So why does Europe have such hard time popping new software ventures like the US? Is it market fragmentation? Languages? Is it capital allocation related problems?
I feel that the ability to bootstrap projects in all the large EU countries is way harder than the US, or smaller euro ones (like the Netherlands or Estonia).
In Spain for example, the cost of something similar of an LLC is way higher than in the US, not to mention that you have to pay almost 400€/month (at minimum) just for owning the company as Social Security fee, even if I'm also working for someone else paying my social security through my salary.
It's a huge burden if you're in my situation, which is having an average salary, not a lot of savings and you don't have a family that bails you out.
If language were a major barrier; then, how does one explain the US doing well in the EU?
I get that home markets may not be big and provide a springboard perhaps to other markets but even the big countries there don’t seem to dominate the small countries in terms of Software.
I think this has been debunked? Just look at Sweden as an counter example or Israel.
I believe it’s just the lack of massive capital and the power law of VC investments. Start 1000s companies with smart people and a tiny fraction will get insanely big.
This is probably true, because I know many Europeans that come to America and start their startups. So it may not be that there are few European startups, just few startups targeting that market.
>So why does Europe have such hard time popping new software ventures like the US?
The US has a very mature and developed tech VC scene. Where's Europes isn't as mature. Also clustering is a thing -- why didn't Silicon Valley happen in New York either -- many of the conditions were there just like California but it didn't materialize and Europe was simply a mess in the aftermath of WWII there weren't going to be many tech revolutions taking place there.
In fact ironically enough there was such a congregation of talent in Berlin in the 1930s that some have predicted a second "Renaissance" was inevitable were it not for WWII.
You can look at the two world wars as an elaborate suicide attempt of Europe which resulted in handing over the world to the US.
It's quite depressing really.
I can only speak for myself, but I find the amount of legal red tape you need to deal with incredibly discouraging.
I'll much rather build and run software for free in my spare time than start a business since the latter would mean having to spend dozens of hours every week dealing with all manner of bureaucracy.
I have the capacity and funds to start a business, but I just don't think it's worth the hassle.
I have a hard time to see how Europe would be any more bureaucratic then the US. Working for a European company that do business with American companies every now and then I can say that the contracts lengths and the legal staffing is a factor of ten higher every time we try to deal with an American customer. Heck involving lawyers just to sign standard contracts is not even something we have to do with European customers generally.
For many, Big Government is probably a big part of it here in Belgium. The public sector is so big that many software engineers can spend their entire career as overpaid government contractors.
British limited companies are probably among the simplest and cheapest to incorporate and manage in the world but, well, the UK is no longer in the EU...
I have never understood why countries slap so much red tape and so many fees on this. The UK has got it right, IMHO: make it as cheap and simple as possible, there are only upsides [Edit: for society/the state] to people starting up a business.
>there are only upsides to people starting up a business.
that is not true at all. The majority of business ventures fail and a lot of small businesses aren't productive, and at the end of the day someone needs to pick the tab up. Even Thiel used to say, don't start a business until you have a very good reason to.
What you actually want is to incentivize the kind of people to start a business who have a high chance of driving innovation and bringing about large, productive firms, you don't really want an army of self-employed people with low capital formation in a developed country.
This has been discussed before. Although the EU is a marketplace of 27 countries, it is not a digitally homogeneous marketplace. Adoption and acceptance of digital tools varies by country. Language is also important - the tech giants localise their apps and tools. But many software companies in larger European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK etc) concentrate on their home country first before they focus on international reach. That makes sense. However, in smaller countries, where the software market is also smaller, software companies have a more international outlook (i.e. eyeing the US market).
Even when there are local apps available, many small businesses (and larger ones) will stick with services from big, well-known tech companies. Why? I guess because of inertia, or simply because those products feel safe and familiar.
Where are the pan-European equivalents to eBay, Etsy, KickStarter, AirBnB, Shopify, AbeBooks, etc? Europeans use these services entensively. You'll probably find local equilavents in each European country, but they are not pan-European or global in scope.
if anything the opposite should be true: A small homogeneous market with a language barrier is a great testing ground where a new product can grow and then become global. Facebook started in harvard, and some EU fintech startups are doing well in Sweden, i hear.
Global expansion is not an issue; every american company can easily reach the whole of EU. And there are many many european startups whose main market is america. Unless you mean that, products are so tailored to their home market that they don't have global appeal.
> So why does Europe have such hard time popping new software ventures like the US?
Because people in Europe still largely believe that a business should be an actual business. You know, operating and bringing profit.
Unlike the US where nearly every single "unicorn" can lose billions of dollars a year for over a decade, never see a profit, and still be lauded as a successful business.
I can feel it myself. I am very reluctant to create a money losing business. It is a deep-seated fear (I'm creating a new business at the moment). Where I got this from, parents, culture, common sense, whatever, doesn't really matter. I would not personally feel successful if I had created Uber, I'd just feel stressed and kind of a fraud. End of story.
So for my new business I'm not getting VC funding even though I know some VCs and they made it clear I could get money from them. I want to build a real business that is actually sustainable on its own terms. This will inevitably limit my reach and likely means I won't create a "tech company", but I've made my peace with that.
Someone else already said acquisitions but the other half of the answer is finance. The US has the most rich and ruthless financial system in the world, with gigantic flows with comparatively little oversight. There's simply enough built up to finance eternal unicorns.
You're oddly being downvoted for that. Not being paid nearly as highly in tech in general, detracts from how much money is in the ecosystem for doing start-ups.
If you can sock back a retirement working for big tech for 10-12 years (counting equity), it frees you up massively to do whatever you like, whether funding as an angel, or self-funding your own start-ups. It's not uncommon for people you know in tech in Silicon Valley to pitch in on early small funding rounds if you've started something new and are rounding up some early funds. Multiply that wide process by the scale of the US tech industry - at the small and large ends - and all the wealth that has been created in it over the past 30 years.
1.3 million software developers with a median salary of $110,000 is a lot of money just from the software developer worker bees every year (save N% per year of that pile, now it's available for investment in one form or another; and that's ignoring the equity value they're yielding).
Europeans are a lot worse at capitalism, in general, than Americans. Partly because we're not required to be. Western Europeans are more or less born into a massive insurance scheme that will bail you out whenever the going gets tough. This is mostly good, IMO, but not without cost.
The reason is that EU is an open economy that is not even TRYING to become independent.
China knew that America will try to crush them. It's a real, literal, life or death situation for them to come up with a Chinese Google. They have pumped trillions into the tech industry over decades.
Ok I perhaps misspoke because we would want them, if they came without costs.
And by cost I mean law and regulatory environment necessary for such companies.
In EU generally speaking law is in favor of the people (individuals) a lot more than in USA (there are huge exceptions to this like defamations (or anything to do with banks), but I still believe its true.).
There are stories about EU fining USA corporations and how that is unfair.
But they fine local ones as well, so breaking things (as in breaking/ignoring law ) and moving fast ends up with law breaking you long before you are successful enough that you can shrug it off.
It's not hard to start business in EU, but it's hard to get hokey stick growth. There are plenty of small to mid level companies in EU that pay well to founders and it's employers.
But if you are trying to get hokey stick growth, EU is not optimal, so why even bother starting there since you can go straight to USA most of the time ?
And honestly speaking if we would have to import American style laws/ regulatory environment in order to get them here, I would rather choose not to have them
This isn’t really a plausible root cause. These companies in the U.S. that are supposedly acquiring everyone (and they aren’t: there are record numbers of unacquired unicorns and IPOs recently) were small once too. That just begs the question: How did the U.S. get all the large acquirers in the first place?
