EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceCybersecurityHeadquarters: DE

Search Guard: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Search Guard is a security plugin for Elasticsearch clusters from floragunn GmbH. It adds role-based access control down to individual documents and fields, encryption of indices at Lucene level, audit logging, Kibana multi-tenancy and alerting by email, Slack, PagerDuty, Jira and webhooks. Integration with SAML, OpenID Connect and LDAP / Active Directory is part of the paid editions. The product is installed as a plugin on the organisation's own infrastructure. A free Community edition is available under the Apache 2.0 licence, alongside paid Enterprise and Compliance editions.

floragunn GmbH is headquartered in Berlin and states that Search Guard has been built and supported in Germany since 2013. No non-European parent company was found. Because the software runs on your own servers or in your own cloud tenancy, you decide where search data and keys are stored; the vendor does not host the data. The Community edition is open source, whereas the paid editions are not. Note that Search Guard secures Elasticsearch, so the licensing and hosting of Elasticsearch itself remain a separate consideration.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Search Guard pre-selected
MastodonLinkedInBlueskyXEmail
Sovereignty score
80 / 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-380
    Closed source, but self-hostable: encryption keys and runtime under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-680
    Closed source, but self-hostable on your own infrastructure

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 14, 2026
Headquarters
DE (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
Self-hosted, e.g. in EU (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Cybersecurity
Type
Product
Website
search-guard.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Search Guard

The European alternatives to Search Guard come from our knowledge base of over 8,400 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

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

Is Search Guard 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 Search Guard

Search Guard 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.

Search Guard runs on infrastructure you choose and control yourself. You decide where the data lives, including fully within the EU if you want — this is not a fixed hosting choice made by the vendor.

Search Guard is closed source, but you run the software yourself on your own infrastructure. The encryption keys and the runtime therefore stay under your own control, though you cannot audit or modify the source code. Ask about export options and open standards to limit software-level lock-in.

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

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Search Guard include Actalis, Advenica and Aikido Security. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Search Guard?

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

Is Search Guard GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Search Guard is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Search Guard 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 October 14, 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

Cyber Resilience Act

Public signals that relate to the EU Cyber Resilience Act. They do not count towards the score. A missing line means "not found publicly".

We found none of these signals on the vendor's own site when we checked.

For products in scope of the CRA, CE marking is required from 11 December 2027; this cannot be checked yet.

Checked on October 14, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

In the changelog

Earlier changes to this page, as listed in the public changelog.

Digital sovereignty in Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity: Threat detection, endpoint protection, SIEM, vulnerability 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 dashboardMissing a vendor? Submit itAre you this vendor? You can also become a sponsor on the Cybersecurity page — with no effect on your score
8 European alternatives to Search Guard — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score