Digital sovereignty: five European tool alternatives for a sovereign stack

Digital sovereignty means a company can say, for each tool, who operates it and which law can compel that operator, where the data is stored, what leaves the EU, and how it takes its data out. A sovereign stack is one where every tool answers all four; an EU data centre answers only the second. Checked against the vendors' own pages, one European alternative per layer looks like this: Excalidraw for diagrams, Element on Matrix for chat, Docs from La Suite numérique for documentation, MeisterTask for tasks and Capme for video.

For the video layer, which is ours, the Capme Trust Center lists where recordings are stored and every subprocessor involved, or try the free recorder: the take stays in your browser.

For a company, digital sovereignty comes down to four questions per tool. Data sovereignty is the narrower part: data residency (where the data is stored) plus who can be forced to hand it over.

End-to-end encryption, where the keys never reach the vendor, eases the first three questions: the vendor has nothing readable to hand over. That works for chat and shared drawings. Video, documents and task boards have to be processed by the service, so there the operator, the region and the exit decide.

A five-person team with no sensitive data and no public-sector customers can usually stop at questions 1 and 4.

The CLOUD Act lets US authorities require a communications or cloud provider under US jurisdiction to disclose data in its possession, custody or control, whether stored in the United States or abroad (18 U.S.C. § 2713). Article 48 of the GDPR says a judgment or authority decision from outside the EU that requires the transfer or disclosure of personal data can be recognised or enforced only if it rests on an international agreement, without prejudice to the other grounds for transfer in Chapter V. A US-operated tool with an EU data centre can be caught between the two.

On 10 June 2025 a French Senate inquiry asked Anton Carniaux of Microsoft France under oath whether he could guarantee that French citizens' data entrusted to Microsoft through UGAP would never be passed to the US government on its order without the French authorities' explicit agreement. His answer, in the Senate's record: "No, I cannot guarantee it, but, once again, it has never happened yet" (translated).

Many transfers to US vendors use the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, whose two predecessors the Court of Justice struck down (C-362/14, 6 October 2015; C-311/18, 16 July 2020). We think the stack is worth building now, because if the framework falls on appeal, the tools that never relied on it keep working. Capme's one DPF entry, the support mailbox, also has standard contractual clauses behind it. This article describes the law and the product, not legal advice.

Each pick is described only from its vendor's linked pages, checked 1 November 2026.

Excalidraw takes the place of Miro and is open source under the MIT licence (licence), so you can run it yourself. On the free editor at excalidraw.com, a shared link is encrypted in the browser and the key sits in the part of the URL after the #, which the browser never sends to the server (Excalidraw on its encryption). Excalidraw+ differs: its terms name Excalidraw s.r.o. in Brno (terms), and its DPA names subprocessors outside the EEA, including the United States, under standard contractual clauses (Excalidraw+ DPA).

Element on Matrix stands in for Slack or Teams, and in chat, encryption does most of the protecting. Matrix is an open protocol, and Element's privacy policy says nobody at Element or its processors can access encrypted data (privacy policy). With Element Server Suite you run the server yourself (Element Server Suite). Element Creations Limited in London and its subsidiaries run the hosted service (company information); hosted customers pick the location, on AWS (privacy policy). Encryption has to be on in each room that matters, and the server still sees who sits in which room.

Docs, published by La Suite numérique, is an open-source editor in place of Notion or Confluence (repository). Self-hosted, the operator, the region and the backups are yours, and the exit is your own database. Hosted docs tools show why the first question comes before the second: Slite keeps production data in Belgium on Google Cloud (security page), while its legal page names Slite, Inc., a Delaware company, as the service operator (legal information).

MeisterTask replaces Asana or Trello boards; its imprint names MeisterLabs GmbH in Vaterstetten near Munich (imprint). Its security page puts the servers in an ISO 27001-certified data centre in Germany and says MeisterTask is certified to ISO 27001:2022 (security page).

Capme Meetings is the platform that ends status meetings, in place of Loom and the weekly call: speakers record their agenda topic in the browser, everyone else watches the recordings, and viewers in a meeting are free. The free recorder at capme.app/studio records screen, camera or both, and the take stays in that browser. Save to device downloads the file without uploading it, after you confirm your email address.

As checked in our code on 1 November 2026, the paid plans decide where hosted video lives. Solo and Team use EU hosting, stored in Germany and Sweden and delivered from the nearest node worldwide; recordings are kept for 12 months by default. On Business and Enterprise the workspace owner enters an endpoint, bucket and access key under Data, in Storage, and runs Test connection. From then on, browsers upload straight into your bucket and play from it. The Business trial includes your own bucket and runs 14 days without a card; the figures are on the pricing page.

The Trust Center names all 6 subprocessors and the DPA gives thirty days' notice of changes. Two entries reach beyond the EU: Bunny.net stores video in Germany and Sweden and uses standard contractual clauses for delivery nodes outside the EU, and the support mailbox runs on Google Workspace, whose transfers to its US parent rest on the Data Privacy Framework and standard clauses. To leave, the person who recorded a video downloads it with Download video. For everything at once, the DPA promises a free export of the videos and, on request, the metadata as JSON or CSV; after a plan ends you have 30 days to collect the recordings. Capme has no ISO 27001 or SOC 2, no independent penetration test yet, and no end-to-end encryption. Where end-to-end encryption is required, send the file through an encrypted Matrix room.

Question 3 splits the five picks: self-hosted Docs and Element list only your own servers; hosted Element runs on AWS; Excalidraw+ has US subprocessors; MeisterTask names no hosting provider; Capme has two entries beyond the EU.

Copy this sheet once per tool; it leaves a record your data protection officer can read.