EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignBusiness Email & GroupwareHeadquarters: DE

Open-Xchange: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Open-Xchange develops OX App Suite, a web-based platform for email, contacts, calendars and documents. It is aimed at telecom operators, hosting providers, internet service providers, government, education and regulated institutions, which offer the solution to end users under their own brand. According to the vendor, customers keep control over data, deployment, branding and cost. The group also includes Dovecot Pro, the commercial edition of the Dovecot mail server, and PowerDNS.

Open-Xchange was founded in 2005 with headquarters in Olpe and Nuremberg, Germany. According to the vendor's licence page, the OX App Suite backend and user interface are released under the AGPLv3, and a community edition exists. A European organisation can therefore run the platform itself or obtain it through a provider; where the data is stored depends on the party operating the service. Anyone choosing a provider should ask in which region storage takes place.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Open-Xchange 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 July 2, 2026
Headquarters
DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal
CLOUDFLARESPECTRUM - Cloudflare London, LLC, US (US)Technically measured
Category
Business Email & Groupware
Type
Product
Website
open-xchange.com ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Open-Xchange

The European alternatives to Open-Xchange 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

28 European Business Email & Groupware 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 Open-Xchange

Open-Xchange 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 Open-Xchange scores best on data residency.

Open-Xchange 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-Xchange 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-Xchange?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Open-Xchange include Axigen, Benno MailArchiv and BlueMind. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Open-Xchange?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Open-Xchange include Benno MailArchiv, CipherMail, Dovecot and EGroupware. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Open-Xchange is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Open-Xchange 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 July 2, 2026.

Sources

This record was checked via the vendor's website and legal notice during the full audit of June and July 2026. Source links have been recorded per record since 20 September 2026.

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 Business Email & Groupware

Business Email & Groupware: Business email servers, groupware, calendar and contact 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

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