Self-hosted / open sourceData Governance & MDMHeadquarters: US

Open Policy Agent: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open-source policy engine that lets you manage authorisation and governance rules outside your applications. Rules are written in the declarative language Rego and can be applied to APIs, Kubernetes, microservices and data access. Teams define, test and version the rules as code. OPA can be installed as a binary, a container or a library on your own infrastructure.

OPA has been a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) since January 2021 and is licensed under Apache 2.0. The CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation, which is based in the United States. Because the source code is open and the software runs on your own infrastructure, decision logic and data can stay within the organisation. That makes OPA a practical alternative to proprietary policy products tied to a single vendor's platform. The foundation that stewards the project is US-based, so for a European organisation the governance sits outside EU jurisdiction, while the software itself runs on your own systems.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Open Policy Agent pre-selected

Mastodon LinkedIn Bluesky X Email

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	Data Governance & MDM
Type	Product
Website	openpolicyagent.org ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Open Policy Agent

The European alternatives to Open Policy Agent 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

23 European Data Governance & MDM vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

Is Open Policy Agent one of many dependencies?

Score your whole stack in about three minutes. Free, no account needed.

Assess your stack →View a sample report (opens in a new tab)

Why digital sovereignty matters with Open Policy Agent

Open Policy Agent 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.

Open Policy Agent 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.

Open Policy Agent 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 Open Policy Agent 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 Open Policy Agent?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Open Policy Agent include Accutics, Amnesia and Anjana Data. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Open Policy Agent?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Open Policy Agent include Amnesia, ARX Data Anonymization Tool and Data Contract CLI. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Open Policy Agent GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Open Policy Agent 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 Data Governance & MDM

Data Governance & MDM: Data catalogues, lineage, data quality, ownership and master data management. 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

See all →

Open in the alternatives dashboard Missing a vendor? Submit it Are you this vendor? You can also become a sponsor on the Data Governance & MDM page — with no effect on your score