EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceDatabase & Data ManagementHeadquarters: US

Milvus: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Milvus is an open-source vector database for GenAI applications, designed to store and search vector embeddings of text, images and multimodal data. It offers fast similarity search, hybrid search, metadata filtering and support for multiple vectors per record. Milvus comes in three forms: Milvus Lite, a library for prototyping that you install with pip; Milvus Standalone for a single machine; and Milvus Distributed, a horizontally scalable deployment for large datasets. In addition, Zilliz, the main contributor, offers a managed service, Zilliz Cloud, available as serverless or dedicated clusters and also with bring-your-own-cloud options.

Milvus is licensed under Apache 2.0 and is a graduated project of the LF AI & Data Foundation. You can run the software yourself in a European data centre, so that the data stays in a location you choose. Zilliz is headquartered in the United States, so using Zilliz Cloud means relying on a US provider. The sources consulted name no hosting regions for Zilliz Cloud.

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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 (self-hosted)
  • 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 6, 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
self-hostedVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Database & Data Management
Type
Product
Website
milvus.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Milvus

The European alternatives to Milvus 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

13 European Database & Data Management 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 Milvus

Milvus 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.

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

Milvus 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 Milvus 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 Milvus?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Milvus include Aiven, ArangoDB and DuckDB. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Milvus?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Milvus include DuckDB, Elastic, Firebird SQL, MariaDB and Meilisearch. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Milvus is headquartered in US and hosts data in self-hosted. 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 6, 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 Database & Data Management

Database & Data Management: Database systems, data warehousing, managed database services and data 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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8 European alternatives to Milvus — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score