EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceSocial MediaHeadquarters: DE

Pleroma: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Pleroma is lightweight server software for federated microblogging. It implements ActivityPub, so an instance can exchange posts with Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, Friendica and other fediverse software. It is written mainly in Elixir, stores its data in PostgreSQL and offers several web frontends, including the official Pleroma FE and the simpler Soapbox. Anyone can join an existing instance or install their own, which suits communities, organisations and individuals who want to run their own social platform.

Pleroma is free software under the AGPL-3 and is developed as a community project on its own GitLab instance. The project site names no company or owner, so no foreign parent applies. Because each instance is self-hosted, the operator decides where data is kept: an instance in an EU data centre stays under EU law, and the operator controls moderation and which servers to federate with. Public posts still reach the servers of other instances.

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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
HeadquartersDE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Hosting signalHETZNER-AS - Hetzner Online GmbH, DE (DE)Technically measured
CategorySocial Media
TypeProduct
Websitepleroma.social ↗

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 Pleroma

The European alternatives to Pleroma 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

34 European Social Media 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 Pleroma

Pleroma 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 Pleroma scores best on data residency.

Pleroma 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 Pleroma 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 Pleroma?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Pleroma include Agorapulse, Akkoma and BeReal. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Pleroma?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Pleroma include Akkoma and Diaspora. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

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

Social Media: Social networks — posts, media, communities. 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 Pleroma — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score