre can be provisioned and managed like cloud resources. It is aimed at organisations that want to run an on-premises cloud and is offered as software for self-hosting. The project's own managed offering, metalstack.cloud, is based on the same software.

The project is run from Munich, Germany, and the operator of metalstack.cloud, x-cellent technologies GmbH, is also based in Munich. The public pages do not state an ownership structure or parent company. Several repositories are published under the MIT licence and can be deployed in a company's own data centre, so the data stays under the operator's control. According to its website, the managed service is hosted in Germany and is GDPR-compliant, giving European customers a data residency option for those who do not want to self-host.

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

Sovereignty score

94 / 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-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-6100
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 11, 2026

Headquarters	DE (EU)	Verified by hand
Data hosting	Self-hosted, e.g. in EU (your choice)	Verified by hand
Open-source	Yes	Verified by hand
GDPR-compliant	Yes	Vendor-stated
Category	Virtualisation & Containers
Type	Product
Website	metal-stack.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to metal-stack

The European alternatives to metal-stack 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

20 European Virtualisation & Containers 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 metal-stack

metal-stack 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.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so metal-stack scores best on data residency.

metal-stack 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 metal-stack 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 metal-stack?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to metal-stack include APPUiO (VSHN), Gardener and Giant Swarm. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to metal-stack?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to metal-stack include Gardener, Giant Swarm, Harvester, IncludeOS, K3s, Kamaji and Kubermatic. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is metal-stack GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

metal-stack is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes metal-stack 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 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 Virtualisation & Containers

Virtualisation & Containers: Virtualisation platforms, container management, Kubernetes distributions and hypervisors. 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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