Governments, institutions, companies and civil society are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of controlling their own digital infrastructure.
From concerns about data protection and vendor lockin to questions of political autonomy, the topic has moved from niche circles to mainstream policy debates.
Yet while the debate is global, the actual state of digital sovereignty varies widely between countries. Policies may exist, but how much infrastructure is really running locally, instead of the cloud? What choices do people make? And how does this compare to the policy of the public sector?
To address this question, we developed the Digital Sovereignty Index DSI a simple metric to illustrate how much self hosted collaboration applications are actively used across over 50 countries. It represents the relative amount of deployments of self-hosted productivity & collaboration tools per 100,000 citizens, compared to other countries.
The results of the first Digital Sovereignty Index show significant differences in the adoption of self-hosted infrastructure across Europe and beyond.
The scores are comparative, not absolute – a high score indicates stronger relative deployment than in other countries, but not necessarily broad adoption. The data reflects visible tool usage across society, particularly among individuals and small organisations.
The index reflects the number of servers, not their size ― making it more indicative of what small companies and private individuals use, rather than the policies of large corporations or governments.
Studies show that most government agencies in Europe are completely dependent on Microsoft, Google and other big tech solutions. But the scores show that in several European countries, civil society makes different choices than their government does, opting for hosting large numbers of servers running project management tools, file store and exchange platforms, groupware or video or chat applications.
In Germany, for example, the relatively high score suggests that sovereign tools are more commonly used in the general population than in some parts of the public sector. States like Schleswig-Holstein, which are introducing self-hosted, open source infrastructure, may therefore be more closely aligned with the choices than those using Microsoft 365.
| 🇫🇮 Finland | 64.50 |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | 53.85 |
| 🇳🇱 Netherlands | 36.32 |
| 🇫🇷 France | 25.10 |
| 🇨🇭 Switzerland | 23.32 |
| 🇮🇸 Iceland | 22.58 |
| 🇮🇪 Ireland | 22.03 |
| 🇦🇹 Austria | 20.23 |
| 🇪🇪 Estonia | 18.40 |
| 🇱🇺 Luxembourg | 17.72 |
| 🇱🇻 Latvia | 16.63 |
| 🇱🇹 Lithuania | 16.10 |
| 🇨🇦 Canada | 14.94 |
| 🇺🇸 United States | 14.88 |
| 🇸🇪 Sweden | 14.27 |
| 🇭🇺 Hungary | 13.38 |
| 🇸🇮 Slovenia | 13.33 |
| 🇨🇿 Czechia | 13.10 |
| 🇧🇬 Bulgaria | 12.93 |
| 🇦🇺 Australia | 10.20 |
| 🇬🇧 U. Kingdom | 9.21 |
| 🇹🇼 Taiwan | 8.49 |
| 🇷🇴 Romania | 7.66 |
| 🇵🇱 Poland | 7.55 |
| 🇭🇷 Croatia | 7.25 |
| 🇧🇪 Belgium | 7.15 |
| 🇪🇸 Spain | 7.01 |
| 🇷🇺 Russia | 6.95 |
| 🇩🇰 Denmark | 6.50 |
| 🇮🇹 Italy | 6.49 |
| 🇳🇴 Norway | 6.35 |
| 🇸🇰 Slovakia | 5.88 |
| 🇶🇦 Qatar | 5.71 |
| 🇷🇸 Serbia | 5.44 |
| 🇨🇾 Cyprus | 5.25 |
| 🇯🇵 Japan | 5.17 |
| 🇰🇷 South Korea | 5.05 |
| 🇬🇷 Greece | 4.81 |
| 🇵🇹 Portugal | 4.33 |
| 🇳🇿 New Zealand | 4.23 |
| 🇮🇱 Israel | 3.71 |
| 🇲🇹 Malta | 3.38 |
| 🇺🇦 Ukraine | 2.83 |
| 🇦🇷 Argentina | 2.57 |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | 2.44 |
| 🇹🇷 Turkey | 2.26 |
| 🇿🇦 South Africa | 1.79 |
| 🇮🇩 Indonesia | 1.07 |
| 🇲🇦 Morocco | 0.94 |
| 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia | 0.87 |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico | 0.57 |
| 🇹🇳 Tunisia | 0.55 |
| 🇯🇲 Jamaica | 0.51 |
| 🇮🇳 India | 0.43 |
| 🇬🇱 Greenland | 0.36 |
| 🇪🇬 Egypt | 0.12 |
| 🇳🇬 Nigeria | 0.03 |
Germany ranks second in the Digital Sovereignty Index with a score of 53.85, above the EU average of 16.
The strong performance is largely driven by the use of communication tools and data storage.
