EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceCybersecurityHeadquarters: US

step-ca: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

step-ca is an online certificate authority (CA) for running your own private PKI, aimed at DevOps environments. The server issues X.509 (TLS) certificates and SSH certificates and acts as an ACME server, so common ACME clients can request certificates automatically. Supported provisioners include OIDC single sign-on, cloud instance identity and JWK tokens. Keys can be protected with HSMs, cloud KMS or YubiKey PIV, and it integrates with Kubernetes cert-manager. It is server software that you run yourself, together with the step command-line client.

step-ca is maintained by Smallstep Labs, Inc., a company based in San Francisco, in the United States, and is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Because you operate the CA yourself, certificates, keys and issuance logs stay under your control. Smallstep also offers a commercial platform and a hosted authority for features step-ca does not include; its documentation does not state a hosting region for that hosted service.

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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
Data hosting
Self-hosted, e.g. in US (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Cybersecurity
Type
Product
Website
smallstep.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to step-ca

The European alternatives to step-ca 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

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Why digital sovereignty matters with step-ca

step-ca 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.

step-ca 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.

step-ca 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 step-ca 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 step-ca?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to step-ca 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 step-ca?

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

Is step-ca GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

step-ca 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".

security.txt
smallstep.com/.well-known/security.txt

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

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8 European alternatives to step-ca — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score