But I just wanted to point out that https://alternativeto.net/ recently (well, over a year ago) added a flag next to each suggestion so you can easily tell where its from. It's all crowd-sourced and I've both contributed to and greatly benefited from the project myself (especially for finding FLOSS alternatives to popular software). Here's an example
I think the fact that it's crowd-sourced gives it a lot more staying power than a lot of these one-off projects that are presumably maintained by a single person or team.
I submitted my project EasyInvoicePDF (a free & open-source invoice generator) a couple of months ago to European Alternatives but never heard back unfortunately.
The project has no backend and is purely browser-based, but I’m based in Europe and developing the project here, so I consider it a European project =)
I think the purpose of the site is more about the alternatives to 'large players', platforms and infrastructure companies. Still Constantin Graf should have clarified out of politeness but possibly he's busy or doesn't have time to respond to every email.
However I'd point out there is a market for European 'Product Hunt' that would include more of these smaller projects.
I don't think creating an invoice is "niche". It is such a common need for users that invoicing software should be included in the operating system application suite. (Which it is somewhat if you consider Pages invoice templates).
Millions and millions of people need to make and send invoices. Many more than people who need domain name registrars, uptime monitoring services, content delivery networks, or microblogging services.
Open-source security framework (1). Applied 16 August 2025. Company registered in Switzerland (EFTA). No reply.
However, European Alternatives is a personal (sole proprietorship) website and has nothing to do with Europe, despite the name and style, which are slightly misleading as they mimic official EU website aesthetics.
I have been working on https://1launch.eu for the past two months. Very MVP stage. I don't plan to be in the same niche as european-alternatives, but it is very much inspired by this. It is largely meant to be a ProductHunt / AngelList for Europe with a couple of key features especially for the European market (like instant translation into all 24 languages of the EU to launch in the whole European market in one go). If you want to launch on the platform or want to be involved in a different way, send me an email on hackernews@1launch.eu
I think the biggest issue is that your product is not from a company generating money (and taxes).
IMO as an european, I think we should aim for open source, not corporate software, but free and open source software is generating way less jobs and taxes money.
The site has a lot of open source projects though, in fact i found about copyparty[0] from it because it was listed as an alternative to file hosting services (though it was removed since then, probably because it isn't a service :-P but still there are various FLOSS projects).
Gradually moving over from Teams to Hetzner + Nextcloud over the past year. The chat app is the blocker (Nextcloud Talk is not quite there yet). But we've moved over files, docs, calendar, photos, etc.
I wouldn't hard recommend based on lack of solid experience of using them over time, but Gandi showed a lot of promise for me.
Context: I used to run a domain-related service that used registrar api's and gandi's seemed the most well thought out by a considerable way. The drawback was they're quite expensive for registrations/renewals unless you're doing it at volume.
I had reservations about them being a French company wrt support but their API was so good I never needed to contact them on anything.
One obvious thing missing from any of those lists: Visa and Mastercard alternatives. This is the protection money that is never brought up by the US officials when they say that America was paying for our security.
And within those countries in only a handful of banks. We've been here before, but as of right now, I'd give it a better chance than I'd have given just four months ago.
Wero is a land grab by the banks who fumbled building a PayPal alternative for 20 years, now desperately trying to stop the digital Euro.
Sure I'd rather use Wero than PayPal -if it was decent- and building it on top of SEPA instant transactions is neat. But the lack of buyers protection is a deal breaker for me!
And quite frankly I'd rather use a digital Euro governed by the ECB than some rent seeking hobby project by a bunch of private banks. Especially because they will inevitably enshittify it with ads and hostile BNPL like PayPal.
It seems like Taler has been coming along great and the biggest things it’s missing are more interest and adoption. There has been some first ‘real-world’ use recently, but it’s still far from becoming widespread, which would be a dream come true.
The big European countries still have their National Systems that work very well.
If the US would nuke Visa/MC in Germany, payments inside Germany would still work very well via Girocard (except for some people that bank with cheapskate neobanks)
In Belgium, Maestro card was halted and my bank switched to MasterCard. Then I paid on some USA website and they managed to pull money from my account based on only the card number, without using the bank website's chip+pin. I was flabberghasted on how we silently managed to get such a huge setback in both security and national independence. I stopped payments using non-EU entities.
France has the CB network for example which I believe still dominates most credit card transactions although it's declining as more and more cards are not co-branded anymore.
Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too.
Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...
Many European countries have a single payer system when it comes to the medical system. That gives them a big leverage in negotiations for drug pricing.
AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.
While Master Card and a Visa there is a EU regulation limiting the fees, health insurance is mainly national level. So you could ask the question why is Ozempic cheap in Australia? But I can't answer your question.
And the fees you pay go, in part, to fund the American War machine that is now threatening Europe. As a European, I don't want to fund your war machine.
You know that nearly nobody in the US pays the sticker price of Drugs?
They have to put an absurd sticker price on the drugs so that the "Pharmacy Benefit Manager" (an useless middlemen that only exists in US Healthcare) can "negotiate" a "discount" on behalf of your insurance (aka the real price), for which he takes a cut based on how big the "discount" is
Something I'd love to see is a Europe-hosted mirror of software repositories like pypi, juliahub, and the like. It feels pretty essential to have these be available no matter what, but I haven't found any such mirrors.
More importantly, perhaps, are some exercises where a A SRE team creates likely problem (US/China/…) does bad things with DNS/BGP/…, submarine cables, starlink, GPS/GALILEO, Kessler effect etc, and SRE team B tries to keep the national infrastructure together. This may be happening already, but I have my doubts
Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? I mean I get it, Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach, Russia and China reverted back into dictatorship, but Europe is also at the edge. Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free? And instead propagate global alternatives that are not subjected by some power-hungry state-/capital-sponsored overlord?
It is a sad reality. The US has recently threatened to annex Denmark and Canada. Some of us are suddenly keenly aware that the US is in a position to take control of most of our computers and phones via software updates.
Open source is the global alternative you're looking for. There's even interesting hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US also has had an unfair advantage in tech/defense and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With this newfound isolationism, tariffs etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere.
What are global alternatives? Every company is connected to some country, there are no global alternatives.
I live in EU and want to use EU services mainly because I want this part of the world to prosper. I want to leave my money and incentivise innovation in this part of the world because this is where I live and I want a better life here for me and my kids.
And alternatives are always good, especially that they’re not closed. People in the US can use services from EU companies as well :) why not?
> Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? [...] Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab [...]
While I agree with your sentiment, European and nationalistic are two contradicting positions, unlike the other three mentioned superpowers.
Not really. The forging pan-European nation composed of many nationalities is a thing in all meaningful contexts. European civilization, European economy, European products, European voters etc.
This might be possible for software, if we assume that being open source can protect software from state or corporate control (doubtful to be honest). For other things I don't really see how it would work. Your hardware has to be manufactured somewhere, your infrastructure has to be located somewhere.
It is not "nationalistic" to prefer things that are made in Europe. Europe is not a nation and very few people feel anything close to national pride about it. I like that we have European alternatives instead of German, French, Swedish, etc, alternatives.
First of all, US is at the edge of a dictatorship. If US falls completely, Europe will likely too, but untangling ourselves from US is an attempt to prevent that.
