EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceIdentityHeadquarters: DE

privacyIDEA: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

privacyIDEA is a modular open source authentication server that adds multi-factor authentication to logins, VPNs, SSH and web portals. It supports one-time passwords, FIDO2 and WebAuthn, smartcards, push, SMS, email and SSH keys, and reads users from LDAP, Active Directory, SQL databases and other sources. Administrators manage tokens and policies through a web interface and a REST API. The server is written in Python with the Flask framework and runs on Linux, on your own infrastructure.

The server is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 and its code is developed openly on GitHub. NetKnights GmbH, based in Kassel, Germany, offers the privacyIDEA Enterprise Edition with support, which according to the vendor can be deployed on premises or hosted. Because the community edition is self-hosted, user and token data stays in the environment you operate, so its location and jurisdiction are under your control. A European organisation can therefore run it in its own datacentre or an EU cloud while keeping access to the source code.

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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
CategoryIdentity
TypeProduct
Websiteprivacyidea.org ↗

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 privacyIDEA

The European alternatives to privacyIDEA 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

58 European Identity 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 privacyIDEA

privacyIDEA 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 privacyIDEA scores best on data residency.

privacyIDEA 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 privacyIDEA 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 privacyIDEA?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to privacyIDEA include Adnovum, Airlock and Auðkenni. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to privacyIDEA?

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

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

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

Identity: Identity and access management — SSO, MFA, directory services. 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 privacyIDEA — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score