EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceVirtualisation & ContainersHeadquarters: IT

Nivola: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Nivola is a cloud management platform for public administrations, built on OpenStack and extended with services for the public sector. Its management layer exposes accounting, profiling and security services through an API and works with the virtualisation, cloud orchestration, backup and monitoring platforms underneath. A service portal lets customers set up their own cloud environment. The software is deployed with Kubernetes and Docker containers, using MariaDB or MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis and RabbitMQ, and is administered with a command-line tool.

Nivola was created by CSI Piemonte, a consortium for information systems based in Turin, Italy, that works for public bodies. The code is published on GitHub under the EUPL-1.2 licence, so an organisation can deploy and inspect the platform itself. CSI Piemonte also operates the platform as the Nivola Cloud service for public administrations; according to CSI Piemonte, the data is held in Italy. The platform appears in the Developers Italia catalogue of public-sector software. Self-deployment keeps the cloud layer on infrastructure under the organisation's own control.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Nivola pre-selected
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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 14, 2026
Headquarters
IT (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Virtualisation & Containers
Type
Product
Website
csipiemonte.it ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Nivola

The European alternatives to Nivola come from our knowledge base of over 9,300 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

25 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 Nivola

Nivola is headquartered in IT 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 Nivola scores best on data residency.

Nivola 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 Nivola 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 Nivola?

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

Are there open-source alternatives to Nivola?

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

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

Nivola is headquartered in IT (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Nivola 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 14, 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 14, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

In the changelog

Earlier changes to this page, as listed in the public changelog.

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.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to Nivola — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score