Elium vs Notion
Elium is a European alternative to Notion: same office & collaboration use case, headquartered in Belgium and governed by EU GDPR, while Notion is based in the United States.
By the EU Alternatives team Last updated
Governed knowledge base with AI import, AI search, expiry reminders for stale content and permission-aware delivery to Teams, ServiceNow and AI agents.
- Jurisdiction
- EU / EEA
- Primary privacy law
- EU GDPR
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- No
- Open source
- No
- Free tier
- No
Notion combines notes, documents, wikis and lightweight databases in a single workspace, and has become a favourite of startups and students alike. Personal use is free, while teams pay per member per month. Notion Labs is a private company headquartered in San Francisco.
- Jurisdiction
- United States
- GDPR by default
- Requires DPA + TIA
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- Yes
Elium vs Notion at a glance
| Elium | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Belgium | United States |
| Data jurisdiction | EU / EEA | United States |
| Primary privacy law | EU GDPR | Requires DPA + transfer assessment |
| US CLOUD Act exposure | No | Yes |
| Best for | Teams that need office & collaboration built for European data-protection requirements | Teams already invested in the Notion ecosystem |
Choose Elium if…
- You want a provider governed by a European privacy regime
- GDPR or public-sector data-protection requirements apply to you
- You'd rather back the European tech ecosystem
Stick with Notion if…
- You depend on integrations only available in the Notion ecosystem
- Your organisation has no EU data-residency constraints
- Migration costs outweigh the jurisdiction benefits for now
About Elium
Elium turns scattered procedures, policies and runbooks into one governed source of truth for the whole company. Content has owners, gets flagged when it goes stale, and is routed back for verification, so teams and their AI tools work from knowledge that is actually current.
Existing documents come in through AI import from SharePoint, Google Drive, Confluence, Notion or plain Markdown. Answers then reach people where they already work, in the web app, on mobile, in Microsoft Teams, Zendesk and ServiceNow, and reach AI agents through MCP, REST and API access that respects each user's permissions.
Key benefits:
- Expiration management flagging outdated pages and sending them to their owners
- AI search answering questions from verified company content
- Permission-aware AI so agents only see what the asking user may see
- AI import converting legacy documents into structured, maintainable articles
- Wide integrations with more than 30 tools including Teams, Slack, Jira and Salesforce
- Flexible deployment as SaaS, private cloud or on-premise for enterprise customers
Elium is built by Whatever SA, an independent company founded in 2007 in Walloon Brabant, Belgium, with a second office near Paris. It holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification and processes data under GDPR. Standard SaaS data stays in the EU on Google Cloud's Belgian region, while customers who want to avoid US-owned infrastructure can choose hosting in France on 3DS Outscale, which is SecNumCloud-qualified. Customer content is never used to train models.
More than 150,000 people across 150+ organisations use Elium, including L'Oréal, BNP Paribas, VINCI Energies, SNCF and the Council of Europe.
Why choose Elium over Notion?
The decisive argument is data jurisdiction. Notion is headquartered in the United States, which means personal data processed through it can be subject to non-EU legal regimes: the US CLOUD Act, FISA 702, or similar laws depending on the provider. After the 2020 Schrems II ruling, EU organisations must carry out a transfer impact assessment for every such data flow.
Elium removes that overhead. As a Belgium-based provider, it operates under EU GDPR, and data stays inside the EU/EEA by default. For regulated sectors such as health, public administration, and finance, that's not a nice-to-have but a requirement. For everyone else, it's concentration-risk insurance: you avoid depending on a single jurisdiction that can change the rules without warning.