EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignAIHeadquarters: CH

MATE: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

MATE is a private AI assistant from Swisswise GmbH in Bern. It offers chat for writing, research and planning, optional web search with cited sources, custom assistants and translation, in apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac and the web. In On-device Mode a downloaded open-weights model runs on your own device, offline once set up; MATE Cloud Mode sends requests to the vendor's own servers. Chat history and Memory stay on your device.

Swisswise GmbH is headquartered in Bern, Switzerland, which is not an EU member but is an EFTA country with an EU adequacy decision. No foreign parent company is stated. According to the vendor, MATE Cloud runs open-weights models on hardware it owns in Swiss data centres, without hyperscalers or third-party AI services, and conversation content is neither retained after the answer nor used for training. The privacy policy covers the GDPR and Swiss data protection law. For European organisations it is a Swiss-hosted alternative to US assistants such as ChatGPT.

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Sovereignty score
67 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in Switzerland: Swiss law, recognised by the EU as adequate
  • Data residency SOV-380
    Hosting in Switzerland only (recognised by the EU as adequate)
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-360
    Key management with a European vendor
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-655
    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 October 14, 2026
Headquarters
CH (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
CHVerified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
AI
Type
Product
Website
swissmate.ai ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to MATE

The European alternatives to MATE come from our knowledge base of over 9,200 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

93 European AI 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 MATE

MATE is headquartered in Switzerland and falls under Swiss law, including the revised Swiss data protection act. Switzerland is not an EU member, but the European Commission recognises its level of data protection as adequate. Its Swiss headquarters does not by itself bring it under US legislation such as the CLOUD Act.

MATE hosts data in Switzerland only. Switzerland is not part of the EU or the EEA, so the GDPR does not apply there directly; the European Commission does recognise Swiss data protection as adequate, so personal data can go there without extra safeguards. Our model therefore scores it between EU hosting and hosting outside Europe. If you require strictly EU hosting, take this into account.

MATE 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 MATE 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 MATE?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to MATE include Acapela Group, aiaibot and Aleph Alpha. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to MATE?

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

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

MATE is headquartered in CH (EFTA) and hosts data in CH. That makes MATE 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 AI

AI: Artificial intelligence — large language models, translation, generative AI. 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 MATE — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score