EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceEnterprise SearchHeadquarters: CH

Semanteer: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Semanteer is a modular search and intelligence suite from Contexity AG in Winterthur. Its search offers autocomplete, typo tolerance, facets and filters, synonyms, geo search and context-sensitive results. It can also link user behaviour to content for personalised results, extract meaningful entities from unstructured text, categorise content automatically and build knowledge graphs. An administration cockpit handles configuration, management and monitoring, and APIs and libraries connect it to existing systems. It is used for websites, web shops and enterprise portals. According to the vendor, the suite is built on open-source components.

Contexity AG is headquartered in Switzerland, and the site names no foreign owner. You can run Semanteer on your own server, in the cloud or as a hosted service. The site does not say where the hosted service runs, so ask the vendor. If you want full control, choose your own server. Switzerland is not an EU member state but is an EFTA country with an EU adequacy decision.

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Sovereignty score
80 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in Switzerland: Swiss law, recognised by the EU as adequate
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    Hosting in Switzerland only (recognised by the EU as adequate)
  • 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
CH (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
Self-hosted, e.g. in CH (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
NoVendor-stated
Category
Enterprise Search
Type
Product
Website
contexity.ch ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Semanteer

The European alternatives to Semanteer come from our knowledge base of over 9,200 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

25 European Enterprise Search 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 Semanteer

Semanteer is headquartered in Switzerland and falls under Swiss law, including the revised Swiss data protection act. Switzerland is not an EU member, but the European Commission recognises its level of data protection as adequate. Its Swiss headquarters does not by itself bring it under US legislation such as the CLOUD Act.

Semanteer 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.

Semanteer 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 Semanteer 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 Semanteer?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Semanteer include AddSearch, Cludo and Datafari. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Semanteer?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Semanteer include Datafari, Elasticsearch and ElasticSuite. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Semanteer is headquartered in CH (EFTA) and hosts data in CH. That makes Semanteer 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

In the changelog

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

Digital sovereignty in Enterprise Search

Enterprise Search: Internal knowledge and document search across company tools, wikis and file stores. 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 Semanteer — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score