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Contact Book: the EU alternative to Airtable
Same job, hosted in the EU. Contact Book runs in Germany under German law - your data stays in EU jurisdiction end to end.
If your reason for moving off Airtable is data sovereignty, the comparison gets simpler. Contact Book is hosted in Germany on infrastructure we operate ourselves - no US-headquartered company in the request path. The CLOUD Act does not reach what physically lives here.
At a glance
Airtable is the most flexible CRM you can build - because it's not a CRM, it's a database. The flexibility is its strength and its trap. Past 500 rows the UI gets sluggish, custom views proliferate, and what was a tidy template becomes a junk drawer. Contact Book is purpose-built and stays fast at scale; the trade-off is you can't add a totally custom field type whenever you want. If you're currently in a spreadsheet and weighing the move, see our guide to migrating from a spreadsheet to a personal CRM.
EU jurisdiction
What 'EU-hosted' actually means here, end to end
Contact Book runs on servers we manage, physically located in Germany. There is no US-headquartered subprocessor in the request path - the data plane (your records, your files, your audit log) lives entirely in EU jurisdiction. Two third parties exist outside that boundary: Stripe (payment information only, under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework) and the mail relay for transactional email. Neither sees your records. Airtable's setup is the variable - if their primary infra is US-based, the CLOUD Act applies regardless of what their privacy page claims.
Contact Book vs Airtable: EU comparison
When to pick which
Pick Contact Book when
Pick Airtable when
EU-jurisdiction questions
Specific to where the data lives, who can subpoena it, and what crosses borders.
Start with Contact Book
Free plan, no credit card. We host in Germany. Export + delete are self-serve.
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