EU Sovereignty Score
Non-EU vendorForms & SurveysHeadquarters: GB

SmartSurvey: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

SmartSurvey is an online survey and form platform for organisations that collect feedback from customers, employees, patients, citizens or market-research respondents. Users build surveys with branding, many question types and logic and branching, and distribute them by email, SMS, web embeds, pop-ups, QR codes, tracking links or offline kiosk mode. It is delivered as a SaaS service.

SmartSurvey is a UK company. According to its security page, its servers are located in the UK, run on dedicated servers provided by UKFast, with backups held in a separate physical location, and its staff are UK-based. The company states that it is ISO 27001 certified and Cyber Essentials Plus certified, and it is registered for the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit. The product is not open source. Because the UK is outside the EU and EEA, European organisations rely on UK law and on the UK adequacy arrangement for transfers of personal data.

Sovereignty score
32 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-250
    Headquartered outside the EU (GB)
  • Data residency SOV-30
    No hosting in Europe (GB)
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-340
    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-630
    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
GB (OTHER)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision
Yes — found adequate by the European CommissionVerified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
GBVerified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal
CLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
Category
Type
Product
Website

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 SmartSurvey

The European alternatives to SmartSurvey 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

41 European Forms & Surveys vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

Is SmartSurvey one of many dependencies?

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Why digital sovereignty matters with SmartSurvey

SmartSurvey is headquartered in GB, outside the EU. Contracts and data therefore also fall under non-European law. The GDPR applies through contractual terms, but in a conflict with local legislation you have less certainty than with a European vendor.

SmartSurvey hosts data outside the EU (GB). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

SmartSurvey 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 SmartSurvey 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 SmartSurvey?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to SmartSurvey include SurveyJS, AidaForm and Crowdtech. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to SmartSurvey?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to SmartSurvey include SurveyJS. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

SmartSurvey is headquartered in GB (OTHER) and hosts data in GB. 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".

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 Forms & Surveys

Forms & Surveys: Online forms, surveys and feedback tools. 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 SmartSurvey — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score