EU Sovereignty Score
Non-EU vendorDevOpsHeadquarters: US

Upbound: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Upbound is the company behind Crossplane, an open-source framework that platform teams use to manage cloud infrastructure as control planes. Upbound sells a commercial platform for building, running and governing those control planes, aimed at platform engineers, automation and AI agents. According to the vendor, the full platform can run anywhere, including air-gapped environments. Crossplane graduated as a CNCF project in November 2025.

Upbound was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, US. Its Series B round in 2021 was led by Altimeter Capital, with GV and Intel Capital participating; no majority owner is named. Crossplane is open source, whereas the Upbound platform is a commercial product. For a European organisation, the vendor's US base and its unpublished hosting locations are the points to check. Organisations that prefer to avoid vendor hosting can run the open-source Crossplane themselves, but the commercial platform's deployment terms should be reviewed before purchase.

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Sovereignty score
17 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-210
    Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
  • Data residency SOV-30
    No hosting in Europe (US)
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-320
    Key management with a non-European vendor
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-615
    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 11, 2026
HeadquartersUS (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionOnly for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelVendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hostingUSVerified by hand
Open-sourceNoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantNoVendor-stated
CategoryDevOps
TypeProduct
Websiteupbound.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Upbound

The European alternatives to Upbound come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 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

38 European DevOps 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 Upbound

Upbound 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.

Upbound 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.

Upbound 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 Upbound 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 Upbound?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Upbound include Buddy, CFEngine and Checkmk. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Upbound?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Upbound include CFEngine, Checkmk, Codeberg and Eclipse Che. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Upbound is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. 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 11, 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 DevOps

DevOps: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, monitoring, container registries. 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 Upbound — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score