It's capital. We simply don't have it, or it's not allocated to tech.
All these silly fees you mention are marginal. It would actually be much cheaper to hire devs from Europe, so cost is not the issue at all. It is simply a lack of capital altogether. Nor is there the risk taking that is required.
Cost of incorporating; cost of hiring and firing (this is a big one); and fragmented market in terms of policy, culture and language. Capital availability, until recently, but I don't think that's an issue anymore.
The costs you list are dwarfed if a company scales to any reasonable size and by that point they have enough of a team to consider moving elsewhere in the EU to better manage them. In fact, moving to the US might open up as an opportunity which some people take.
The biggest problem is funding due to the risk aversion of EU institutions and limited alternative sources. You have to be incredibly qualified to acquire the funding need to drive a startup forward in the way that happens in the US. This ranges from the small angel investors through to the first series of VC funding.
In the EU, if you are a business like a biotech or pharma you may be able to navigate this because those are well trodden paths with high risk adversity baked in. A software company has many unknowns, so you encounter problems with expectations. You can't fail in the EU because you only have one shot and won't get back again with another company/idea. In reality, it's very likely you'll stumble a lot initially and won't have the leeway that you have in the US. If you compared bankruptcy on both sides of the Atlantic you'd notice similar patterns.
I would turn that question around. How have the US become this hub for tech-companies? Probably culture and momentum. The same reason a small country like Sweden managed to become the third-largest music exporter in the world.
And also European companies are moving to the US to start and/or grow their businesses there. Why is Spotify even listed on the NY stock exchange?
Another thing - most european companies will reduce your salary and treat you as a slave if you are working as a contractor outside the EU (since no one can punish them that way).
I can confirm that an ex FB guy who went full-remote digital nomad style earlier this year and wanted to move as a senior developer for a French startup simply because he loves their idea (and it'd be easier for him due to timezones while he stays in Thailand/Cambodia) and guess what they did? They offered him less than half as compared to an actual junior position, even though they received milkions in funding, and the reason? He lives in a "cheap" place therefore he doesn't need a high salary anymore, who cares of his expertise, it's not going to be "fair" towards the other workers in the company.
I'd guess that the biggest factor is their Venture Capital firms are way more risk averse. The US in general has a more entrepreneurial culture, and therefore a bigger risk appetite.
Language is a big barrier.
With my first startup waiterio.com we had to build a lot of custom tools to narrow the linguistic gap.
I'm turning one of the tools into a public SaaS:
https://www.polyblog.io helps you build multi-language blogs.
> So why does Europe have such hard time popping new software ventures
So what makes you think that "popping new software ventures" is a good thing for society? Isn't there enough software already? The problem is the mediocre quality of it, and decline (hello Adobe). Popping new software ventures is hardly a solution.
This is not even debateable. Software is eating the world and there's still a lot to eat. Europe won't be selling leather bags for much longer. The fact that it excluded itself from the future of the internet is a crime for the future generations.
New ventures is a solution for decline of old ones. The circle of life... It's a necessity, in fact. Cells need to divide and renew, organisms need to reproduce. Companies are the same.
You could look into Estonian e-residency for setting up a company outside of Spain. You’re usually still taxable in your country of residence within the EU, so it’s not a tax avoidance scheme, but it might change your personal insurance status? Just an idea, those 400€ sound awful…
It is beyond insanity. And should you succeed in France/Belgium/Spain you'd be seen as the evil capitalist responsible for all that is wrong in the EU.
The whole mentality is rotten.
The EU has one big software company and it's... SAP. SAP is a drop in the bucket compared to the big US or Chinese tech firms (I don't think SAP is worth even 1/10th of any GNAFAM). But there's worse: I think SAP's market cap is worth basically as much as the next 50 or next 100 (or maybe basically all the others) EU software companies. Something crazy like that.
So one successful software company (thankfully we have Germany in the EU and SAP if, of course, German).
It's a failure whose level of failure cannot be understated.
So it's an enormous, wealthy country where there is lots of investment. Obviously there are other factors but these seem blindingly obvious as starting points.
I find the UK's inability to compete with the US web giants depressing. I don't like the idea of relying on a few American companies for search, cloud infra and so on. I'd love to see us build a British Google for example. I don't like the guy at all, but I agree with Dominic Cummings that we should focus our efforts on something like this.
I'm not arguing for web service nationalism but, for economic and security reasons, way more nation states should be looking to encourage the building of their own web backbone companies. It would also be good for general Internet resiliency to not have so few companies and single points of failure.
> I'd love to see us build a British Google for example.
Here in France we have (had ?) Qwant[1] that never really worked because at first it was about having a search engine at the level of Google, then being user privacy focused (like DDG), then being focused on kids, then on music, then...
But from the beginning it was failing because they were just providing a proxy for Bing's results. They were not even providing a sanitized version of those results. It was Bing's results with a different UI.
And then, because they needed money, they focused on some topics (like the kids, which provided them public money) or music (income from partners companies).
Also there was a lot of political/bureaucratic crap involved within the direction.
So it looks like the issue is that it was people with money that said "we are going to be the French Google". But they hadn't enough money to do so and being "the French Google" is not enough.
If we look at DDG, first it was a bad search engine but they focused on their promise about user privacy. And then they improved their search engine from there. Now they are a credible alternative to Google because they have something that Google don't, while on the core feature (search engine) they are almost the same. If you want to compete, you have to offer something different while providing the same core features.
I think ProtonMail (Switzerland) is a good example. At the moment they don't provide a webmail as good as Gmail, but they provide great email service while focusing on user privacy. They are trying to compete against Google on email like DDG dig on search engine. And that's why it's more and more popular.
So there's probably a mindset issue : don't compete for the sake of competing. Offer something different and then try to reach the competitors level on the core feature. You can't beat a multi-billion giant at its own game.
I will take my 250k in London vs 450k in New York any time.
USA is just a third world country with a Gucci belt.
My family's value system is completely incompatible with how America operates and what drives people and organisations.
I have many senior dev friends who think the same.
I guess this is a Silicon Valley megacorp right? Who could afford those wages?! Over here in the UK, if you're absolutely shit hot, principal engineer type material, I guess £150k + is common. Maybe more if you're a true elite engineer, but US wages are surreal. As others point out though, we get a lot of great public services, state pensions and so on. All a tradeoff.
If you compare US States to European nations it's easy to see that despite political polarization businesses in the states are extremely interactive and it makes easy for huge corps to grow throughout the USA.
Not sure if it's listed or not but one I'm pretty happy with is smallPDF based in Switzerland.
https://smallpdf.com/
I got pissed off when I wanted to rotate a PDF 90 degrees on my dad's computer and adobe wanted to charge for it, then I found that smallPDF could do that and a whole lot more like edits and signature collections. I ended up subscribing him but the free tier already does several things that adobe would charge you for so I encourage anyone to use this service.
I am continually frustrated at just how difficult of a problem simple PDF operations are on Windows PCs. Even looking for alternative PDF readers is a complex and confusing task. And, every top result wants to either charge or require an account to use it. The FOSS tools aren't great either. Why can't Microsoft make a product like Preview for Mac which allows for such things?!?
Shameless plug: I built https://simplePDF.eu as I was similarly frustrated by the lack of a good PDF editor when filling French paperwork.
Checkboxes for example did not seem to be available in any of the tools I found.
