EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceNetwork & Firewall ManagementHeadquarters: US

Squid: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Squid is a caching and forwarding proxy for the web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and other protocols, and organisations use it to save bandwidth, answer repeated requests faster, restrict access, authorise users and log traffic. It is server software that you install, configure and operate yourself; the developers do not offer a hosted service.

According to the project site, Squid is developed by a small group of volunteers, supported by companies that use it. The project is run through the Squid Software Foundation, a non-profit incorporated in the US state of Colorado. The software is released under the GPL, version 2 or later. Because you run Squid on your own infrastructure, traffic and logs stay with you. The foundation is based outside the EU, but the source code is public and not tied to a cloud service, so you can have a European provider operate it or adapt it yourself.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Squid pre-selected
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Sovereignty score
69 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-210
    Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    No hosting in Europe (US)
  • 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-665
    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
US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision
Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
USVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Network & Firewall Management
Type
Product
Website
squid-cache.org ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Squid

The European alternatives to Squid 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

62 European Network & Firewall 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 Squid

Squid is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

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

Squid 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 Squid 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 Squid?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Squid include Accelleran, ADTRAN Networks (ADVA) and ALCASAR. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Squid?

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

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

Squid is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. 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 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 Network & Firewall Management

Network & Firewall Management: Central management of firewalls, switches and Wi-Fi, network access control (NAC), load balancing and DNS/DHCP/IPAM. 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 Squid — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score