European leaders fundamentally have no issue with Americans dominating tech and were happy to have their entire digital infrastructures rely on US companies. If the Trump admin could give them some sort of nod behind the scenes that all of this is just a big show and they're not actually going to break NATO or invade or w/e insane shit they're saying I guarantee you a sizeable amount would just say hey no worries then let's keep the status quo going.
But that's not what's happening. It's a clear and obvious security risk to their sovereignty. If the government can't guarantee that to its citizens then what even is its purpose? The Trump admin has already tried to use American tech dominance as leverage.
Ask yourself this question, what if there was a foreign tech competitor that managed to scale up to be basically a better cheaper AWS. Would the US government ever allow it to encroach its market to the point that AWS or Azure did in Europe? Look at what happened to tiktok if you want to see what approach they'd likely take.
So how exactly would you envision an objective and neutral provider in a world of geopolitical competition?
I think the opposite as you. These global companies often act as a nation with laws unto themselves. Most of them don't actually have real support that can do anything unless you make a lucky Twitter post or something. Having a local company that is realistically beholden to local laws and local politicians that you can actually potentially go and talk to if needed is a major feature.
> Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach
It's not even that. We euros were more than willing to look the other way (see the umpteen attempts to reconcile our privacy-friendly legislation with the free-for-all of American services, ongoing for decades) in the name of convenience and fundamentally shared values. The turning point was really in 2024/2025, when those shared values were summarily swept away on the other side of the Atlantic.
Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.
> Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.
> Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free?
We should not; we must. But at the same time we need to recognise that we are powerless to affect the American government, which can go rogue at any moment. So from a pure risk analysis, we also need to have local alternatives. I regret this state of affairs, but it is an unavoidable consequence of the US threatening its nominal allies.
Nothing against global standards and similar. But even "global alternatives" are usually rooted somewhere locally, and that starts to matter more and more, it seems.
The irony is that European alternatives are still in English, when no European country (since the departure of the U.K. from Europe) actually uses that language.
A language is a tool, not a nationality or a border.
Your average educated European speaks at least three, one of which is English because it is a good language to have because it is the language of international commerce. This has been the case since many decades and has nothing to do with using the language internally.
But: many people do use it internally. French tourists abroad are more likely to use English than French. European colleagues usually standardize on English, both for their communications as well as for their documentation needs.
Scientific literature is predominantly in English (at least, for now).
So there are many reasons to use English which have nothing to do with allegiance or dependence.
Open source generally meets the needs of the first two. There's barely any proprietary toolchains left in common use; maybe Oracle Java is one of the last?
Hardware you can buy from China. Distant, predictable authoritarianism that doesn't make annoying social media posts is sadly preferable to .. whatever is going on over there.
I don't see the issue with Operating systems or programming languages. There are FOSS alternatives and since they are run locally have no connection outside of the EU.
You are missing the big picture who develops them, pays the salaries of people in the trenches, implement LSPs, and whatever else around the ecosystems.
Example, Java, .NET, Go and co are FOSS, how long do you think they will keep on going without their overlords?
For complete alternatives we need to go back to the cold war days, where programming languages were driven by vendor neutral standards, and there were several to buy from.
As it is, it suffices to take the air out of existing FOSS options.
Even if you quickly point out to GCC and clang, one reason why they have dropped implementation velocity from existing ISO revisions is due to a few well known big corps focusing on their own offerings, while other vendors seldom upstream stuff as they focus on clang.
EDIT: As I missed this on the first comment, same applies to the big FOSS OS projects, most contributions to the major Linux distros, or the BSDs come from non European companies, there is naturally something like SuSE, but then we get into the whole who is allowed to contribute, security, backdoors and related stuff.
> - Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.
FWIW Free Pascal and Lazarus communities and developers are largely European and there isn't a single company behind them. Though at the same time there are also several devs from outside EU so i do not think it can be called a "EU alternative" - which is the case for most FLOSS projects actually.
Some projects, especially high profile ones, do have US companies behind them (e.g. Google, etc) so you could claim they are US-centric, but at this point it becomes a question of why you are looking for an EU alternative. If it is to help EU businesses (like others mentioned), then unless you financially support these US companies (either directly or indirectly via, e.g., your data) it doesn't matter if the FLOSS project you are using is made by them or not.
I think recently it has been made obvious by the US that relying on US technology is a risk, because it can be used to bully entire countries.
So I think there is a movement right now of "non-US alternatives", but of course if you are in the EU and got burned by relying too much on the US, maybe it is wise to try to fix that by having some kind of digital sovereignty in the EU.
But I'm pretty sure many companies would switch to a Canada-based product if it allowed them to reduce their dependency on the US.
- OSes is easy, Suse and Ubuntu are European. As well as a bunch of smaller ones.
Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.
Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.
Thought I'd have another look at mail providers, but from what I can see, none support the features I use with fastmail (custom domain, security key, unlimited on-the-fly aliases for sending).
I've been looking at mail providers too, and it's starting to look there are no real alternatives. Not just in Europe, but worldwide. I've been a happy user of Fastmail for quite some time now, and it's sad the the current geopolitical situation pressures me into migrating away.
The alternative that's looking best to me so far is Kolab Now. I don't see a lot of user reviews of it on Reddit though, or anywhere else, so it seems to not be very popular at first sight. That's perhaps not a good sign.
In any case I'm planning on trying it out for a while, with a domain I don't use it all that often, before deciding to migrate to it.
Doesn’t seem to support on-the-fly aliases for sending, requiring instead to set it up in advance. I use a custom mail per website/contact workflow, and with FM any reply uses whatever alias I used to receive the mail, with the option to change it to whatever I want without extra steps.
Does this hook up with promotion of the EUPL [1] as a preferred license for software? Does it even make more sense for european FOSS authors over the GPL family?
The EUPL is a fine license, especially if your goal is wide compatibility with other copyleft licenses. However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft, which could be surprising if you just read the main text.
Also, the GPL is not as short and has more explicit wording for how it behaves in common situations (like the P2P copying stuff, for example), and it allows certain additional restrictions and exceptions (like what the LGPL is). It's just more well thought-out in my opinion.
Edit: Reading it again, I also just remembered that the EUPL's warranty disclaimer is a lot weaker than usual licenses, and weirdly also asserts the program is a “work in progress”.
> However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft
Keep in mind that within EU the GPL's copyleft is as strong as EUPL's or LGPL while at the same time EUPL takes into account network access like AGPL. In practice though, software is distributed outside of the EU and while GPL relies on local laws to "maximize" its copyleftness, EUPL specifically refers to either the EU country of the developer or Belgium if the developers from outside the EU, where the laws do not distinguish between static or dynamic linking (check "More details on the case of linking" from [0] about license compatibility). Also FWIW while FSF suggests that "license hopping" (i.e. changing to some compatible licenses from EUPL to something else) weakens the copyleft, a European Commision lawyer who worked on EUPL has commented doing so would be copyright infringement because the purpose of the compatibility list in EUPL is for interoperability (so that multiple projects with different licenses can coexist) and the purpose would matter in court.
Though in practice since software is often distributed outside of EU, e.g. to US where (it seems) such distinction does exist, people do respect (L)GPL's dynamic vs static linking requirements and from a worldwide perspective EUPL is something like LGPL with a dash of AGPL (making some program functionality available even remotely is considered as distribution). Or in other words, EUPL is basically AGPL within the limitations of EU law.