I also figured that if I had to spend the time to position the fields, someone else shouldn’t spend that time too: crowd-edited PDF if you will (the document never sees my server)
Basic PDF manipulation has been a constant thorn ever since I started using a computer. I still don't have a single source for it, either. Definitely looking into smallPDF
But it's not. PDF Exchange has a free version and does this for free. There are other software available to do it as well as websites. It's not hard to find for anyone that knows how to type in a few words to google. Sumatra is also a great little pdf viewer (also some simple edits like rotation) for windows.
pdf90 (and 180 and 270) is available on just about any Linux distro. It's a single command. Not quite the same as smallpdf, but if all you're after is rotating ...
This list is just sad. I was thinking about what else could I say, but it's just sad. There's no area listed with an European solution that's comfortably in the top 3 in the world in its field. Maybe it is because this list is deliberately listing areas where the alternatives are less known (someone in another thread brings up SAP as an example).
I would consider DeepL to be comfortably the best translation service for the 24 languages they support. Their decision to support a lot of the less spoken languages in the EU (which have quite terrible support in Google Translate) has made the internet much more accessible for older people in my country who generally can't read English.
Yes, Europe has some tech areas where it is number one. Gambling is one I can think of. All the major sportsbooks, casino sites, poker sites and gambling backend companies are European. Also in porn many top sites are European. Onlyfans, Xvideos, Xnxx, LiveJasmin are all European. The Pornhub network was also started in Europe then sold to a Canadian. Also all major pirate sites and apps are European
Gonna get some hate of course but where’s SAP here? SaaS, private cloud in Rot, BW, Germany, and stringent data privacy as it’s a German company. Executes entirely under GDPR, ticks every of the boxes.
Europe’s biggest software company, never mentioned…
SAP is like Salesforce or SoftBank, in that nobody can figure out what they make or do, but the suits keep shoveling boxcars full of money at them for some reason.
Because SAP isn't an "alternative" it's the dominant player of it's own field. What alternative does the US have to SAP might be another perspective worth examining?
Weird that no service provided by seznam.cz is listed (I would expect at least their maps or email to be mentioned, while the search engine is tailored to czech language only so listing it would be less useful to most people outside of Czechia).
Exactly. Mapy.cz is a brilliant service with a ton of its own technology.
So does Seznam.cz search engine, which, I believe, has it's own crawler and rankings.
Email.cz is used by the most of Czech citizens. When someone asks you for an email address, it's common to reply with the username alone and just confirm it's hosted on Seznam.
mapy.cz is miles better in terms of hiking maps, sattelite/plane maps and regular maps compared to Googe Maps - at least in Czech Republic and Slovakia. And their apps have offline mode.
These listings seem limited from a cursory glance. And what does European mean?
If a German company hosts everything on Google or AWS is it still considered European? Or if a Romanian company moves HQ to New York and still does development mainly in Romania like UI Path?
Or what if you are an American company with all or most of your dev team in say Sweden or Hungary? Does that make you European?
And if you are say a non-European company but meet all the European data protection and compliance requirements and the European counterparts do not?
In this context "European Union" and the company is registered primarily in the EU and where the vast lionshare of profits are declared. The companies mentioned do appear tastefully (or limited in your words) curated are definitely EU based and lends some credence to the overall claim and purpose of page. I'm not seeing controversial 'European' companies that are actually American like Stripe. (Sometimes people claim Stripe to be Irish) -- Adyen is definitely Dutch for example and Mullvad is Swedish.
I'm not seeing anything with a Union Jack on the page and the UK would normally have some entries here. Switzerland and Norway are part of the EU institutions like Schengen and the EEA -- just not full members. So the author of the page does appear to have very good working definition of 'European' but it's not clear what exactly that is -- it's not in the terms page for instance.
I think the idea is companies that do not have a conflict of interest with the US. Although Microsoft claims their data in European data centers can not be given to the US government the US government doesn't see it that way and there are court cases being fought over this.
Good questions ... e.g. look where the founders of Elastic come from (Israel & Netherlands & Germany) and they initially incorporated in the Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_NV
Yes it probably means european as in the legal sense (where it's registered).
As for the last question, that doesn't mean you're an european alternative, you just do what you mentioned: either don't violate or are compliant with the EU policies.The website is probably meant for people who want to use services from inside the EU.
However, this needs to be reminded: if the EU wants to keep this dream of promoting tech development, it needs to look itself in the mirror when it comes to supporting/not supressing entrepreneurs with shitty legislation. They won't do it obviously, but the discussion needs to keep happening. Right now you still have the vast majority of old "boomers" that don't understand the way in which the whole pipeline works, the second biggest group is right out activists who frankly exaggerate when talking about technology(and it mostly has nothing to do with tech regulation/support but forcing tech into their own ideology) and the third group is probably the least popular one, with sensible people who understand you cannot regulate because that suppresses development, but at the same time recognize values and rights needs to be adapted to this medium, while being individual-focused.
I just clicked on the first one I liked (grape - in telecommunications), and it was just closed down due to insolvency. It mentions it had 500,000 users, which baffled me that they couldn't find investment for such an obviously liked and used product. EU startup landscape looks a bit depressing honestly.
Sorry, but that's not a reason for me to buy something. I prefer solutions that perform good over something whose only merit is that it has been made by my neighbor.
Instead of trying to guilt-trip people into buying why not come up with products that can compete in the global market? There's a few - I mean I'm a Spotify customer. But most EU tech is just garbage.
"I prefer solutions that perform good over something whose only merit is that it has been made by my neighbor."
I prefer supporting competition in the market, because I know that as soon as monopoly gets established it starts abusing all marlet participants and acting like a little dictator. Of course it doesn't have to be local.
Also Skype was really good before Microsoft bought it, i have no idea what that department is smoking
And that's great! Lots of us consider more than just "this is a well oiled global machine". That's the beauty of diversity and markets that support a diversity of opinions. I love and use some of these companies because they are in the EU which I consider further up on the "freedom" and "responsible global player" scale than my home country of the USA.
I'm interested in products that are not made with slave labour or under dictator regimes.
I feel like the site is trying to imply this... but Europeans are actually really good at modern day slave labour.
Don‘t forget: Local business means local taxes. So by supporting local businesses near your place you might indirectly profit from better infrastructure, better school etc. (things which are paid by the government with these local taxes).
Switzerland is in some EU institutions like Schengen.
Thus EU membership has lots of asterixes and grey areas unlike the US which is a federacy the EU is a confederacy (Look at Brexit). Switzerland is somewhat unique in that it's both EU and not EU. Take the UK for instance -- their grey area is "Northern Ireland".
It's quite off-puting branding, playing with the flag of a bureaucratic institution like the EU.
If it was about what Europeans create, I would be receptive. Instead, they are promoting whatever is in the European Commission agenda, which is radically different to what I need.
You're being confused by a nasty habit many loyalists to the EU institutions have, of conflating the EU (a political system) with Europe and Europeans (a continent and people).
A good rule of thumb is that if a British person says Europe or European they mean "the continent" and are including Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein, Vatican City etc, but excluding the UK itself.
If a German/French/Spanish/Italian person says Europe or European, especially if they've been to university, they a very likely to mean the EU and only the EU. These people usually don't consider Switzerland or Britain to the "European" as a consequence.
People outside of Europe always mean the continent and population, including the UK, when they use these terms.
> If a German/French/Spanish/Italian person says Europe or European, especially if they've been to university, they a very likely to mean the EU and only the EU. These people usually don't consider Switzerland or Britain to the "European" as a consequence.
