Is it really European? The three questions we ask

DeepL is from Cologne. It was founded there, it is registered there, and its translator is on almost every list of European alternatives to Google. In April 2026 it announced that it "will no longer process data exclusively within Europe" and is "adding AWS as a sub-processor". The company didn't move. Where your text can go did.

Who controls DeepL is a harder question. Its investors include American venture funds such as Benchmark, IVP and ICONIQ Growth, as DeepL said when it raised $300 million in 2024. It doesn't publish who holds the majority of the votes, so from the outside nobody can say.

"European" hides three questions: who controls a service, where it is based, and who runs the servers your data sits on. For DeepL today the answers are unknown, Germany, and mixed. One word can't carry all three, so on EU Alts we don't use it as a single label. Every service we compare gets three answers, each with a country, a source and the date we checked it.

The three questions

1. Owned: who controls it at the top?

We follow the chain of companies up to whoever controls the business in the end: the parent company, the controlling shareholder or the fund that bought it. A subsidiary with a European name, a European address and European servers doesn't decide the answer; its owner does.

Exoscale shows why. It is a Swiss cloud provider, and all its data centres are in Europe. It is also part of the A1 Telekom Austria Group, and A1 is controlled by América Móvil, the Mexican telecoms group, which holds 61% of it according to A1's shareholder page. Exoscale is based in Europe and runs its servers in Europe. Its owner is in Mexico.

Minority shareholders don't change the answer, but we name a large one when there is one, because readers ask. In Exoscale's case it is the Austrian state, which holds 28.4% of A1 through its holding company ÖBAG.

2. Headquartered: whose law does it answer to first?

This is where the company is registered and run from. It decides which country's courts, regulators and data-protection authority deal with it first.

Proton is a good example. Proton AG is registered in Switzerland, with its headquarters in Geneva, and its main shareholder is the Proton Foundation, a Swiss non-profit. It is owned and run in Europe. It is not owned or run in the EU, and for some readers that is the point that matters (more on Switzerland below).

3. Hosted: who runs the servers?

This is where your data is stored and processed, and which company runs the machines it sits on.

Location alone is not enough. Under the US CLOUD Act of 2018, a provider under US jurisdiction that is served a valid US warrant or order must disclose data in its "possession, custody, or control, regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States". A service that is "hosted in the EU" on Amazon, Microsoft or Google servers passes the location question and still involves a US company.

That is why we read a service's list of sub-processors, the other companies it hands your data to, and not just its marketing. DeepL's move to AWS is one case from this year. The other big one is Amazon's own answer to the question.

AWS European Sovereign Cloud runs in the EU through a European company. A critic quoted by Trending Topics points out that this company is "100% owned by a US-based Amazon company", which is why the CLOUD Act question doesn't go away. AWS's reply is that since it started reporting the figure in 2020 it has made zero disclosures to the US government of business or government customers' content stored outside the US. Both are facts, and we report both.

How the answers appear

Each comparison on EU Alts will have the same three rows near the top: Owned, Headquartered and Hosted. Each row will name a country, link to the source and say when it was checked. There are three kinds of answer:

• A country, when the answer is clear, with "Europe, not EU" beside it when the country is in Europe but outside the European Union.
• Mixed, when it splits. For example, a service run on its own servers in Germany that also sends some data to a US sub-processor.
• Unknown, when we couldn't find out. We would rather say that than guess.

We don't add the three up into a score. Which one matters most depends on you. For a translator, you may care most about where your text is processed. For email or a VPN, whose law the company answers to may matter more.

Where we draw the line

Europe isn't one legal area, so here is our line, stated openly so you can disagree with it:

• The 27 EU countries count as European.
• Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and the United Kingdom count as European too, always with the label "Europe, not EU".
• Everywhere else doesn't count, even with a European office or a European-sounding name.

The label is there because the difference matters to some readers and not to others. Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein are in the European Economic Area, and the GDPR has applied there since 20 July 2018, the same data-protection law as in the EU. Switzerland and the UK have their own data-protection laws, which the European Commission recognises as adequate (the UK decision was renewed on 19 December 2025), but neither is in the EU or the EEA, so the GDPR doesn't apply there as EU law. Many readers' first choice of email is Swiss; others rule Swiss services out for exactly that reason. The label lets you decide.

The rule is the same for owners and for headquarters: a Norwegian, Swiss or British owner counts, with the label, and an American owner doesn't. For hosting we name the country the servers are in and the company that runs them, for the reason above.

What the questions leave out

The three questions are about control and jurisdiction, not about whether a company is good. Being European doesn't guarantee better privacy, better working conditions or owners whose views you share. We don't score politics. When something happens that readers want to weigh up, such as a sale, a move to a US cloud or a controversy around a founder, we add it to the comparison with the date and a source, and leave the judgement to you.

Answers change

Companies get sold, and services move servers. Every answer on EU Alts carries the date it was last checked, and we check again before a comparison is updated. If you find an answer that's wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it and note the correction on the page.

Check it yourself in five minutes

1. Find the legal name. EU law requires online services based in the EU to show their name and geographic address (Article 5 of the e-Commerce Directive). Look in the legal notice, the imprint (the Impressum in Germany and Austria) or the terms of service.
2. Follow it upwards. Search for that legal name with "parent company" or "annual report", or look it up in the national company register.
3. Read the sub-processor list. It is usually linked from the privacy policy, and names the cloud and analytics companies your data goes to.