EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceWriting Assistance & GrammarHeadquarters: CA

Stylo: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Stylo is a semantic, collaborative text editor for scholarly articles in the humanities and social sciences. Its editorial chain is based on pandoc and includes a metadata editor, versioning, bibliography management, annotation and document sharing, with exports to HTML5, TEI/Erudit XML and PDF. It is a web application: according to the README, running it yourself requires Node.js and MongoDB, and a hosted instance is available at stylo.huma-num.fr.

Stylo is designed and produced by the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities (Research Laboratory on Digital Textualities) at the Université de Montréal, and funded by the Revue 3.0 project and Huma-Num. The source code is published under the GPL-3.0 on GitHub, so institutions can install their own instance and keep manuscripts on their own servers. The project site links to the hosted instance under the Huma-Num domain, but the documentation does not say who operates it; ask the team about data location before relying on it.

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Sovereignty score
77 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-250
    Headquartered outside the EU (CA)
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    No hosting in Europe (OTHER)
  • 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
CA (OTHER)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision
Yes — found adequate by the European CommissionVerified by hand
Data hosting
Self-hosted, e.g. in OTHER (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
NoVendor-stated
Category
Writing Assistance & Grammar
Type
Product
Website
stylo-doc.ecrituresnumeriques.ca ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Stylo

The European alternatives to Stylo 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

26 European Writing Assistance & Grammar 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 Stylo

Stylo is headquartered in CA, 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.

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

Stylo 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 Stylo 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 Stylo?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Stylo include CKEditor, Congree and contentbird. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Stylo?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Stylo include CKEditor, Geany, ghostwriter and Grammalecte. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Stylo is headquartered in CA (OTHER) and hosts data in OTHER. Its GDPR compliance is limited or unclear. 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

In the changelog

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

Digital sovereignty in Writing Assistance & Grammar

Writing Assistance & Grammar: Grammar checking, spell checking, style advice and AI writing assistants. 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 Stylo — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score