EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceDatabase & Data ManagementHeadquarters: US

RethinkDB: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

RethinkDB is an open-source, scalable NoSQL database for realtime web applications. Data is stored as schemaless JSON documents, and changes are pushed to the application so that it does not have to poll. The database supports joins, aggregation and map/reduce, secondary indexes, sharding and replication with automatic failover, among other features. A cluster is managed and monitored through a web interface or an API. RethinkDB is installed and operated by you; no provider hosts it as a service.

The original company behind RethinkDB ceased operating in 2016. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a Linux Foundation project, bought the intellectual property and handed the code to the Linux Foundation, and the licence was changed from AGPLv3 to Apache 2.0. Since then the project has relied on contributions from its community and on sponsors. There is therefore no commercial vendor with a foreign parent company. You decide where the data is stored, but support and further development depend on the community.

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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)
  • 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 6, 2026
HeadquartersUS (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionOnly for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingself-hostVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
CategoryDatabase & Data Management
TypeProduct
Websiterethinkdb.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to RethinkDB

The European alternatives to RethinkDB 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

13 European Database & Data Management 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 RethinkDB

RethinkDB 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.

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

RethinkDB 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 RethinkDB 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 RethinkDB?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to RethinkDB include Aiven, ArangoDB and DuckDB. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to RethinkDB?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to RethinkDB include DuckDB, Elastic, Firebird SQL, MariaDB and Meilisearch. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

RethinkDB is headquartered in US and hosts data in self-host. 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 6, 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 Database & Data Management

Database & Data Management: Database systems, data warehousing, managed database services and data platforms. 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 RethinkDB — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score