German, been to university. Same for my whole social system. That's absolutely BS what you're saying. Especially German speaking countries have a stronger bond than EU/Europe because of "DACH" and a shared culture (see the anthroposophy discussion recently).
I don’t know who runs this but it’s definitely incomplete. Too bad the “European alternative” to webchat doesn’t even work on mobile. Maybe that’s the reason why it’s so incomplete
I run the site and as many things in life this site is a work in progress. I got many suggestions for new services in the last days, so there will be many more services in the future.
If you have suggestions I'm sure you can email them, and they will welcome then. This is probably just someone's hobby page like those “Awesome _________” pages on GitHub.
I can see this list get more useful as the categories get more complete.
I do question the design of the logo which makes the site look like an official EU initiative, which it is not. At best it's unintentionally misleading and at worst it might not be entirely legal.
This list is trash. Why, for example, is Hetzner missing in the cloud computation section? Or SAP? I could understand that they didn't want to over-emphasize any country and give a fair selection, but many countries, especially Germany, has many more companies in any of these spaces.
Thanks for the constructive criticism! Hetzner is now listed. (https://european-alternatives.eu/product/hetzner) Since Hetzner mainly provides virtual servers, I have created a separate category for them. I just wrote down SAP, here I still have to think of a suitable category.
Whoops, so sorry! I thought this was an official thing. If it's a WIP, then not a problem. There is going to be a lot of stuff you can list, like email providers taking privacy into account like protonmail or posteo.
EU investors, banks are too conservative, they only invest small amount of money and they are not comfortable taking risks. US on the other hand has built a much high tolerance for taking risks. They are ok with taking risks and loosing big time.
The sad state of EU IT is also due to the fact that US companies are much, much better at marketing their solutions.
Often even the european media landscape is only mentioning US services in reviews and comparison. The fact that it needs a page like this says a lot about how bad marketing of these european companies even in their home market is.
D̶e̶u̶t̶s̶c̶h̶l̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶ EU Über Alles ? Digital nationalism?
I don't really get this fragmentation in a free world. Why should i use product that is less competitive just because companyX servers a located in a country that is theoretically more friendly? Even that is a big question.
If you live in Poland or any Eastern European EU member, in this case GB, US do more to protect you from absolutely real War risk.
Germany, France, Austria government is absolutely corrupted they lead to situation when Russia think it can claim rights on other sovereign countries. Half of eastern Europe felt left behind. Same with China relationship. How many people will lose their job because china is building their capital on not fairly regulated market, stolen Intellectual property. EU don't care. No real protection. They afraid tensions(polite form of saying corrupted) even when this tension means protect own citizen.
At the same time ex german counselor works at Gazprom to Lobby corrupt interests. He got an official title. Russia takes this money and execute, poison people, blow up military objects in European countries.
But EU built a nice website to support corrupted governments via taxes. Maybe first get some responsibility and do your job?
Who said the product is inferior? Have you checked any of these?
More discoverability of alternative offerings is always better, for both the customer and supplier, unless the supplier is a monopolist.
In my experience middle sized companies that still have to prove themselves and build good will offer (much) better servivce / product than mature corporations run by beancounters who are focused on "monetising" their userbase most effectively.
because that what market shows. One market has 0 regulations and it strives. Other with all regulations and theoretically bigger population by almost 50% still struggles to be at comparable size.
One pays up to $500k a mo for a dev position other pays pennies promising you some kind of pension.
Classical regulated vs free market
You are stating your personal opinion as fact. There are many and varied views on the EU among Europeans, from euroscepticism all the way up to and including eurofederalism.
> I dont want to move to another country in Europe and learn their language.
Cool! nice initiative.
For me is important my privacy, and using EEUU apps/services/dns/cloud/third parties things for using internet it should pass through EEUU services, threath analysis, NSA, FBI, Goverment interest, that's why this kind of initiatives are important.
FYI "EEUU" only makes sense in Spanish-speaking countries (AFAIK). When writing in English, for English-speaking audiences, use "the US". Otherwise everyone will be very confused, especially in the context of an article about the EU.
So why does Europe have such hard time popping new software ventures like the US? Is it market fragmentation? Languages? Is it capital allocation related problems?
I feel that the ability to bootstrap projects in all the large EU countries is way harder than the US, or smaller euro ones (like the Netherlands or Estonia).
In Spain for example, the cost of something similar of an LLC is way higher than in the US, not to mention that you have to pay almost 400€/month (at minimum) just for owning the company as Social Security fee, even if I'm also working for someone else paying my social security through my salary.
It's a huge burden if you're in my situation, which is having an average salary, not a lot of savings and you don't have a family that bails you out.
Also, this listing lacks a few more that I listed here: https://iagovar.com/mapas/european-web-hosting-alternatives
I think the biggest problem is the small home market / fragmented market.
While the EU has a very well integrated market for industry goods, for services (where I would include software) the market is less than perfect.
The language barrier is the biggest strangle for EU software entrepreneurship / platform business in my opinion.
The second-biggest obstacle imho is funding. If you want to grow really fast, it is hard to get enough money.
Third, I would rank ecosystem in general, besides money.
I think over regulation is not as bad as it is often said. All developed countries have regulations in place, some more some less.
If language were a major barrier; then, how does one explain the US doing well in the EU?
I get that home markets may not be big and provide a springboard perhaps to other markets but even the big countries there don’t seem to dominate the small countries in terms of Software.
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I think this has been debunked? Just look at Sweden as an counter example or Israel.
I believe it’s just the lack of massive capital and the power law of VC investments. Start 1000s companies with smart people and a tiny fraction will get insanely big.
We’re starting to see this in Europe too now.
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This is probably true, because I know many Europeans that come to America and start their startups. So it may not be that there are few European startups, just few startups targeting that market.
> I think the biggest problem is the small home market / fragmented market.
That doesn't explain why Israel doesn't have this problem, they have an even smaller home market. They just sell internationally.
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>So why does Europe have such hard time popping new software ventures like the US?
The US has a very mature and developed tech VC scene. Where's Europes isn't as mature. Also clustering is a thing -- why didn't Silicon Valley happen in New York either -- many of the conditions were there just like California but it didn't materialize and Europe was simply a mess in the aftermath of WWII there weren't going to be many tech revolutions taking place there.
In fact ironically enough there was such a congregation of talent in Berlin in the 1930s that some have predicted a second "Renaissance" was inevitable were it not for WWII.
You can look at the two world wars as an elaborate suicide attempt of Europe which resulted in handing over the world to the US. It's quite depressing really.
I can only speak for myself, but I find the amount of legal red tape you need to deal with incredibly discouraging.
I'll much rather build and run software for free in my spare time than start a business since the latter would mean having to spend dozens of hours every week dealing with all manner of bureaucracy.
I have the capacity and funds to start a business, but I just don't think it's worth the hassle.
I have a hard time to see how Europe would be any more bureaucratic then the US. Working for a European company that do business with American companies every now and then I can say that the contracts lengths and the legal staffing is a factor of ten higher every time we try to deal with an American customer. Heck involving lawyers just to sign standard contracts is not even something we have to do with European customers generally.
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For many, Big Government is probably a big part of it here in Belgium. The public sector is so big that many software engineers can spend their entire career as overpaid government contractors.
56% of GDP in public spending in no rush to become more efficient. In fact, quite the contrary.
Compare this with the cut throat competition in Sillicon Valley or the international arena.
That's how you end up with non existent tech offerings in Europe.
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British limited companies are probably among the simplest and cheapest to incorporate and manage in the world but, well, the UK is no longer in the EU...