What are some non-subjective reasons to use Euro alternatives? It reminds me of startup founders having to choose between the big expensive service or their buddy’s startup that intends to serve the same use case.
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
I think you’re missing the point of my question. I’m not saying that story isn’t distressing and a good reason to use alternatives, but I’m asking about whether you can convince individuals and individual businesses that these alternatives are more cost effective or capable than the software they’re replacing.
To me, a very non-subjective reason is that the money I'm paying for these services will go to people and companies that share the same values and the taxes on the said money will be used for our common defense instead of being used to attack us.
If you're European and reading the news at any point in the last year+, you understand how critical a weakness being dependent on US companies for your IT infra is.
There are some things that are difficult to avoid, like CPUs and GPUs, but software is much more doable.
Please don’t assume I’m not up to date on the news. But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software. I’m genuinely asking about incentives for the individual or individual business. That’s a more difficult question to answer than asking why shouldn’t Europe as a whole pursue this.
European companies operate under stricter privacy laws. GDPR is applicable world wide but has serious teeth and enforcement within Europe. Small US companies with no presence in Europe can effectively ignore it. However if an American were to choose a European service this benefit is effectively passed on to them. They can view what data any company has on them or ask them to delete it.
I can appreciate some don't care about their data especially in this world of people pouring their lives in to social media but some people do care.
And a second non-subjective and very important reason is that at any moment the US government might decide that the data we entrusted their corporations with is no longer ours and we need to part with it. It will be used for AI training. Also, this is because we didn't say thank you or something like that...
That’s really not a good comparison. Many of the listed services and companies have been well established for a long time, in some cases for decades, and aren’t small businesses.
You simply don’t need such inflated salaries if schools are free, roads are not broken, trains exist, healthcare is affordable, grocery stores are in biking distance, parks are good and free and plenty, labor laws are in your favour, utilities markets mostly aren’t dysfunctional and a 2-bedroom apartment doesn't cost $10000/m.
Americans compare their salaries to European ones but never stop to imagine the insane high “taxes” they pay for stuff that we get cheaply or for free.
I'm not even saying the one is better than the other. There's a lot to be said for the American system of only paying for what you need. It's just.. you can't just compare dollars/euros like that. There's reddit posts of people who earn $900k/y and openly wonder whether that's enough to live in NYC and that shit is equally unfathomable to the average European as the idea of a dev earning €70k/y is to the average American.
True. But the systems are more and more breaking down. Its unsustainable. At least what I can tell from Germany and the Netherlands.
to see a healthcare specialist, you wait 3-6months in some cases.
Not talking about the trains. Germany DB runs on time in only 50% of the cases.
So thats a big problem
I suspect China or Russia don't have higher salaries, they still manage to build their own alternatives. And Airbus builds better planes than Boeing with European salaries.
I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.
Not true. Plenty of European products are better. Consumer example: Spotify is better than Apple Music. Business example: Attio is better than every American CRM at SME/early stage startup stage.
Biggest problem has been talent going to US.
This problem is rapidly being solved by the US government.
The startup I work for was planning to raise next round in the US. This will not happen as the CEO refuses to travel to the US.
It’s the best time to build in the EU or UK there has ever been. I don’t expect America to pull out of this nose dive. The future of western software is in europe now, and globally I expect China to be the lead beginning with AI.
Assuming that people are solely motivated by money, which most aren't. You can't pay me enough to put my children into a school system that has "active shooter" drills. After a certain point money stops being a motivation, that point is well within the average EU tech salary band (perhaps excluding places like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia and that general area).
High US salaries come from US VCs having to bid against other to capture talent. US VCs have more capital than EU VCs. This is why.
The EU is now going to start pumping money in to building European alternatives. EU software dev salaries are going to increase. All 27 states agreed to establish the saving and investments union.
Nothing will happen overnight but you'll see this start to play out over the next 5 years. It will take decades to catch up but we are starting.
Over what period of time do you predict economic downfall for European tech because of salaries?
Please explain your working. These last 40 years or more there has been a cliff of money, but Europeans continue to live and work in europe.
You have to have an incredibly narrow definition of "only good people work for more money and only poor/ineffective people work for less" to say people who don't chase the millions in a US company are somehow failures.
I doubt you break your leg every year though. The kind of companies that we're talking about (big tech that are national champions) offers health insurance (among other benefits) and 200-500k USD/year salaries.
I think culture and quality of life not withstanding, the raw numbers simply don't favor the EU becoming a tech leader with the current incentives.
It's not just about salaries, but also the lack of a culture for seeding and financing. The fear of failed investments really dominates. Government and EU-backed financing is a joke, and I'm not even talking about the terms or amounts, but who actually gets them. It's pure waste of taxpayer money and should be abandoned.
I am not saying you are wrong, but Trump has shown exactly how quickly a "culture" can crumble down. Despite "checks and balances" the American democracy has done nothing to slow down the slide into dictatorship.
Personally it's not all about money. I even moved to a lower wage country in Europe for better quality of life.
Having enough is what I care about and things are a lot cheaper here too. Not to mention free healthcare, social security. I don't need a car and a public transport pass is 25€ a month. That alone saves me so much money. The time till the next metro train counts down in seconds here.
When I had a car in the past it would cost me hundreds per month and it was such a headache.
I'd never move to the US even if I could make 3x as much. In fact I got an offer from a FAANG once (with the whole H1B managed by some agency I think) but I declined. I only applied because they advertised it as a local job but then when the offer came it was in California. Nope.
The actions of the current US administration seem to have provoked intense negative reactions, or perhaps caused long simmering resentment to boil over. I hope some of this energy goes towards cultivating a more entrepreneurial, less risk-averse culture in Europe.
As much as you may detest all the other great powers jostling for position with seemingly cursory attention paid to moral considerations, making your core identity the cultured "nice guy" is likely a trap. I'd love to see the resurgence of a strong Europe. I think this will require some introspection and more action than simply boycotting Google and Amazon.
Before we closed our office in Mountain View years ago, every time we went over there:
- I could not get out of my San Francisco Hotel to get to a deli across the road without having to step over at least 5 homeless people.
- I could not fail to notice that even those people who did have jobs and not lost their homes to tech bros had a surprisingly low number of healthy teeth for a modern western first-world society
- An apartment with noisy air conditioning, dirty carpets and questionable building codes would cost more in rent than a villa at the Côte d’Azur.
- The air quality during fire season was a nightmare. During my time there I developed asthma.
- Everybody hated the arrogant ignorant tech people that invaded their communities, forced them out of their houses to then have to commute into the city or valley to serve tech bros. Yes, as a European I am not that well trained to constantly ignore that my privilege are causing the community around me to suffer. That I do not "earn" this gigantic salary, I am just grabbing the resources pretending the "normal" people don't deserve to have any of that.
You are getting paid so much because you in exchange are living in a sh*thole country without education, healthcare, public transport, clean air, or anything else that I as a "wealthy" developer person would expect to receive in exchange for my work.
