Non-EU vendorCRMHeadquarters: US

Salesforce: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Salesforce is a cloud customer relationship management (CRM) platform that brings sales, service, marketing, commerce and IT together around a shared view of the customer. Its offering includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, the Data 360 data product and Agentforce for AI agents, plus the Salesforce Platform for building custom applications. It is intended for organisations from small to large across many sectors. Salesforce delivers the software as SaaS and handles hosting, maintenance and security itself.

Salesforce is a publicly listed US company headquartered in San Francisco. The software is not open source. It runs on Hyperforce, an architecture built for the public cloud, where customers can choose from several regions, including the US, the UK and Germany. Data is generally stored in the country where the organisation is located if the service is available there, although components of some products may run elsewhere. For EU data residency, Salesforce offers the paid Hyperforce EU Operating Zone, with processing inside the EU and support from EU-based staff. A European organisation still contracts with a US provider.

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

Mastodon LinkedIn Bluesky X Email

Sovereignty score

27 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
Data residency SOV-350
Hosting inside and outside Europe (US, EU, APAC)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-320
Key management with a non-European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-615
Closed source, runtime with the vendor

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

Headquarters	US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	US, EU, APACVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Compliance documents	1 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signal	AKAMAI-ASN1 - Akamai International B.V., NL (US)Technically measured
Category	CRM
Type	Product
Website	salesforce.com ↗

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 Salesforce

The European alternatives to Salesforce 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

42 European CRM vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

Is Salesforce one of many dependencies?

Score your whole stack in about three minutes. Free, no account needed.

Assess your stack →View a sample report (opens in a new tab)

Why digital sovereignty matters with Salesforce

Salesforce 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.

Salesforce hosts data in US, EU, APAC. Exactly what stays within the EU — and what does not — is defined by the vendor's data processing agreement and sub-processor list, not by a setting you control yourself; check those documents for the precise scope, including backups, logs and support access.

Salesforce is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Salesforce 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 Salesforce?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Salesforce include SuperOffice, Odoo and Axelor CRM. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Salesforce?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Salesforce include Odoo, Axelor CRM, Dolibarr and X2CRM. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Salesforce is headquartered in US and hosts data in US, EU, APAC. 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 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".

Security page / trust center: salesforce.com/platform/cloud-data-security/

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

Links checked on September 21, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in CRM

CRM: Customer relationship management — sales pipelines, contact management. 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

See all →

Open in the alternatives dashboard Missing a vendor? Submit it Are you this vendor? You can also become a sponsor on the CRM page — with no effect on your score