EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceIoT & EmbeddedHeadquarters: US

Particle: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Particle is an IoT platform for connected products that combines hardware, firmware, connectivity and cloud services. Its hardware includes single-board computers, system-on-modules, development boards and gateways. On the cloud side it offers device management with over-the-air updates, staged releases, an event bus, a key/value store for digital twins, serverless logic, a REST API and many integrations. Connectivity covers cellular, Wi-Fi, satellite and LoRaWAN, including an embedded SIM. The firmware, Device OS, is published on GitHub under the LGPL-3.0 licence. In January 2026 Particle was acquired by Digi International.

Particle Industries is based in San Francisco and is now owned by Digi International. According to its privacy addendum, personal information is processed and stored in the United States, using providers such as Amazon Web Services and MongoDB; no hosting in the EU is specified. Device OS can be inspected, but the cloud service itself is proprietary. European organisations should assess the transfer of data to the US.

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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 5, 2026
HeadquartersUS (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionOnly for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingUSVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantNoVendor-stated
CategoryIoT & Embedded
TypeProduct
Websiteparticle.io ↗

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Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Particle

The European alternatives to Particle come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 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

62 European IoT & Embedded 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 Particle

Particle 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.

Particle 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.

Particle 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 Particle 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 Particle?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Particle include 1NCE, Actility ThingPark and akenza. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Particle?

Our list of EU alternatives to Particle is mostly commercial options. Browse the category on the map for open-source choices.

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

Particle 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 5, 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 IoT & Embedded

IoT & Embedded: Internet of Things platforms, embedded systems and industrial IoT solutions. 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 Particle — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score