Take your US salary, and invest it into a travel into some of the more up-to-date regions of the world. Those with clean air, education, healthcare. Places I have visited that are better than the Valley in this regard include:
- Pretty much all of Europe. Maybe with the exception of Greece and Spain, when they are now burning thanks to the "drill drill drill" people.
- China
- Iran
- New Zealand
- Australia
- Canada
...
Yes, the amount of zeros on your US salary might look soooooooooooooooo impressive. But they are zeros. They don't buy you a livable live in a modern civilization.
Right now you are just bribed with money not to see the civil war getting ignited in minnesota.
Oh oh oh, now I remember! I have even been to two countries with civil wars a while ago, who had clean air, education and healthcare. And I think even directly after the civil war, all of Kosovo had a lower percentage of homeless people than the US has today.
Yes, another one of my drastic postings. But you will survive. Be brave: With someone who clearly is being paid a lot for being clever, I can assume that you think this through again, to calculate what the better deal is. You know the average amount of student debt people who want to become programmers have? Zero.
You are not getting more VALUE out of working in the US in high-tech compared to other places. There are places on this world, where being a good programmer buys you a wonderful life with nobody around you being poor, or without healthcare, or homeless. Try Estonia. They have a lovely tech community, a fully digital government. You can become a digital citizen, open your own company in minutes. And you will have a far better life.
Trump's attitude motivated me to finally get away from Gmail. I tried several of the providers mentioned on this website and stuck with tuta.com. After almost a year, I'm very happy, would recommend.
Interesting to know before going in:
- They encrypt the emails when storing them, so the only way to access emails is to use their own apps. I was hesitant at first but their web app, desktop app and android app are great
Speaking of missing categories — there's no "Compliance Tools" or "GRC" category yet. I'm building humadroid.io (SOC 2 / ISO 27001 compliance platform, based in Poland) and as far as I can tell, there aren't many European alternatives in this space. Most of the established players (Vanta, Drata, Secureframe) are US-based. Would be great to see this category added.
Interesting, do you also provide the actual audit for ISO 27001 as part of your service? That’s why I went with Oneleet, but a EU-based solution would be attractive.
No, we don't do audits — and that's intentional. I think there's a conflict of interest when the same company advises you on compliance and then certifies you. Incentives get weird.
The good news: there are plenty of EU-based ISO 27001 audit firms. We can recommend one or two if you need a pointer — we just don't have a formal catalogue or marketplace for that yet (though it's on my list).
So you'd use Humadroid for the preparation - policies, controls, evidence, risks, continuity plans, ISMS workbook - and then bring in an independent auditor for certification.
I'm sure there are much bigger and more worthwhile criticisms to be had than this.
It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway? I think you would consider other factors first.
A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
> A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
I lost a VPS in that fire, but I was up and running a few hours later with a new VPS at a different OVH location.
Not to deflect blame away from OVH and their large screw up, but we should never rely only on the redundancy of the hosting provider. Even on AWS, I wouldn't trust them to not lose my data if one of their datacenters burns down.
At the time I was making regular backups to two different providers with servers somewhere else. When I noticed that it was serious, I ordered a new VPS and restored everything. If OVH itself went down, I could have used Scaleway, Hetzner, Contabo, etc.
A lack of Unicode support in 2026 is like someone coming with dirty clothes to a job interview: it might not affect too much how the work is done, but immediately raises doubts about the underlying level of professionalism.
> It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway?
You know why I have this screenshot? Because I literally tried to switch to "great European alternative" that is "as slick as DO".
After a third or a fourth screen, most of which felt completely isolated and disconnected from any previous ones, I gave up on the screen that couldn't handle a standard European address.
This was literally the point that I gave up.
So I went ahead... and signed up with Hetzner.
Edit
So I decided to try again. Literally the first page of account sign in tried to trick you into accepting tracking
Since I apparently had an account, I could login... So redirected to a subdomain with the same cookie popup. On a site that is solely for billing address collection
which then redirects you to a third domain with the a similar but different popup.
Which ends up on an empty page indistinguishable in "usability" from Hetzner (or worse)
That's the end of my experience of my "European DO that is Scaleway".
Alternatives to Amazon.com? I'm totally serious when asking about this. I think delivery apps (like the one comically named "Deliveroo") are all potential alternatives to Amazon, but I think they charge a premium.
It depends where you live. There's no one company that's implented in all European countries. All countries have a shop similar to Amazon (often with fewer sponsored products and less drop shipping garbage). There are also a few specialized shops (for books, sports, electronics...). Since 2020 I only buy Amazon if they're significantly cheaper than other sellers. That's about 10% of my purchases.
We should be divesting from unethical businesses, not from american ones.
Nationalism can be so seductive but if you engage in it you're being pulled down to "their" level.
Instead, consider your true "country" is the set of good people, no matter where they live. Keep spending your money on ethical american businesses, and european ones, and russian and chinese ones, if you can find them. Stop spending your money on unethical businesses, even if they're local.
> The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country or in the UK.
but
> For hosting providers: It is not allowed that a hosting provider is simply a sub-hosting provider of a company that is not based in an EU or EFTA member country.
It is good to have a dedicated location to find these. The problem is that you want a sufficiently large company when buying the services so that it does not fall apart or get acquired and runs to the ground, and we have a few. Also, putting a country flag to the service is cringe, it might even be odd to some because it implies a specific language/culture. We just all want to consume a proper business staffed with pros and the one which does not resell AWS services.
The open web is your European alternative, not the Silicon Valley-approach but then in Europe. That just invites the same abuse of data, the same enshittification and the same rent-seeking behavior.
"French server", what is that? Usually we judge customer service on the company, not the nationality of the hardware, care to share exactly where you had a bad experience?
so much reasonable scepticism here is being downvoted, i don’t get why
to add my 2 cents: why does anyone think the EU countries don’t or won’t pose the same risks as the US? They might just be doing it silently and illegally. Where is the guarantee that the mere fact a service is EU-based provides benefits over using US-based ones?
Most of it is entirely unreasonable and being posted by Americans with vested interests who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech - think Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this".
It's the exact same, and it doesn't take much wisdom to understand.
> being posted by Americans
> Americans with vested interests
proofs, please?
> who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech
it’s just your assumption. I personally don’t know anyone from the states who would want this except their government
> Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this"
again, it’s the government who fights the dependency on China, not the regular people. You are confusing politics and normal people’s concerns
I think there is some sort of Darwinistic reason for this. Maybe its inevitable.
Not to say that the US didn't help spur this, but its just sad to see.
When I was younger, I was such an idealist. Anarchy, open borders, free market open trade, pacifism.
Even as Trump started getting aggressive, I kept trying to tell myself: "Well, these other countries surly know that most of the population doesn't support this. Surely they know we are fans of liberalism, democracy, and human rights. One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."
But I saw the comments of how quickly it seemed the general population of other nations flipped like a dime.
It has shooken me. (And I don't blame that its shooken them)
It has made me the exact person I was against. Now I think we really do need to look toward the national interest. If 1 bad politician can alienate us from 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
People in the US need to become more aware of the dramatic impact this current administration has on the world. A paper in the Lancet, not exactly your average leftie rag, extrapolates the deaths resulting from the sudden USAID defunding to amount to about 14 million people. That's about 10x Pol Pot.
People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.
I'm sorry, my cognitive bias says 'Look! See! That proves my point at how great the US is/was.'