Across categories, Germany shows one of the most balanced and consistent profiles, coming in just behind Finland but well ahead of the rest of the field.
Given the known dependence of the public sector on big tech, it is interesting to note that so many citizens and organizations choose self-hosted solutions.
The Netherlands ranks third with a score of 36.32, marking a steep drop from Germany’s 53.85 and highlighting the significant gap between the top two and the rest of the field.
There is of course an impact of digitalization in general. But the Netherlands, which is arguably far more digitalized than Germany, still lags behind in the DSI.
This would strongly suggest that business and citizens in the Netherlands have focused more on public cloud services than hosting their own collaboration and data storage servers.
France follows in fourth place with just 25.1 points ― closer to the EU average of 16.3 than to the top tier.
Its score is primarily driven by the availability of self-hosting infrastructure such as Plex and Webmin, while adoption in more collaborative categories is weak: France ranks only eighth for both file storage and project management, and eleventh for communication tools.
Iceland completes the top five with 22.58 points.
I am very pleased that the evaluation has shown that a aboveaverage number of open source products are used on local servers in Germany. This is also a great source of knowledge and experience and demonstrates a good awareness of digital sovereignty. Public administration is heavily dependent on products from digital monopolies and runs the risk of paying exorbitant prices with taxpayers’ money in the long term. The EU's service deficit for software licenses, cloud services, and other costs with the U.S. reached an alarming record level of €148 billion last year. A digital "Zeitenwende" is urgently needed.
I believe that Europe should work towards digital sovereignty and keep up with our data privacy values and rules. Open standards and open source technologies are also becoming increasingly important in this context, and are essential for a resilient digital landscape.
With a score of just 14.88, the United States is below the EU average.
Adoption of self-hosted tools is only moderate across most categories and particularly weak in groupware, including essential services likeemail and calendars.
The heavy reliance on centralized cloud platforms continues to undermine the broader use of selfhosted, privacy-preserving infrastructure.
To generate the Digital Sovereignty Index, we relied on data from Shodan.io, a search engine that scans the internet for publicly accessible servers. For each of the applications, we searched for country-specific IP addresses that visibly run these tools. This was based on identifiable patterns in returned HTML or other metadata.
We then adjusted the raw server counts by population size, calculating the number of observed instances per 100,000 citizens. To avoid skew from tools with very high or low absolute adoption, we normalized each product score across all countries and scaled it to a 0 100 range. A country’s overall DSI is the average of its normalized scores across all products. We also aggregated scores by product category.
Of course, there are limitations. The data represents publicly visible servers. Any deployment behind a proxy or firewall may go undetected. Some tools are harder to identify reliably than others. And while a high number of servers suggests broad adoption, it does not reflect data volume, user numbers, or ownership structure.
In short, the DSI offers a comparative view of observable self hosted deployments across borders. It does not claim to measure full digital sovereignty, but it highlights where real infrastructure exists and where momentum is building.
We welcome community feedback to refine the index over time - including improved search definitions and suggestions for additional tools to include in future iterations.
The goal of increasing technological sovereignty is to reduce dependencies, and increase control and security for personal data, as well as businesses' trade secrets. But more so, we need open technological sovereignty, as only with Open Source can we allow the public and the private sector to create and innovate sustainably in Europe. We welcome the Digital Sovereignty Index, as it shows how the European countries are doing in this regard.
∗ Total divided by number of tools
Taiga, Redmine, OpenProject, Xwiki, Wekan, Planka
Big Blue Button, Jitsi Meet, Mumble, Matrix/ Element, Mattermost, Rocket.chat, Zimbra, Nextcloud Talk
Roundcube, Zimbra, Mailcow, SOGo, Kopano, Nextcloud Groupware
Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, Pydio, Cryptpad, Etherpad, OnlyOffice Docs, HedgeDoc, Outline
Joplin Server
Odoo, ERPNext, Dolibarr, SuiteCRM
Plesk, cPanel, DirectAdmin, ISPConfig, Interworx, Webmin, Cockpit, Ajenti, Froxlor, YunoHost, Cloudron, Proxmox, Portainer, Rancher, Sentora, VestaCP, TrueNAS, QNap, Synology, VMWare
We welcome suggestions for future editions of the index. Every contribution helps us paint a more complete picture of digital sovereignty in practice.
Digital Sovereignty is, to some, a nebulous concept. But for others it just means they own the server that stores their data. The Digital Sovereignty Index shows that millions of citizens and businesses already made that choice. Yet, the public sector is still largely dependent on big tech.
This gap indicates that government organizations are deeply dependent on foreign big tech providers, while many citizens and smaller organizations actually show they care about digital sovereignty.