I have never understood why countries slap so much red tape and so many fees on this. The UK has got it right, IMHO: make it as cheap and simple as possible, there are only upsides [Edit: for society/the state] to people starting up a business.
Yup, costs £12 to incorporate, and it can be done entirely online. Then £12 a year to maintain.
The last time I incorporated a company in the UK it took a grand total of 35 minutes from start to actually having an incorporated company.
>there are only upsides to people starting up a business.
that is not true at all. The majority of business ventures fail and a lot of small businesses aren't productive, and at the end of the day someone needs to pick the tab up. Even Thiel used to say, don't start a business until you have a very good reason to.
What you actually want is to incentivize the kind of people to start a business who have a high chance of driving innovation and bringing about large, productive firms, you don't really want an army of self-employed people with low capital formation in a developed country.
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This has been discussed before. Although the EU is a marketplace of 27 countries, it is not a digitally homogeneous marketplace. Adoption and acceptance of digital tools varies by country. Language is also important - the tech giants localise their apps and tools. But many software companies in larger European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK etc) concentrate on their home country first before they focus on international reach. That makes sense. However, in smaller countries, where the software market is also smaller, software companies have a more international outlook (i.e. eyeing the US market).
Even when there are local apps available, many small businesses (and larger ones) will stick with services from big, well-known tech companies. Why? I guess because of inertia, or simply because those products feel safe and familiar.
Where are the pan-European equivalents to eBay, Etsy, KickStarter, AirBnB, Shopify, AbeBooks, etc? Europeans use these services entensively. You'll probably find local equilavents in each European country, but they are not pan-European or global in scope.
if anything the opposite should be true: A small homogeneous market with a language barrier is a great testing ground where a new product can grow and then become global. Facebook started in harvard, and some EU fintech startups are doing well in Sweden, i hear.
Global expansion is not an issue; every american company can easily reach the whole of EU. And there are many many european startups whose main market is america. Unless you mean that, products are so tailored to their home market that they don't have global appeal.
> So why does Europe have such hard time popping new software ventures like the US?
Because people in Europe still largely believe that a business should be an actual business. You know, operating and bringing profit.
Unlike the US where nearly every single "unicorn" can lose billions of dollars a year for over a decade, never see a profit, and still be lauded as a successful business.
Yes has to be a big part of it.
I can feel it myself. I am very reluctant to create a money losing business. It is a deep-seated fear (I'm creating a new business at the moment). Where I got this from, parents, culture, common sense, whatever, doesn't really matter. I would not personally feel successful if I had created Uber, I'd just feel stressed and kind of a fraud. End of story.
So for my new business I'm not getting VC funding even though I know some VCs and they made it clear I could get money from them. I want to build a real business that is actually sustainable on its own terms. This will inevitably limit my reach and likely means I won't create a "tech company", but I've made my peace with that.
Yeah those people earning half a million at Uber in the US are the real fools here, right? /s
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Someone else already said acquisitions but the other half of the answer is finance. The US has the most rich and ruthless financial system in the world, with gigantic flows with comparatively little oversight. There's simply enough built up to finance eternal unicorns.
probably because software engineers don't get paid nearly as much as in the US.
Also, there's less of an entrepreneurial mindset in europe. DO a good job, get paid, work life balance. Very different set of goals from america
You're oddly being downvoted for that. Not being paid nearly as highly in tech in general, detracts from how much money is in the ecosystem for doing start-ups.
If you can sock back a retirement working for big tech for 10-12 years (counting equity), it frees you up massively to do whatever you like, whether funding as an angel, or self-funding your own start-ups. It's not uncommon for people you know in tech in Silicon Valley to pitch in on early small funding rounds if you've started something new and are rounding up some early funds. Multiply that wide process by the scale of the US tech industry - at the small and large ends - and all the wealth that has been created in it over the past 30 years.
1.3 million software developers with a median salary of $110,000 is a lot of money just from the software developer worker bees every year (save N% per year of that pile, now it's available for investment in one form or another; and that's ignoring the equity value they're yielding).
Europeans are a lot worse at capitalism, in general, than Americans. Partly because we're not required to be. Western Europeans are more or less born into a massive insurance scheme that will bail you out whenever the going gets tough. This is mostly good, IMO, but not without cost.
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The reason is that EU is an open economy that is not even TRYING to become independent.
China knew that America will try to crush them. It's a real, literal, life or death situation for them to come up with a Chinese Google. They have pumped trillions into the tech industry over decades.
Because we don't want them.
Ok I perhaps misspoke because we would want them, if they came without costs. And by cost I mean law and regulatory environment necessary for such companies.
In EU generally speaking law is in favor of the people (individuals) a lot more than in USA (there are huge exceptions to this like defamations (or anything to do with banks), but I still believe its true.).
There are stories about EU fining USA corporations and how that is unfair. But they fine local ones as well, so breaking things (as in breaking/ignoring law ) and moving fast ends up with law breaking you long before you are successful enough that you can shrug it off.
It's not hard to start business in EU, but it's hard to get hokey stick growth. There are plenty of small to mid level companies in EU that pay well to founders and it's employers.
But if you are trying to get hokey stick growth, EU is not optimal, so why even bother starting there since you can go straight to USA most of the time ?
And honestly speaking if we would have to import American style laws/ regulatory environment in order to get them here, I would rather choose not to have them
It doesn't. The problem is that anything that begins to show promise gets acquired by a US company before long. Europe works fine as an incubator.
This isn’t really a plausible root cause. These companies in the U.S. that are supposedly acquiring everyone (and they aren’t: there are record numbers of unacquired unicorns and IPOs recently) were small once too. That just begs the question: How did the U.S. get all the large acquirers in the first place?
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'gets acquired', or chooses to go to the US because it sees no future as a european startup?
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It's capital. We simply don't have it, or it's not allocated to tech.
All these silly fees you mention are marginal. It would actually be much cheaper to hire devs from Europe, so cost is not the issue at all. It is simply a lack of capital altogether. Nor is there the risk taking that is required.
Europe has no VC.
Cost of incorporating; cost of hiring and firing (this is a big one); and fragmented market in terms of policy, culture and language. Capital availability, until recently, but I don't think that's an issue anymore.
The costs you list are dwarfed if a company scales to any reasonable size and by that point they have enough of a team to consider moving elsewhere in the EU to better manage them. In fact, moving to the US might open up as an opportunity which some people take.
The biggest problem is funding due to the risk aversion of EU institutions and limited alternative sources. You have to be incredibly qualified to acquire the funding need to drive a startup forward in the way that happens in the US. This ranges from the small angel investors through to the first series of VC funding.
In the EU, if you are a business like a biotech or pharma you may be able to navigate this because those are well trodden paths with high risk adversity baked in. A software company has many unknowns, so you encounter problems with expectations. You can't fail in the EU because you only have one shot and won't get back again with another company/idea. In reality, it's very likely you'll stumble a lot initially and won't have the leeway that you have in the US. If you compared bankruptcy on both sides of the Atlantic you'd notice similar patterns.
I know those costs are nothing when a business grow, but having low barriers of entry means a lot more people trying.
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I would turn that question around. How have the US become this hub for tech-companies? Probably culture and momentum. The same reason a small country like Sweden managed to become the third-largest music exporter in the world.
And also European companies are moving to the US to start and/or grow their businesses there. Why is Spotify even listed on the NY stock exchange?