1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
Buy local is a well known and used tactic globally in many places big and small. Another observation, saying it is nationalistic is odd given it involves multiple nationalities. US has protectionist policy EU has it, there is nothing new here. The odd thing is that it triggers the person for it being so small.
To clarify empowering the EU is literally the opposite of Nationalism or are you discussing the recent surge of 'American Exceptionalism' of the current US administration?
Brexit made to clear that for some people being in the EU is an important part of their identity so that enables EU nationalism for them.
There are racist European nationalists - the Anders Breivik type.
This website is not either. However I think its worth looking beyond Europe. Avoiding the US and China and a few other countries leaves a lot of possibilities.
That’s a bit of a negative way to think about things. We’ve tried globalism, I don’t think it works. It’s utopian.
Small and distributed, this is the way. Not large and centralised. Stop over complicating things. If people just looked after themselves, their family, and their neighbours (in that order) the rest would figure itself out. This is how love works, it’s personal and intimate. I wish people would just stop trying to meddle with the world and let people be.
> Even as Trump started getting aggressive, I kept trying to tell myself: "Well, these other countries surly know that most of the population doesn't support this. Surely they know we are fans of liberalism, democracy, and human rights
A huge proportion of your electorate is actually not only fine with the current direction, but actively cheer on this.
> One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."
This sounds a lot worse than you imagine. We will be always one election away of anothe asshole that will want to leveraged the US relative strength to cause harm. Better to not keep strengthening it.
> 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
I almost choked at this.
The US has a long history of fucking over other countries.
The only thing that changed is that it just decided to be more direct about it, even with former allies.
> One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years.
That's what we thought the first time. And it did happen, a sane person did get elected a few years later, but then another few years later Trump got elected again. And it's pretty clear that he and his crew are rapidly turning the USA into a fascist authoritarian hellhole, and they show all signs of not being willing to step back from power. It's a real tragedy both for USA's own people, especially the ones that Trump doesn't like, but also for people in other countries.
That has real consequences. Here is, with thanks to user malauxyeux for neatly summarizing, a case that should anyone start thinking real hard of the consequences of using American services:
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
This list is very impressive, but it is the wrong approach. We simply need an EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon etc.
The closer to a drop-in replacement the better. Tying all of these functional bits and pieces together to form a consistent whole is just not going to happen. You need to approach this on a per-company level.
So, who will step up to the plate and re-implement as much of Google as necessary to catch 80% of the functionality and their EU customers?
Isn't massive tech conglomerates locking people into their ecosystems how we got here in the first place? The quest to replace US with EU products is really just treating symptoms of the problems that tech has created in the past 2-3 decades.
Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense for consumers or small business to have to wrangle dozens of IT providers. How can we consolidate them?
Excellent question and great to see you thinking in the same direction.
Consolidation of various open source projects is underway with projects such as owncloud but it is still very fragile and hard to maintain.
I think a pledge never to be bought out and a way to restrict stock to EU UBOs would be one step in the right direction, then you'll need a massive amount of capital to pull this off. But maybe the climate is finally right to raise a proper amount of money for such an undertaking.
You don't have to do all five at once, and a proper replacement based on the integration of a number of partial solutions should in principle be workable. What is required is the capital and the will to do it. If someone pulls this off they can count on my company as a subscriber and I think there are many more like me.
In this thread I've seen
- https://altstack.jp for Japan
- https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives for Canada
- and ofc https://european-alternatives.eu/ for the EU
But I just wanted to point out that https://alternativeto.net/ recently (well, over a year ago) added a flag next to each suggestion so you can easily tell where its from. It's all crowd-sourced and I've both contributed to and greatly benefited from the project myself (especially for finding FLOSS alternatives to popular software). Here's an example
https://alternativeto.net/software/github/
I think the fact that it's crowd-sourced gives it a lot more staying power than a lot of these one-off projects that are presumably maintained by a single person or team.
I submitted my project EasyInvoicePDF (a free & open-source invoice generator) a couple of months ago to European Alternatives but never heard back unfortunately.
The project has no backend and is purely browser-based, but I’m based in Europe and developing the project here, so I consider it a European project =)
App: https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe
GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
It's a cool project but it is 'niche'.
I think the purpose of the site is more about the alternatives to 'large players', platforms and infrastructure companies. Still Constantin Graf should have clarified out of politeness but possibly he's busy or doesn't have time to respond to every email.
However I'd point out there is a market for European 'Product Hunt' that would include more of these smaller projects.
I don't think creating an invoice is "niche". It is such a common need for users that invoicing software should be included in the operating system application suite. (Which it is somewhat if you consider Pages invoice templates).
Millions and millions of people need to make and send invoices. Many more than people who need domain name registrars, uptime monitoring services, content delivery networks, or microblogging services.
1 reply →
Thanks for the comment. I hadn’t thought about this before, but it makes sense - I agree.
About European Product Hunt - very good idea.
I was thinking recently that we need more European social networks, messengers, etc.
It’s a very good time to build imo =)
18 replies →
Same here.
Open-source security framework (1). Applied 16 August 2025. Company registered in Switzerland (EFTA). No reply.
However, European Alternatives is a personal (sole proprietorship) website and has nothing to do with Europe, despite the name and style, which are slightly misleading as they mimic official EU website aesthetics.
1. GitHub: https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
Make sense.
Btw tirreno looks very cool, just starred on GitHub :)
1 reply →
I have been working on https://1launch.eu for the past two months. Very MVP stage. I don't plan to be in the same niche as european-alternatives, but it is very much inspired by this. It is largely meant to be a ProductHunt / AngelList for Europe with a couple of key features especially for the European market (like instant translation into all 24 languages of the EU to launch in the whole European market in one go). If you want to launch on the platform or want to be involved in a different way, send me an email on hackernews@1launch.eu
I checked the first 3 companies I saw with the label 'EU hosted'. bunq.com and lifebit.ai are hosted on AWS, and tomtom.com is hosted on Azure.
https://info.addr.tools/bunq.com https://info.addr.tools/lifebit.ai https://info.addr.tools/tomtom.com
1 reply →
Do you have a plan or idea of how to get the minimum critical mass of genuine users once the platform is built out?
1 reply →
Wow, 1launch looks great! Will definitely launch there very soon.
Just submitted EasyInvoicePDF to launch on 1launch :)
I've seen the same thing, the site accepts submissions but there's no one to either approve or reject them.
Unfortunately they did really well at SEO at one time, and more active alternatives appear far below in the search results.
Do you know any good alternatives?
5 replies →
I think the biggest issue is that your product is not from a company generating money (and taxes). IMO as an european, I think we should aim for open source, not corporate software, but free and open source software is generating way less jobs and taxes money.
The site has a lot of open source projects though, in fact i found about copyparty[0] from it because it was listed as an alternative to file hosting services (though it was removed since then, probably because it isn't a service :-P but still there are various FLOSS projects).
[0] https://github.com/9001/copyparty
Yes, make sense.
I plan to add a paid “pro” version with more features, but the current functionality will remain free.
Same here. I created and submitted a European open-source Snapchat alternative, but it's been in “Waiting for Review” status for quite some time now.
