EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceSearch EnginesHeadquarters: DE

YaCy: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

YaCy is free search engine software that can be used in three ways: as a peer-to-peer network in which independently run peers share one decentralised web index, as your own search portal with an index and crawl you control, or as intranet search for internal web pages and file systems.

YaCy was created in 2003 by Michael Christen and is developed by a community as a non-profit project that relies on contributions and donations; the YaCy brand is owned by a private company, which also offers consulting. It is released under the GPL-2.0-or-later, so the source code is open. Because you run the software yourself, data residency depends on where you deploy it: on EU infrastructure, the index and queries stay under your control. In peer-to-peer mode your peer exchanges index data with other peers, whereas a standalone installation is independent of them.

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Sovereignty score
94 / 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-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-6100
    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 July 2, 2026
HeadquartersDE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Compliance documents1 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signalHETZNER-AS - Hetzner Online GmbH, DE (DE)Technically measured
CategorySearch Engines
TypeProduct
Websiteyacy.net ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to YaCy

The European alternatives to YaCy 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

15 European Search Engines 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 YaCy

YaCy 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 YaCy scores best on data residency.

YaCy 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 YaCy 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 YaCy?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to YaCy include Ecosia, Lilo and MetaGer. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to YaCy?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to YaCy include MetaGer. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

YaCy is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes YaCy 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 July 2, 2026.

Sources

This record was checked via the vendor's website and legal notice during the full audit of June and July 2026. Source links have been recorded per record since 20 September 2026.

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".

Security page / trust center
yacy.net/privacy

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

Links checked on September 22, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in Search Engines

Search Engines: Search engines — privacy-friendly web searching. 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.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to YaCy — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score