Another thing - most european companies will reduce your salary and treat you as a slave if you are working as a contractor outside the EU (since no one can punish them that way). I can confirm that an ex FB guy who went full-remote digital nomad style earlier this year and wanted to move as a senior developer for a French startup simply because he loves their idea (and it'd be easier for him due to timezones while he stays in Thailand/Cambodia) and guess what they did? They offered him less than half as compared to an actual junior position, even though they received milkions in funding, and the reason? He lives in a "cheap" place therefore he doesn't need a high salary anymore, who cares of his expertise, it's not going to be "fair" towards the other workers in the company.
I'd guess that the biggest factor is their Venture Capital firms are way more risk averse. The US in general has a more entrepreneurial culture, and therefore a bigger risk appetite.
Language is a big barrier. With my first startup waiterio.com we had to build a lot of custom tools to narrow the linguistic gap. I'm turning one of the tools into a public SaaS: https://www.polyblog.io helps you build multi-language blogs.
> So why does Europe have such hard time popping new software ventures
So what makes you think that "popping new software ventures" is a good thing for society? Isn't there enough software already? The problem is the mediocre quality of it, and decline (hello Adobe). Popping new software ventures is hardly a solution.
This is not even debateable. Software is eating the world and there's still a lot to eat. Europe won't be selling leather bags for much longer. The fact that it excluded itself from the future of the internet is a crime for the future generations.
New ventures is a solution for decline of old ones. The circle of life... It's a necessity, in fact. Cells need to divide and renew, organisms need to reproduce. Companies are the same.
You could look into Estonian e-residency for setting up a company outside of Spain. You’re usually still taxable in your country of residence within the EU, so it’s not a tax avoidance scheme, but it might change your personal insurance status? Just an idea, those 400€ sound awful…
Money.
The US had way more wealth compared to Europe, thanks to unbridled capitalism in the past centuries and not hosting a World War.
That wealth trickle down and converted in various shapes until the current VC class.
> and not hosting a World War.
Two.
Taxes and bureaucracy.
It is beyond insanity. And should you succeed in France/Belgium/Spain you'd be seen as the evil capitalist responsible for all that is wrong in the EU.
The whole mentality is rotten.
The EU has one big software company and it's... SAP. SAP is a drop in the bucket compared to the big US or Chinese tech firms (I don't think SAP is worth even 1/10th of any GNAFAM). But there's worse: I think SAP's market cap is worth basically as much as the next 50 or next 100 (or maybe basically all the others) EU software companies. Something crazy like that.
So one successful software company (thankfully we have Germany in the EU and SAP if, of course, German).
It's a failure whose level of failure cannot be understated.
A complete, total and utter failure.
Why does the US dominate digital products?
1. Enormous internal market
2. Extremely wealthy
3. Well-developed capital markets for investment
So it's an enormous, wealthy country where there is lots of investment. Obviously there are other factors but these seem blindingly obvious as starting points.
I find the UK's inability to compete with the US web giants depressing. I don't like the idea of relying on a few American companies for search, cloud infra and so on. I'd love to see us build a British Google for example. I don't like the guy at all, but I agree with Dominic Cummings that we should focus our efforts on something like this.
I'm not arguing for web service nationalism but, for economic and security reasons, way more nation states should be looking to encourage the building of their own web backbone companies. It would also be good for general Internet resiliency to not have so few companies and single points of failure.
> I'd love to see us build a British Google for example.
Here in France we have (had ?) Qwant[1] that never really worked because at first it was about having a search engine at the level of Google, then being user privacy focused (like DDG), then being focused on kids, then on music, then...
But from the beginning it was failing because they were just providing a proxy for Bing's results. They were not even providing a sanitized version of those results. It was Bing's results with a different UI. And then, because they needed money, they focused on some topics (like the kids, which provided them public money) or music (income from partners companies). Also there was a lot of political/bureaucratic crap involved within the direction.
So it looks like the issue is that it was people with money that said "we are going to be the French Google". But they hadn't enough money to do so and being "the French Google" is not enough.
If we look at DDG, first it was a bad search engine but they focused on their promise about user privacy. And then they improved their search engine from there. Now they are a credible alternative to Google because they have something that Google don't, while on the core feature (search engine) they are almost the same. If you want to compete, you have to offer something different while providing the same core features.
I think ProtonMail (Switzerland) is a good example. At the moment they don't provide a webmail as good as Gmail, but they provide great email service while focusing on user privacy. They are trying to compete against Google on email like DDG dig on search engine. And that's why it's more and more popular.
So there's probably a mindset issue : don't compete for the sake of competing. Offer something different and then try to reach the competitors level on the core feature. You can't beat a multi-billion giant at its own game.
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant
Qwant seems like its entire purpose is to siphon money from the French government by tapping into their anti-US tech hysteria.
I just recently saw someone posting on LinkedIn that 500k for a Senior Engineer role was too low.
Half a fucking million.
All good European engineers are leaving to USA. And I would too.
I will take my 250k in London vs 450k in New York any time.
USA is just a third world country with a Gucci belt. My family's value system is completely incompatible with how America operates and what drives people and organisations.
I have many senior dev friends who think the same.
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I guess this is a Silicon Valley megacorp right? Who could afford those wages?! Over here in the UK, if you're absolutely shit hot, principal engineer type material, I guess £150k + is common. Maybe more if you're a true elite engineer, but US wages are surreal. As others point out though, we get a lot of great public services, state pensions and so on. All a tradeoff.
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> I'd love to see us build a British Google for example.
There is one, and with users globally: https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-... Self-disclosure: CEO
Great points, I agree but would like to add: 4. Common language
If you compare US States to European nations it's easy to see that despite political polarization businesses in the states are extremely interactive and it makes easy for huge corps to grow throughout the USA.
Not sure if it's listed or not but one I'm pretty happy with is smallPDF based in Switzerland. https://smallpdf.com/
I got pissed off when I wanted to rotate a PDF 90 degrees on my dad's computer and adobe wanted to charge for it, then I found that smallPDF could do that and a whole lot more like edits and signature collections. I ended up subscribing him but the free tier already does several things that adobe would charge you for so I encourage anyone to use this service.
>"I wanted to rotate a PDF 90 degrees"
I am continually frustrated at just how difficult of a problem simple PDF operations are on Windows PCs. Even looking for alternative PDF readers is a complex and confusing task. And, every top result wants to either charge or require an account to use it. The FOSS tools aren't great either. Why can't Microsoft make a product like Preview for Mac which allows for such things?!?
Shameless plug: I built https://simplePDF.eu as I was similarly frustrated by the lack of a good PDF editor when filling French paperwork.
Checkboxes for example did not seem to be available in any of the tools I found.
I also figured that if I had to spend the time to position the fields, someone else shouldn’t spend that time too: crowd-edited PDF if you will (the document never sees my server)
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Basic PDF manipulation has been a constant thorn ever since I started using a computer. I still don't have a single source for it, either. Definitely looking into smallPDF
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I was baffled reading the OP as to why anyone would need to pay to do that. This explains it, thanks.
But it's not. PDF Exchange has a free version and does this for free. There are other software available to do it as well as websites. It's not hard to find for anyone that knows how to type in a few words to google. Sumatra is also a great little pdf viewer (also some simple edits like rotation) for windows.
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> Why can't Microsoft make a product like Preview for Mac which allows for such things?!?
I presume it's some nonsense application of antitrust laws preventing this.
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pdf90 (and 180 and 270) is available on just about any Linux distro. It's a single command. Not quite the same as smallpdf, but if all you're after is rotating ...