Webpage: https://twonly.eu/en
Github: https://github.com/twonlyapp/twonly-app
twonly looks very cool, just starred the repo on github :)
1 reply →
You probably need to include EN16931, XRechnung, Factur-X, ZUGFeRD, … and how they all called, the new standard for electronic invoices.
Free generator for e-invoices here: https://www.e-rechnung-online-erstellen.de/kostenlos/e-rechn...
This is planned =)
Starting working asap on this because in Poland (where I live) it will be required from April 2026.
Issue to follow: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf/issues/121
Same, can’t get https://mailpace.com listed, no idea why
Unless you do Peppol... it's not intresting at all.
Stay tuned
https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf/issues/121
2 replies →
> template=stripe
Maybe this was enough to not include it?
What is the problem with “/?template=stripe”…?
=)
Doing my bit: migrating my small company's db this weekend from AWS RDS to Hetzner VPS + volumes. Fingers crossed!
Already done: replaced SendGrid with Sweego.
Later: move domains from US registrar to EU based.
The difficult bit is the Microsoft Office because we are also using Azure DevOps for code, tickets, wiki and ci/cd.
Gradually moving over from Teams to Hetzner + Nextcloud over the past year. The chat app is the blocker (Nextcloud Talk is not quite there yet). But we've moved over files, docs, calendar, photos, etc.
Me too.
Just moved all my hosting and dbs from a US company to Hertzner after 15 years of good service. Moving domains now.
Unfortunately Hetzner volumes have pretty low iops for databases
We have a small database with low access rates. We'll be fine, at least for a while.
What EU based registrars would you recommend?
https://www.inwx.de/en
Hetzner might be a good choice to keep things together, as we're already using some services from them.
1 reply →
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/domain-name-regist...
It's all in there.
I wouldn't hard recommend based on lack of solid experience of using them over time, but Gandi showed a lot of promise for me.
Context: I used to run a domain-related service that used registrar api's and gandi's seemed the most well thought out by a considerable way. The drawback was they're quite expensive for registrations/renewals unless you're doing it at volume.
I had reservations about them being a French company wrt support but their API was so good I never needed to contact them on anything.
Definitely worth a look.
For me personally, one that's well supported by DNS-01 providers for let's encrypt.
Unfortunately there's not that many and often the process is broken.
2 replies →
I haven't looked into this yet, so I cannot recommend. I'll work my way through the list here: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/domain-name-regist...
I’ve been using Gandi for quite a few years now without any trouble.
SchlundTech
netim.com
One obvious thing missing from any of those lists: Visa and Mastercard alternatives. This is the protection money that is never brought up by the US officials when they say that America was paying for our security.
Wero is coming. Currently it is only available in a few countries.
And within those countries in only a handful of banks. We've been here before, but as of right now, I'd give it a better chance than I'd have given just four months ago.
No it's not.
Wero is another name for iDEAL, it has been pushed by Dutch, but it is an engineering fiasco.
There is no way Poland would adopt it. Blik is just on another level price- and feature-wise.
9 replies →
+1 for Wero! Unsure where I can see their timeline.
Wero is a land grab by the banks who fumbled building a PayPal alternative for 20 years, now desperately trying to stop the digital Euro.
Sure I'd rather use Wero than PayPal -if it was decent- and building it on top of SEPA instant transactions is neat. But the lack of buyers protection is a deal breaker for me! And quite frankly I'd rather use a digital Euro governed by the ECB than some rent seeking hobby project by a bunch of private banks. Especially because they will inevitably enshittify it with ads and hostile BNPL like PayPal.
I wish GNU Taler would become more concrete.
https://www.taler.net
It seems like Taler has been coming along great and the biggest things it’s missing are more interest and adoption. There has been some first ‘real-world’ use recently, but it’s still far from becoming widespread, which would be a dream come true.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
The digital Euro has not been implemented yet. Some analysts are skeptical but this is the EUs answer for Visa/Mastercard.
For small transactions right? I haven't looked much into it but I thought the main purpose was to save people all the transaction fees.
1 reply →
The big European countries still have their National Systems that work very well. If the US would nuke Visa/MC in Germany, payments inside Germany would still work very well via Girocard (except for some people that bank with cheapskate neobanks)
Wero is coming and it should work across Europe
In Belgium, Maestro card was halted and my bank switched to MasterCard. Then I paid on some USA website and they managed to pull money from my account based on only the card number, without using the bank website's chip+pin. I was flabberghasted on how we silently managed to get such a huge setback in both security and national independence. I stopped payments using non-EU entities.
France has the CB network for example which I believe still dominates most credit card transactions although it's declining as more and more cards are not co-branded anymore.
It merged with Mastercard almost two decades back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocard_%28credit_card%29
Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too.
Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...
Many European countries have a single payer system when it comes to the medical system. That gives them a big leverage in negotiations for drug pricing.
8 replies →
AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.
15 replies →
How is that relevant? The US can reform its healthcare system whenever it decides to do so.
For the EU, Visa and Mastercard dependence form a duopoly controlled by a hostile foreign power. An alternative is essential.
While Master Card and a Visa there is a EU regulation limiting the fees, health insurance is mainly national level. So you could ask the question why is Ozempic cheap in Australia? But I can't answer your question.
36 replies →
And the fees you pay go, in part, to fund the American War machine that is now threatening Europe. As a European, I don't want to fund your war machine.
You know that nearly nobody in the US pays the sticker price of Drugs?
They have to put an absurd sticker price on the drugs so that the "Pharmacy Benefit Manager" (an useless middlemen that only exists in US Healthcare) can "negotiate" a "discount" on behalf of your insurance (aka the real price), for which he takes a cut based on how big the "discount" is
Same submission from a few years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627097
What's insightful to me is how fast the list of alternatives are growing.
The list is much better now than 2021 and we still have a long way to go.
Also Constantin Graf needs to add a new Category: "LLM Clients" or "AI Tooling"
Something I'd love to see is a Europe-hosted mirror of software repositories like pypi, juliahub, and the like. It feels pretty essential to have these be available no matter what, but I haven't found any such mirrors.
More importantly, perhaps, are some exercises where a A SRE team creates likely problem (US/China/…) does bad things with DNS/BGP/…, submarine cables, starlink, GPS/GALILEO, Kessler effect etc, and SRE team B tries to keep the national infrastructure together. This may be happening already, but I have my doubts
Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? I mean I get it, Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach, Russia and China reverted back into dictatorship, but Europe is also at the edge. Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free? And instead propagate global alternatives that are not subjected by some power-hungry state-/capital-sponsored overlord?
It is a sad reality. The US has recently threatened to annex Denmark and Canada. Some of us are suddenly keenly aware that the US is in a position to take control of most of our computers and phones via software updates.
Open source is the global alternative you're looking for. There's even interesting hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US also has had an unfair advantage in tech/defense and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With this newfound isolationism, tariffs etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere.
What are global alternatives? Every company is connected to some country, there are no global alternatives. I live in EU and want to use EU services mainly because I want this part of the world to prosper. I want to leave my money and incentivise innovation in this part of the world because this is where I live and I want a better life here for me and my kids. And alternatives are always good, especially that they’re not closed. People in the US can use services from EU companies as well :) why not?
Theoretically possible in a distributed way, though usually inefficient. IPFS is a good example.
> Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? [...] Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab [...]
While I agree with your sentiment, European and nationalistic are two contradicting positions, unlike the other three mentioned superpowers.
Not really. The forging pan-European nation composed of many nationalities is a thing in all meaningful contexts. European civilization, European economy, European products, European voters etc.
3 replies →
What is nation is not a objective question. People can define Europe as nation and then you can have an nationalistic Europe.
3 replies →
This might be possible for software, if we assume that being open source can protect software from state or corporate control (doubtful to be honest). For other things I don't really see how it would work. Your hardware has to be manufactured somewhere, your infrastructure has to be located somewhere.
It is not "nationalistic" to prefer things that are made in Europe. Europe is not a nation and very few people feel anything close to national pride about it. I like that we have European alternatives instead of German, French, Swedish, etc, alternatives.
First of all, US is at the edge of a dictatorship. If US falls completely, Europe will likely too, but untangling ourselves from US is an attempt to prevent that.
European leaders fundamentally have no issue with Americans dominating tech and were happy to have their entire digital infrastructures rely on US companies. If the Trump admin could give them some sort of nod behind the scenes that all of this is just a big show and they're not actually going to break NATO or invade or w/e insane shit they're saying I guarantee you a sizeable amount would just say hey no worries then let's keep the status quo going.
But that's not what's happening. It's a clear and obvious security risk to their sovereignty. If the government can't guarantee that to its citizens then what even is its purpose? The Trump admin has already tried to use American tech dominance as leverage.
Ask yourself this question, what if there was a foreign tech competitor that managed to scale up to be basically a better cheaper AWS. Would the US government ever allow it to encroach its market to the point that AWS or Azure did in Europe? Look at what happened to tiktok if you want to see what approach they'd likely take.
So how exactly would you envision an objective and neutral provider in a world of geopolitical competition?
No,not sad, centralisation is always problematic even if well meaning. The presence of diverse alternatives is a feature, not a bug.
As long as they're actual alternatives of course, rather than just another monopoly but at a smaller scale.
I think the opposite as you. These global companies often act as a nation with laws unto themselves. Most of them don't actually have real support that can do anything unless you make a lucky Twitter post or something. Having a local company that is realistically beholden to local laws and local politicians that you can actually potentially go and talk to if needed is a major feature.
The European alternatives are not restricted to Europe.
Qwant seems to be.
> Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach
It's not even that. We euros were more than willing to look the other way (see the umpteen attempts to reconcile our privacy-friendly legislation with the free-for-all of American services, ongoing for decades) in the name of convenience and fundamentally shared values. The turning point was really in 2024/2025, when those shared values were summarily swept away on the other side of the Atlantic.
Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.
> Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.
This is, in fact, what "overlord" means!
Competition is always good. It's sad that there's been so little alternatives in the past. I'm glad that this is now slowly changing.
What we should work towards, though, is interoperability and open source solutions.
> Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free?
We should not; we must. But at the same time we need to recognise that we are powerless to affect the American government, which can go rogue at any moment. So from a pure risk analysis, we also need to have local alternatives. I regret this state of affairs, but it is an unavoidable consequence of the US threatening its nominal allies.
Nothing against global standards and similar. But even "global alternatives" are usually rooted somewhere locally, and that starts to matter more and more, it seems.
I'm really not sad about having alternative and choices, especially it also leads to reduce corporate overlordship.
This is great. Since the greenland crisis I'm busy replacing all my us software and other products (e.g. no Heinz, no Apple...)
We’ve been seeing a surprising amount of leads come through this site, clearly the demand for a EU alternative is high.
Hearing from our customers they are abandoning US products. Really surprising how many times I hear it tbh.
If you want an EU-made (and repairable!) e-bike battery, check what we're building at https://infinite-battery.com :)
an European energy sector (mainstream or industrial) HN would be great btw
ps: congrats on your success
Somewhat similar for Canada:
https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives
They should add EU membership as alternative to CUSMA. I really like the idea!
Whoa, was unaware of this! Thanks!
Is there a European alternative for this website?
journalduhacker.net (in french)
Perhaps Lemmy may count based on distributed ActivityPub protocol with some servers in Europe.
techposts.eu i reckon
Seems to be US-hosted.
4 replies →
Its founder lives in europe so there's that.
I think he means Hacker News rather than EU Alternatives.
6 replies →
The irony is that European alternatives are still in English, when no European country (since the departure of the U.K. from Europe) actually uses that language.
The amount of things wrong is impressive
You're confusing Europe and the EU
You're forgetting about Ireland and Malta
You're thinking that because the UK left the EU it will change the main language countries use to speak to each others
11 replies →
A language is a tool, not a nationality or a border.
Your average educated European speaks at least three, one of which is English because it is a good language to have because it is the language of international commerce. This has been the case since many decades and has nothing to do with using the language internally.
But: many people do use it internally. French tourists abroad are more likely to use English than French. European colleagues usually standardize on English, both for their communications as well as for their documentation needs.
Scientific literature is predominantly in English (at least, for now).
So there are many reasons to use English which have nothing to do with allegiance or dependence.
7 replies →
The UK did not leave Europe. Just the EU. But also English fluency is widespread, so it’s not a bad starting point.
6 replies →
Ireland and Malta.
You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
2 replies →
It has been around 300 million years since the UK drifted away from continental Europe but it is still very much part of it!
2 replies →
The UK is still in Europe. They didn't move from the continent.
Except for Ireland.
Categories missing:
- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
- Programming language toolchains
- Hardware vendors
Open source generally meets the needs of the first two. There's barely any proprietary toolchains left in common use; maybe Oracle Java is one of the last?
Hardware you can buy from China. Distant, predictable authoritarianism that doesn't make annoying social media posts is sadly preferable to .. whatever is going on over there.
Only if there are European resources to keep the lights on.
Java is FOSS by the way, however it is also a good example, its runtime capabilities isn't the product of long nights and weekends.
7 replies →
I don't see the issue with Operating systems or programming languages. There are FOSS alternatives and since they are run locally have no connection outside of the EU.
Hardware vendors is a different issue
You are missing the big picture who develops them, pays the salaries of people in the trenches, implement LSPs, and whatever else around the ecosystems.
Example, Java, .NET, Go and co are FOSS, how long do you think they will keep on going without their overlords?
For complete alternatives we need to go back to the cold war days, where programming languages were driven by vendor neutral standards, and there were several to buy from.
As it is, it suffices to take the air out of existing FOSS options.
Even if you quickly point out to GCC and clang, one reason why they have dropped implementation velocity from existing ISO revisions is due to a few well known big corps focusing on their own offerings, while other vendors seldom upstream stuff as they focus on clang.
EDIT: As I missed this on the first comment, same applies to the big FOSS OS projects, most contributions to the major Linux distros, or the BSDs come from non European companies, there is naturally something like SuSE, but then we get into the whole who is allowed to contribute, security, backdoors and related stuff.
7 replies →
They accept suggestions - https://european-alternatives.eu/register
Thanks
> - Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.
Where are located the key companies that contribute to Linux ecosystem?
1 reply →
FWIW Free Pascal and Lazarus communities and developers are largely European and there isn't a single company behind them. Though at the same time there are also several devs from outside EU so i do not think it can be called a "EU alternative" - which is the case for most FLOSS projects actually.
