EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceOffice & ProductivityHeadquarters: IT

PDFsam: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

PDFsam is a desktop program for working with PDF files, available in a Basic and an Enhanced edition. PDFsam Basic is open source under the GNU AGPL licence; it merges, splits and extracts PDF pages, rotates pages, and alternates the pages of two files. PDFsam Enhanced is a commercial PDF editor for Windows. It adds text and image editing, OCR, forms and digital signatures. Both editions are applications that run on the user's own computer.

The developer, Sober Lemur S.r.l., is an Italian company based in Bibbiano, in the province of Reggio Emilia. Its privacy policy names the company as data controller and states that the policy is drafted to comply with the GDPR. The website does not name a parent company or majority owner. For the Basic edition, the site describes no upload of documents and no cloud component. Because Basic is open source, a European organisation can inspect the code and build it itself. Enhanced is proprietary and requires registration.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with PDFsam pre-selected
MastodonLinkedInBlueskyXEmail
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 11, 2026
HeadquartersIT (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
CategoryOffice & Productivity
TypeProduct
Websitepdfsam.org ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to PDFsam

The European alternatives to PDFsam 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

30 European Office & Productivity vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

Is PDFsam 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 PDFsam

PDFsam 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 PDFsam scores best on data residency.

PDFsam 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 PDFsam 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 PDFsam?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to PDFsam include Ashampoo Office, Calligra Suite and Craft Docs. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to PDFsam?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to PDFsam include Calligra Suite, CryptPad, EGroupware, Euro-Office, eXo Platform and Framasoft (Framapad/Framacalc). These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

PDFsam is headquartered in IT (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes PDFsam 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 11, 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 Office & Productivity

Office & Productivity: Office software, word processing, spreadsheets and groupware. 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 dashboardMissing a vendor? Submit itAre you this vendor? You can also become a sponsor on the Office & Productivity page — with no effect on your score
8 European alternatives to PDFsam — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score