EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceCMSHeadquarters: US

Orchard Core: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Orchard Core is an open-source, modular CMS and application framework for .NET, released under the BSD-3-Clause licence. It is distributed as a project template for the .NET CLI, as NuGet packages that can be added to an existing ASP.NET Core application, and as a Docker image. Developers use it to build content-driven websites and web applications. It is a self-hostable, open-source alternative to proprietary CMS platforms.

Orchard Core is backed by the .NET Foundation, a non-profit organisation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, in the United States. The project states that no single company owns it and that it has never been relicensed. Because the software is run on infrastructure chosen by the organisation, including in Europe, there is no vendor-operated hosting to evaluate. The maintaining foundation is US-based, so governance of the source code sits outside Europe; the BSD licence nevertheless allows the code to be maintained independently if needed.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Orchard Core pre-selected
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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 (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
CMS
Type
Product
Website
orchardcore.net ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Orchard Core

The European alternatives to Orchard Core come from our knowledge base of over 8,000 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

43 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 Orchard Core

Orchard Core 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.

Orchard Core 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.

Orchard Core 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 Orchard Core 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 Orchard Core?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Orchard Core 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 Orchard Core?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Orchard Core 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 Orchard Core GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Orchard Core 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

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 12, 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.

Also in this category

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