This list is just sad. I was thinking about what else could I say, but it's just sad. There's no area listed with an European solution that's comfortably in the top 3 in the world in its field. Maybe it is because this list is deliberately listing areas where the alternatives are less known (someone in another thread brings up SAP as an example).
I would consider DeepL to be comfortably the best translation service for the 24 languages they support. Their decision to support a lot of the less spoken languages in the EU (which have quite terrible support in Google Translate) has made the internet much more accessible for older people in my country who generally can't read English.
Yes, Europe has some tech areas where it is number one. Gambling is one I can think of. All the major sportsbooks, casino sites, poker sites and gambling backend companies are European. Also in porn many top sites are European. Onlyfans, Xvideos, Xnxx, LiveJasmin are all European. The Pornhub network was also started in Europe then sold to a Canadian. Also all major pirate sites and apps are European
It's even sadder that we can't have this discussion in a european forum. Are there any, really?
I just looked at VPN section and as a Mullvad user I disagree with you.
Gonna get some hate of course but where’s SAP here? SaaS, private cloud in Rot, BW, Germany, and stringent data privacy as it’s a German company. Executes entirely under GDPR, ticks every of the boxes.
Europe’s biggest software company, never mentioned…
SAP is like Salesforce or SoftBank, in that nobody can figure out what they make or do, but the suits keep shoveling boxcars full of money at them for some reason.
A company I worked for introduced Salesforce shortly before I left. The license costs are off the charts, it's insane.
Lidl wanted to introduce SAP and after investing 500 million Euro into it, they stopped and aborted the project entirely.
Because SAP isn't an "alternative" it's the dominant player of it's own field. What alternative does the US have to SAP might be another perspective worth examining?
Salesforce, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft
Weird that no service provided by seznam.cz is listed (I would expect at least their maps or email to be mentioned, while the search engine is tailored to czech language only so listing it would be less useful to most people outside of Czechia).
They should be mentioned and also incorrect. Those listed are not search engines but search services, mostly using Google or Bing.
Self-diclosure of bias but they also missed our independent no-tracking international search engine (own crawling/indexing) https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-...
Exactly. Mapy.cz is a brilliant service with a ton of its own technology.
So does Seznam.cz search engine, which, I believe, has it's own crawler and rankings.
Email.cz is used by the most of Czech citizens. When someone asks you for an email address, it's common to reply with the username alone and just confirm it's hosted on Seznam.
yeah their maps are the best tourist maps there (and classic maps are also decent), and are also used outside of Czechia
mapy.cz is miles better in terms of hiking maps, sattelite/plane maps and regular maps compared to Googe Maps - at least in Czech Republic and Slovakia. And their apps have offline mode.
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I love the idea behind this, a "support local" spin on digital products.
Myself and others would appreciate one for Canada! Perhaps I should build it.
> Perhaps I should build it.
Do it! Be the change you wish for. :-)
I use two of them, protonmail and mullvad and they work great and have had zero issues with them.
These listings seem limited from a cursory glance. And what does European mean?
If a German company hosts everything on Google or AWS is it still considered European? Or if a Romanian company moves HQ to New York and still does development mainly in Romania like UI Path?
Or what if you are an American company with all or most of your dev team in say Sweden or Hungary? Does that make you European?
And if you are say a non-European company but meet all the European data protection and compliance requirements and the European counterparts do not?
> And what does European mean?
In this context "European Union" and the company is registered primarily in the EU and where the vast lionshare of profits are declared. The companies mentioned do appear tastefully (or limited in your words) curated are definitely EU based and lends some credence to the overall claim and purpose of page. I'm not seeing controversial 'European' companies that are actually American like Stripe. (Sometimes people claim Stripe to be Irish) -- Adyen is definitely Dutch for example and Mullvad is Swedish.
I'm not seeing anything with a Union Jack on the page and the UK would normally have some entries here. Switzerland and Norway are part of the EU institutions like Schengen and the EEA -- just not full members. So the author of the page does appear to have very good working definition of 'European' but it's not clear what exactly that is -- it's not in the terms page for instance.
To complicate matters there are "European" companies like Booking that are totally Dutch but owned by a hands off US holding company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking_Holdings
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> Mullvad is Swedish.
Indeed, it's the Swedish word for "mole". Chosen, I assume, because like a VPN, the animal digs tunnels.
I think the idea is companies that do not have a conflict of interest with the US. Although Microsoft claims their data in European data centers can not be given to the US government the US government doesn't see it that way and there are court cases being fought over this.
Microsoft can claim whatever they want, they must respect the USA law.
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Good questions ... e.g. look where the founders of Elastic come from (Israel & Netherlands & Germany) and they initially incorporated in the Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_NV
Yes it probably means european as in the legal sense (where it's registered).
As for the last question, that doesn't mean you're an european alternative, you just do what you mentioned: either don't violate or are compliant with the EU policies.The website is probably meant for people who want to use services from inside the EU.
However, this needs to be reminded: if the EU wants to keep this dream of promoting tech development, it needs to look itself in the mirror when it comes to supporting/not supressing entrepreneurs with shitty legislation. They won't do it obviously, but the discussion needs to keep happening. Right now you still have the vast majority of old "boomers" that don't understand the way in which the whole pipeline works, the second biggest group is right out activists who frankly exaggerate when talking about technology(and it mostly has nothing to do with tech regulation/support but forcing tech into their own ideology) and the third group is probably the least popular one, with sensible people who understand you cannot regulate because that suppresses development, but at the same time recognize values and rights needs to be adapted to this medium, while being individual-focused.
Great initiative! It's getting more important to be able to find local vendors, making it easier to comply with privacy frameworks.
I just clicked on the first one I liked (grape - in telecommunications), and it was just closed down due to insolvency. It mentions it had 500,000 users, which baffled me that they couldn't find investment for such an obviously liked and used product. EU startup landscape looks a bit depressing honestly.
>Support local businesses
Sorry, but that's not a reason for me to buy something. I prefer solutions that perform good over something whose only merit is that it has been made by my neighbor.
Instead of trying to guilt-trip people into buying why not come up with products that can compete in the global market? There's a few - I mean I'm a Spotify customer. But most EU tech is just garbage.
"I prefer solutions that perform good over something whose only merit is that it has been made by my neighbor."
I prefer supporting competition in the market, because I know that as soon as monopoly gets established it starts abusing all marlet participants and acting like a little dictator. Of course it doesn't have to be local.
Also Skype was really good before Microsoft bought it, i have no idea what that department is smoking
And that's great! Lots of us consider more than just "this is a well oiled global machine". That's the beauty of diversity and markets that support a diversity of opinions. I love and use some of these companies because they are in the EU which I consider further up on the "freedom" and "responsible global player" scale than my home country of the USA.
I'm interested in products that are not made with slave labour or under dictator regimes. I feel like the site is trying to imply this... but Europeans are actually really good at modern day slave labour.
Don‘t forget: Local business means local taxes. So by supporting local businesses near your place you might indirectly profit from better infrastructure, better school etc. (things which are paid by the government with these local taxes).
Hetzner is missing!
Hosting isn't even a category, it only has 'Cloud Computing' but that's not the only way to host your stuff.
Leaseweb, OVH (is mentioned in the cloud section), Hetzner all deserve a mention.
Hetzner is now listed in a new category for VPS hosters. https://european-alternatives.eu/product/hetzner
How can we add to this list? It's missing some notables.
