Category: Database & Data Management
8 European alternatives to Milvus — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted.
Open-source vector database (Apache 2.0), originally built by Zilliz (founded in China, now headquartered in San Francisco, US); governed as a graduated project of the LF AI & Data Foundation (Linux Foundation, US).
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Facts
- Headquarters
- US (US)
- EU adequacy decision
- Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework
- Sovereignty model
- Open-source, distributed
- Category
- Database & Data Management
- Type
- Product
- GDPR-compliant
- Yes
- Open-source
- Yes
- Data hosting
- self-hosted
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
Sovereignty profile of Milvus
How this vendor scores on the five dimensions of the Digital Sovereignty Heatmap: 0 is sovereign, 100 is high exposure. These are the same scores the assessment uses.
| Jurisdictional exposure (JES) | Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702 | 90 |
|---|---|---|
| Data residency (DRS) | No EU hosting (self-hosted) | 0 |
| Cryptographic key sovereignty (CKS) | Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control | 10 |
| Platform lock-in (PLS) | Open source: low switching costs | 20 |
| Source & runtime sovereignty (SRS) | Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable | 35 |
| Average | 31 |
Why digital sovereignty matters with Milvus
Milvus 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.
Milvus hosts data outside the EU (self-hosted). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and drives the data residency score up.
Milvus 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 Milvus together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.
Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Milvus
The European alternatives to Milvus come from our knowledge base of over 3,600 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.
- Elastic↗
Elastic (Elastic N.V.), headquartered at Keizersgracht 281, Amsterdam, Netherlands, develops Elasticsearch, the widely used distributed search and analytics engine, alongside Kibana and Logstash (the "ELK stack"). Since September 2024 Elasticsearch and Kibana source code is triple-licensed under AGPLv3, SSPL, and the Elastic License v2, with AGPLv3 being OSI-approved, restoring genuine open-source status after the 2021 licensing dispute. It can be self-hosted, run via Elastic Cloud with selectable EU data-center regions, or deployed via other providers, giving strong flexibility for EU sovereignty requirements.
NL · open-source
- Firebird SQL↗
Self-hosted relational database stewarded by the non-profit Firebird Foundation, registered in the Czech Republic.
CZ · open-source
- Meilisearch↗
Open-core search engine: the Community Edition is MIT-licensed and free to use, but the Enterprise Edition (sharding, advanced observability, analytics) has been under BUSL 1.1 since v1.19 (August 2025), requiring a commercial agreement for production use.
FR · commercial
Frequently asked questions
What is the best European alternative to Milvus?
It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Milvus 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 Milvus?
Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Milvus include ArangoDB, DuckDB, Elastic, Firebird SQL, MariaDB and OrientDB. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.
Is Milvus GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?
Milvus is headquartered in US and hosts data in self-hosted. The vendor states it is GDPR-compliant, but the data falls under non-EU jurisdiction. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.
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.
Also in this category
- SAP HANAEUDE
- Amazon DynamoDBOTHERUS
- Apache CassandraOTHERUS
- Apache CouchDBOTHERUS
- Azure Cosmos DBOTHERUS
- ChromaOTHERUS
How sovereign is your whole stack?
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