Self-hosted / open sourceIdentityHeadquarters: AT

walt.id: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

walt.id is an open-source toolkit for digital identity and digital wallets, built around issuer, wallet and verifier components for verifiable credentials. It supports standards such as W3C Verifiable Credentials, SD-JWT VC and the OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance and Presentation protocols. The components are offered as SDKs and APIs that organisations run on their own infrastructure, with an enterprise stack and a hosted identity-as-a-service option as commercial alternatives. It is aimed at developers and organisations building wallet, issuance and verification flows.

walt.id GmbH is based in Vienna, Austria, and the site does not state its shareholders. The community stack is published under the Apache 2.0 licence on GitHub. Because self-deployed software runs on the organisation's own servers, data location stays under its control. For the hosted option, the privacy policy says processors store data in the EU or are certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and the company commits to data processing agreements with its providers.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with walt.id pre-selected

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Sovereignty score

92 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-2100
Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
Data residency SOV-3100
Hosting inside and outside Europe (EU, 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-690
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	AT (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model	Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting	EU, USVerified by hand
Open-source	YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Category	Identity
Type	Product
Website	walt.id ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to walt.id

The European alternatives to walt.id 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

70 European Identity 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 walt.id

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

walt.id hosts data in EU, US. Exactly what stays within the EU — and what does not — is defined by the vendor's data processing agreement and sub-processor list, not by a setting you control yourself; check those documents for the precise scope, including backups, logs and support access.

walt.id 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 walt.id 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 walt.id?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to walt.id include Adnovum, Airlock and Auðkenni. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to walt.id?

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

Is walt.id GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

walt.id is headquartered in AT (EU) and hosts data in EU, US. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes walt.id 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 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 Identity

Identity: Identity and access management — SSO, MFA, directory services. 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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