Finland (64.5) has the highest adoption of digital sovereign infrastructure, followed by Germany (53.85) and The Netherlands (36.32). While the UK (9.21), Belgium (7.15), Italy (6.5), Spain (7.01) and Denmark (6.5) are lagging behind the average of all EU countries (16.31). These are the results of the first Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI) published by open source software company Nextcloud, measuring the use of self-hosted collaboration technologies across around 50 countries.
The debate around digital sovereignty has gained momentum since the beginning of the year, covering subjects from protecting sensitive data, avoiding vendor lock-in and ensuring democratic control over infrastructure. Open source software company Nextcloud has published its first Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI) to showcase the status of digital sovereign infrastructure. The index tracks about 50 popular self-hosted software solutions for file hosting, groupware, communication and project management and represents the number deployments per 100,000 citizens relative to other countries among the 50 in the index.
„The research shows high awareness in Germany and The Netherlands. Individuals and small and medium businesses use self-hosted technologies, which are often open source. Yet, the public sector in both countries is still largely dependant on big tech. This gap indicates that government organizations are deeply dependent on foreign big tech providers, while the people and small companies actually show they care about digital sovereignty,“ said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud.
„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“, said Würzburg computer science professor Harald Wehnes.
The UK, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Norway and Belgium lagging behind in digital sovereignty
While ranking above the EU average, France (25.1), Austria (20.23) and Switzerland (23.32) lag behind the leaders. In addition, France’s total score is actually helped by the high number of self hosting tools and infrastructure like Plex and Webmin, but lags behind in all the other applications, scoring only the 8th spot for both data storage and project management, and even 11th for communication tools.
The baltic states, known for their advanced progress in e-government services, Latvia (16.63) Estonia (18.4), Lithuania (16.1) are surprisingly just above the EU average when it comes to digital sovereignty.
Norway (6.35), Belgium (7.15), Denmark (6.5), Spain (7.01) and Italy (6.49) score significantly below the EU average (16.31). The ranking is especially interesting as digital sovereignty has seen great awareness in Denmark since the beginning of the year.
“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”, said Pernille Tranberg, independent advisor in data and AI ethics.
„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,“ said Sebastian Raible, Director EU relations for the European Open Source Business Association APELL in Brussels.
The UK (9.21), Canada (14.94) and the US (14.88) also lag behind the EU average (16.31).
The full results are available in the 2025 Digital Sovereignty Index: dsi.nextcloud.com.
Methodology 2025 Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI)
Nextcloud has researched the usage of about 50 popular self-hosted software solutions for file hosting and collaboration, groupware, communication and project management in over 50 countries on July 28, 2025 across more than 7.2 million servers. The DSI score uses a number between 0 and 100 to show the number of deployments per 100,000 citizens relative to other countries in the Index. The higher the score, the more visible deployments of sovereign infrastructure. The DSI is not an absolute measurement of sovereignty, but it offers a strong indication of the choices a society makes about their data It is important to note that the index is based on the number of deployments, not their size. As small and medium businesses as well as private users running servers far outnumber larger organizations like government or big enterprises, the index says more about the choices of individuals and small companies than what government or large corporations do. The research has been conducted for the first time. Nextcloud does not have access to any data of its customers or to data of other open source software solutions used by third parties.
Nextcloud is the world’s most popular privacy-focused collaboration platform. It is used by tens of thousands of private and public organizations and tens of millions of private individuals to stay in control of their sensitive data and ensure privacy compliance.
With Nextcloud, users can edit and share documents, chat and hold videoconferences, and manage emails, contacts and calendars via easy web and mobile apps. The open-source software has a modular design and can be extended with hundreds of apps. It runs in on premises in a private cloud or with a trusted provider.
Founded in 2016, Nextcloud is fully employee-owned and has grown organically ever since. Learn more at www.nextcloud.com.
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Finland (64.5) has the highest adoption of digital sovereign infrastructure, followed by Germany (53.85) and The Netherlands (36.32). While the UK (9.21), Belgium (7.15), Italy (6.5), Spain (7.01) and Denmark (6.5) are lagging behind the average of all EU countries (16.31). These are the results of the first Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI) published by open […]
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