EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceDatabase & Data ManagementHeadquarters: US

Vitess: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Vitess is an open-source database system that adds horizontal scaling and sharding to MySQL. Applications keep using the MySQL protocol, while Vitess routes queries, pools connections and handles sharding, resharding and failover of the primary. Its features include materialized views and messaging across shards, and background schema changes. It is designed for cloud-native infrastructure and aimed at teams whose single MySQL server no longer meets their needs.

Vitess is a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation and based in the United States. Its code is released under the Apache 2.0 licence and can be run on infrastructure the organisation controls, so there is no mandatory vendor cloud that stores customer data. Data stays on the servers the organisation operates, which can be located in the EU. Organisations that want MySQL at scale can use Vitess instead of building sharding into the application or moving to a proprietary managed database. Governance sits with a US-based foundation.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Vitess pre-selected
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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 12, 2026
Headquarters
US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision
Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
USVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
NoVendor-stated
Category
Database & Data Management
Type
Product
Website
vitess.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Vitess

The European alternatives to Vitess come from our knowledge base of over 7,800 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

14 European Database & Data Management 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 Vitess

Vitess 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.

Vitess 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.

Vitess 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 Vitess 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 Vitess?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Vitess include Aiven, ArangoDB and DuckDB. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Vitess?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Vitess include DuckDB, Elastic, Firebird SQL, MariaDB and Meilisearch. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Vitess 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 12, 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 Database & Data Management

Database & Data Management: Database systems, data warehousing, managed database services and data platforms. 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 Vitess — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score