EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignOffice & ProductivityHeadquarters: DE

Ulysses: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Ulysses is a writing app for Mac, iPad and iPhone for people who write a lot, such as authors, journalists and students. It offers a distraction-free, markup-based editor, organises long projects into chapters, scenes and reference material, and includes a grammar and style checker for more than 20 languages. Texts can be exported to PDF, Word and e-book formats and published directly to WordPress, Ghost, Medium and Micro.blog. The app is distributed through the App Store and Mac App Store, and texts sync across your connected devices.

Ulysses is published by Ulysses GmbH & Co. KG in Leipzig, Germany, and is proprietary software rather than open source. According to its privacy policy, account data and content for web services such as Styles & Themes are hosted by Hetzner in Germany, while some other processors, for example for support and error reporting, are located in the United States and elsewhere. For European organisations this means a German vendor under EU data protection law, although you should check which processors apply to the features you use.

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Sovereignty score
71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • 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 5, 2026
Headquarters
DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Office & Productivity
Type
Product
Website
ulysses.app ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Ulysses

The European alternatives to Ulysses 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

31 European Office & Productivity 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 Ulysses

Ulysses is headquartered in DE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Ulysses scores best on data residency.

Ulysses 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 Ulysses 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 Ulysses?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Ulysses include Ashampoo Office, Calligra Suite and Craft Docs. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Ulysses?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Ulysses include Calligra Suite, CryptPad, EGroupware, Euro-Office, eXo Platform and Framasoft (Framapad/Framacalc). These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Ulysses is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Ulysses 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 5, 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

Digital sovereignty in Office & Productivity

Office & Productivity: Office software, word processing, spreadsheets and groupware. 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 Ulysses — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score