There is an address (email) on the Imprint: https://european-alternatives.eu/imprint
I am always open to suggestions. You can write your suggestions here, in the chat bubble on the site or on Twitter.
seems a bit odd that "EU" is green (good) but Switzerland is yellow (not as good)
bit of a stretch to say Switzerland isn't European
(and there seem to be zero UK companies)
The EU is using every tool in their passive aggressive arsenal in order to guilt Switzerland into no longer being neutral! /s
Switzerland is in some EU institutions like Schengen.
Thus EU membership has lots of asterixes and grey areas unlike the US which is a federacy the EU is a confederacy (Look at Brexit). Switzerland is somewhat unique in that it's both EU and not EU. Take the UK for instance -- their grey area is "Northern Ireland".
Switzerland and the UK aren't in the EU. The website name is abit of a misnomer.
Its not in the EU in terms of being part of all of the accords.
(In particular, free movement of people in the bloc as I understand it.)
the page is labelled "European Alternatives" not "EU Alternatives"
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There is free movement between EU and Switzerland
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It's quite off-puting branding, playing with the flag of a bureaucratic institution like the EU.
If it was about what Europeans create, I would be receptive. Instead, they are promoting whatever is in the European Commission agenda, which is radically different to what I need.
EU adopted it's flag from and existing institution of which virtually all European nations as part of.
It seems like a case of appropriation until you realize that most European supranational organizations share similar origins, goals and members.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Europe
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Switzerland, as others have already mentioned, is not a state of the EU, which means that GDPR rules for third party countries apply to them.
You're being confused by a nasty habit many loyalists to the EU institutions have, of conflating the EU (a political system) with Europe and Europeans (a continent and people).
A good rule of thumb is that if a British person says Europe or European they mean "the continent" and are including Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein, Vatican City etc, but excluding the UK itself.
If a German/French/Spanish/Italian person says Europe or European, especially if they've been to university, they a very likely to mean the EU and only the EU. These people usually don't consider Switzerland or Britain to the "European" as a consequence.
People outside of Europe always mean the continent and population, including the UK, when they use these terms.
> If a German/French/Spanish/Italian person says Europe or European, especially if they've been to university, they a very likely to mean the EU and only the EU. These people usually don't consider Switzerland or Britain to the "European" as a consequence.
German, been to university. Same for my whole social system. That's absolutely BS what you're saying. Especially German speaking countries have a stronger bond than EU/Europe because of "DACH" and a shared culture (see the anthroposophy discussion recently).
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I don’t know who runs this but it’s definitely incomplete. Too bad the “European alternative” to webchat doesn’t even work on mobile. Maybe that’s the reason why it’s so incomplete
I run the site and as many things in life this site is a work in progress. I got many suggestions for new services in the last days, so there will be many more services in the future.
I just added a new live chat service to the category called crisp (https://european-alternatives.eu/product/crisp), maybe it better fits your needs.
If you have suggestions I'm sure you can email them, and they will welcome then. This is probably just someone's hobby page like those “Awesome _________” pages on GitHub.
I can see this list get more useful as the categories get more complete.
I do question the design of the logo which makes the site look like an official EU initiative, which it is not. At best it's unintentionally misleading and at worst it might not be entirely legal.
https://european-union.europa.eu/legal-notice_en
This list is trash. Why, for example, is Hetzner missing in the cloud computation section? Or SAP? I could understand that they didn't want to over-emphasize any country and give a fair selection, but many countries, especially Germany, has many more companies in any of these spaces.
Thanks for the constructive criticism! Hetzner is now listed. (https://european-alternatives.eu/product/hetzner) Since Hetzner mainly provides virtual servers, I have created a separate category for them. I just wrote down SAP, here I still have to think of a suitable category.
Whoops, so sorry! I thought this was an official thing. If it's a WIP, then not a problem. There is going to be a lot of stuff you can list, like email providers taking privacy into account like protonmail or posteo.
EU investors, banks are too conservative, they only invest small amount of money and they are not comfortable taking risks. US on the other hand has built a much high tolerance for taking risks. They are ok with taking risks and loosing big time.
The sad state of EU IT is also due to the fact that US companies are much, much better at marketing their solutions.
Often even the european media landscape is only mentioning US services in reviews and comparison. The fact that it needs a page like this says a lot about how bad marketing of these european companies even in their home market is.
If you buy from a smaller local euripean provider they will local taxes. Local taxes pays for schools, roads and nurses.
D̶e̶u̶t̶s̶c̶h̶l̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶ EU Über Alles ? Digital nationalism?
I don't really get this fragmentation in a free world. Why should i use product that is less competitive just because companyX servers a located in a country that is theoretically more friendly? Even that is a big question.
If you live in Poland or any Eastern European EU member, in this case GB, US do more to protect you from absolutely real War risk.
Germany, France, Austria government is absolutely corrupted they lead to situation when Russia think it can claim rights on other sovereign countries. Half of eastern Europe felt left behind. Same with China relationship. How many people will lose their job because china is building their capital on not fairly regulated market, stolen Intellectual property. EU don't care. No real protection. They afraid tensions(polite form of saying corrupted) even when this tension means protect own citizen.
At the same time ex german counselor works at Gazprom to Lobby corrupt interests. He got an official title. Russia takes this money and execute, poison people, blow up military objects in European countries.
But EU built a nice website to support corrupted governments via taxes. Maybe first get some responsibility and do your job?
Who said the product is inferior? Have you checked any of these?
More discoverability of alternative offerings is always better, for both the customer and supplier, unless the supplier is a monopolist.
In my experience middle sized companies that still have to prove themselves and build good will offer (much) better servivce / product than mature corporations run by beancounters who are focused on "monetising" their userbase most effectively.
because that what market shows. One market has 0 regulations and it strives. Other with all regulations and theoretically bigger population by almost 50% still struggles to be at comparable size. One pays up to $500k a mo for a dev position other pays pennies promising you some kind of pension. Classical regulated vs free market
I'd extend the list with ONLYOFFICE. It works as a Google Docs, Sheets / Office Online alternative, with a free personal tier to test the stuff.
https://personal.onlyoffice.com/
Thank you for the suggestion. I just added ONLYOFFICE to European Alternatives.
https://european-alternatives.eu/product/onlyoffice
Yikes - what a sad list. I think this might be a hint that perhaps people want something else.
Some products like ProtonMail are pretty good.
But, yes, the cloud computing stuff is pretty sad indeed.
UpCloud is rather fantastic for what they offer. Of course, it's no AWS or GCP, but for my needs UpCloud has been just about perfect.
It would be interesting to know how many of these SaaS services run on US cloud platforms. And what that means in relation to Schrems 2.
Notably absent: Social Media Services. Weird! /s
You are stating your personal opinion as fact. There are many and varied views on the EU among Europeans, from euroscepticism all the way up to and including eurofederalism.
> I dont want to move to another country in Europe and learn their language.
Nobody is forcing you to.
But europeans are generally familiar with remote work, why would that be a problem?
Tax residency.
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US has no regulations, no GDPR, nothing. Just fair competition. If you are EU based vendor, there is 0 issues to work with US.
So yeah, regulations will definitely work :) It will just create more lazy corps that have no motivation to be competitive
Cool! nice initiative. For me is important my privacy, and using EEUU apps/services/dns/cloud/third parties things for using internet it should pass through EEUU services, threath analysis, NSA, FBI, Goverment interest, that's why this kind of initiatives are important.
FYI "EEUU" only makes sense in Spanish-speaking countries (AFAIK). When writing in English, for English-speaking audiences, use "the US". Otherwise everyone will be very confused, especially in the context of an article about the EU.
Gracias por tu correccion ;)
now i m curious why it is written like that
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Five Eyes and Club de Berne think you are adorable :)