EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceCollaborationHeadquarters: DE

PILOS: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

PILOS (Platform for Interactive Live-Online Seminars) is an open-source web front end for BigBlueButton servers with a built-in load balancer. It is aimed at universities, colleges and other organisations that want to offer video meetings, digital classes and group learning, and need to pool several BigBlueButton servers behind one interface. PILOS provides the user interface and distributes meetings across the servers; the actual conferencing is done by BigBlueButton, which is required separately. It is delivered as server software, including as a Docker image.

PILOS was developed at Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen, a German university of applied sciences, within its Faculty of Health. The software is published under the LGPL-2.1 licence and is listed in Germany's OpenCoDE software directory. Because you install and operate PILOS yourself, meeting data stays on your own infrastructure or with a hosting partner of your choice; the pages consulted show no commercial offering or cloud service from the developer. According to the project page, several German and Austrian education and public-sector institutions use PILOS.

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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 October 14, 2026
Headquarters
DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Collaboration
Type
Product
Website
thm-health.github.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to PILOS

The European alternatives to PILOS come from our knowledge base of over 9,300 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

63 European Collaboration 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 PILOS

PILOS 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 PILOS scores best on data residency.

PILOS 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 PILOS 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 PILOS?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to PILOS include ahead Intranet, alfaview and CryptPad. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to PILOS?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to PILOS include CryptPad and Nextcloud Deck. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

PILOS is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes PILOS 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 14, 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

In the changelog

Earlier changes to this page, as listed in the public changelog.

Digital sovereignty in Collaboration

Collaboration: Team communication, file sharing, video conferencing, document editing. 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 PILOS — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score