EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceE-signaturesHeadquarters: FR

Signature PDF: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Signature PDF is a free web application for signing and editing PDF files. You can add a signature, initials, a stamp or text, either alone or together with others through a shared link. It also lets you merge, reorder, extract and rotate pages, edit metadata, recognise text with OCR, add a watermark, redact areas of a document and compress files. It is used in the browser and can be installed by an organisation itself.

The software is maintained by 24ème, a French company in Paris that develops free software; all code the company produces is released under the AGPL v3. According to the documentation, you can install Signature PDF on Debian, Ubuntu or Alpine, or with Docker. Storing documents for signing by several people is optional, can be encrypted with GPG and has a configurable retention period. Because you can run the application on your own infrastructure, documents do not have to leave your environment. Besides self-hosting, 24ème and other organisations run public instances; how data is handled there is decided by the operator of that instance.

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Sovereignty score
94 / 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-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-6100
    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 14, 2026
Headquarters
FR (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
E-signatures
Type
Product
Website
pdf.24eme.fr ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Signature PDF

The European alternatives to Signature PDF 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

74 European E-signatures 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 Signature PDF

Signature PDF is headquartered in FR and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Signature PDF scores best on data residency.

Signature PDF 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 Signature PDF 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 Signature PDF?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Signature PDF include A-Trust, Agrello and ANF AC. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Signature PDF?

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

Is Signature PDF GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Signature PDF is headquartered in FR (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Signature PDF 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 E-signatures

E-signatures: Electronic signatures, trust services, eIDAS services. 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

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8 European alternatives to Signature PDF — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score