EU sovereignDatabase & Data ManagementHeadquarters: DE

SAP HANA: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented relational database management system from SAP. Data is held in main memory, which enables fast access and querying. Besides storage and SQL, HANA offers predictive, spatial, text, streaming and graph analytics, ETL and an application server. It is used for real-time analytics and transaction processing and underpins SAP applications. HANA can run on-premises, as a certified hardware appliance or on existing hardware, or in the cloud with providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

SAP SE is headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, and is a European company (SE). HANA is proprietary commercial software, licensed as Runtime or Full Use; an Express Edition is free for productive use up to 32 GB of RAM. Because SAP itself is based in the EU, it is subject to European law. If you consume HANA through a US hyperscaler, however, that adds a further party with its own jurisdiction to the chain, whereas on-premises use keeps the data entirely under your own control.

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Sovereignty score

59 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-2100
Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
Data residency SOV-350
Hosting inside and outside Europe (EU, US, APAC)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-360
Key management with a European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-645
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	DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	EU, US, APACVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal	AKAMAI-ASN1 - Akamai International B.V., NL (US)Technically measured
Category	Database & Data Management
Type	Product
Website	sap.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 SAP HANA

The European alternatives to SAP HANA come from our knowledge base of over 7,800 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

14 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 SAP HANA

SAP HANA 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.

SAP HANA hosts data in EU, US, 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.

SAP HANA 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 SAP HANA 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 SAP HANA?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to SAP HANA 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 SAP HANA?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to SAP HANA 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 SAP HANA GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

SAP HANA is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU, US, APAC. That makes SAP HANA 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 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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