Self-hosted / open sourceBPM & WorkflowHeadquarters: US

Prefect: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Prefect is a workflow orchestration platform for data, machine-learning and agent workloads. Developers write workflows as plain Python, adding flow and task decorators so that Prefect handles state, logging, scheduling, retries, caching and recovery. A single interface shows runs, logs and states across teams, with alerts on failures and late runs. Workflows can run on Kubernetes, ECS, your own VPC or serverless compute. The framework is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence and you can run your own Prefect server; Prefect Cloud is the managed alternative, including a hybrid model in which lightweight workers run inside your own environment.

Prefect Technologies, Inc. is a US-based company, which means US jurisdiction, including the CLOUD Act, applies to the vendor. Prefect Cloud stores orchestration metadata on Google Cloud infrastructure in the United States; Prefect states that personal data processed by workflows never reaches Prefect Cloud with hybrid or push work pool execution. A European organisation that needs full control can self-host the open-source server on its own infrastructure.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Prefect pre-selected

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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 (self-host, US cloud)
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 4, 2026

Headquarters	US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Data hosting	Self-hosted, e.g. in self-host, US cloud (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-source	YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Category	BPM & Workflow
Type	Product
Website	prefect.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Prefect

The European alternatives to Prefect 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

22 European BPM & Workflow 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 Prefect

Prefect 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.

Prefect hosts data outside the EU (self-host, US cloud). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

Prefect 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 Prefect 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 Prefect?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Prefect include Albato, ARIS and Automatisch. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Prefect?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Prefect include Automatisch, Ofelia (Bonita) and Flowable. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Prefect is headquartered in US and hosts data in self-host, US cloud. The vendor states it is GDPR-compliant, but the data falls under non-EU jurisdiction. 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 4, 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 BPM & Workflow

BPM & Workflow: Business process management, workflow automation and process modelling. 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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