Some projects, especially high profile ones, do have US companies behind them (e.g. Google, etc) so you could claim they are US-centric, but at this point it becomes a question of why you are looking for an EU alternative. If it is to help EU businesses (like others mentioned), then unless you financially support these US companies (either directly or indirectly via, e.g., your data) it doesn't matter if the FLOSS project you are using is made by them or not.
> why you are looking for an EU alternative
I think recently it has been made obvious by the US that relying on US technology is a risk, because it can be used to bully entire countries.
So I think there is a movement right now of "non-US alternatives", but of course if you are in the EU and got burned by relying too much on the US, maybe it is wise to try to fix that by having some kind of digital sovereignty in the EU.
But I'm pretty sure many companies would switch to a Canada-based product if it allowed them to reduce their dependency on the US.
1 reply →
For the same reason people on the wrong countries aren't allowed to contribute to US projects.
The way things are going it becomes a national security issue where those PR are coming from.
3 replies →
For consumers, these computers look interesting: https://starlabs.systems/
I recently discovered these: https://www.schenker-tech.de/en/
- OSes is easy, Suse and Ubuntu are European. As well as a bunch of smaller ones.
Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.
Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.
European cloud sovereignty starts with European hardware. Without European bare-metal, the rest is just branding.
Thought I'd have another look at mail providers, but from what I can see, none support the features I use with fastmail (custom domain, security key, unlimited on-the-fly aliases for sending).
I've been looking at mail providers too, and it's starting to look there are no real alternatives. Not just in Europe, but worldwide. I've been a happy user of Fastmail for quite some time now, and it's sad the the current geopolitical situation pressures me into migrating away.
The alternative that's looking best to me so far is Kolab Now. I don't see a lot of user reviews of it on Reddit though, or anywhere else, so it seems to not be very popular at first sight. That's perhaps not a good sign.
In any case I'm planning on trying it out for a while, with a domain I don't use it all that often, before deciding to migrate to it.
Doesn’t seem to support on-the-fly aliases for sending, requiring instead to set it up in advance. I use a custom mail per website/contact workflow, and with FM any reply uses whatever alias I used to receive the mail, with the option to change it to whatever I want without extra steps.
They don't, but you shouldn't feel too bad as fastmail is australian, ie not american, which (at least personally) is where we're trying to divest.
Their servers are in the US
3 replies →
US servers, though.
1 reply →
Gandi.net offers mail with custom domain and unlimited aliases. You need to have your domain registered with them though.
I wouldn't consider them an option since they got bought and had extreme price rises.
2 replies →
Does this hook up with promotion of the EUPL [1] as a preferred license for software? Does it even make more sense for european FOSS authors over the GPL family?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence
The EUPL is a fine license, especially if your goal is wide compatibility with other copyleft licenses. However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft, which could be surprising if you just read the main text.
Also, the GPL is not as short and has more explicit wording for how it behaves in common situations (like the P2P copying stuff, for example), and it allows certain additional restrictions and exceptions (like what the LGPL is). It's just more well thought-out in my opinion.
Edit: Reading it again, I also just remembered that the EUPL's warranty disclaimer is a lot weaker than usual licenses, and weirdly also asserts the program is a “work in progress”.
> However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft
Keep in mind that within EU the GPL's copyleft is as strong as EUPL's or LGPL while at the same time EUPL takes into account network access like AGPL. In practice though, software is distributed outside of the EU and while GPL relies on local laws to "maximize" its copyleftness, EUPL specifically refers to either the EU country of the developer or Belgium if the developers from outside the EU, where the laws do not distinguish between static or dynamic linking (check "More details on the case of linking" from [0] about license compatibility). Also FWIW while FSF suggests that "license hopping" (i.e. changing to some compatible licenses from EUPL to something else) weakens the copyleft, a European Commision lawyer who worked on EUPL has commented doing so would be copyright infringement because the purpose of the compatibility list in EUPL is for interoperability (so that multiple projects with different licenses can coexist) and the purpose would matter in court.
Though in practice since software is often distributed outside of EU, e.g. to US where (it seems) such distinction does exist, people do respect (L)GPL's dynamic vs static linking requirements and from a worldwide perspective EUPL is something like LGPL with a dash of AGPL (making some program functionality available even remotely is considered as distribution). Or in other words, EUPL is basically AGPL within the limitations of EU law.
[0] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/li...
> However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft
Can you elaborate on that?
My understanding is that EUPL is a bit like MPLv2 or LGPL in the spirit. Like it protects the project itself, but doesn't go viral like the GPL.
1 reply →
What are some non-subjective reasons to use Euro alternatives? It reminds me of startup founders having to choose between the big expensive service or their buddy’s startup that intends to serve the same use case.
Here's one case from August 2025:
----
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...
I think you’re missing the point of my question. I’m not saying that story isn’t distressing and a good reason to use alternatives, but I’m asking about whether you can convince individuals and individual businesses that these alternatives are more cost effective or capable than the software they’re replacing.
To me, a very non-subjective reason is that the money I'm paying for these services will go to people and companies that share the same values and the taxes on the said money will be used for our common defense instead of being used to attack us.
If you're European and reading the news at any point in the last year+, you understand how critical a weakness being dependent on US companies for your IT infra is.
There are some things that are difficult to avoid, like CPUs and GPUs, but software is much more doable.
Please don’t assume I’m not up to date on the news. But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software. I’m genuinely asking about incentives for the individual or individual business. That’s a more difficult question to answer than asking why shouldn’t Europe as a whole pursue this.
1 reply →
European companies operate under stricter privacy laws. GDPR is applicable world wide but has serious teeth and enforcement within Europe. Small US companies with no presence in Europe can effectively ignore it. However if an American were to choose a European service this benefit is effectively passed on to them. They can view what data any company has on them or ask them to delete it.
I can appreciate some don't care about their data especially in this world of people pouring their lives in to social media but some people do care.
America could feasibly use cloud and other service provision as an economic weapon. Your company could die as a result.
And a second non-subjective and very important reason is that at any moment the US government might decide that the data we entrusted their corporations with is no longer ours and we need to part with it. It will be used for AI training. Also, this is because we didn't say thank you or something like that...
> their buddy’s startup
That’s really not a good comparison. Many of the listed services and companies have been well established for a long time, in some cases for decades, and aren’t small businesses.
Legal one? Cloud Act is not compatible with GDPR.
This is nice but if Europe doesn't fix their tech salaries situation (half US' in most cases, if not lower), I don't think it's sustainable.
You simply don’t need such inflated salaries if schools are free, roads are not broken, trains exist, healthcare is affordable, grocery stores are in biking distance, parks are good and free and plenty, labor laws are in your favour, utilities markets mostly aren’t dysfunctional and a 2-bedroom apartment doesn't cost $10000/m.
Americans compare their salaries to European ones but never stop to imagine the insane high “taxes” they pay for stuff that we get cheaply or for free.
I'm not even saying the one is better than the other. There's a lot to be said for the American system of only paying for what you need. It's just.. you can't just compare dollars/euros like that. There's reddit posts of people who earn $900k/y and openly wonder whether that's enough to live in NYC and that shit is equally unfathomable to the average European as the idea of a dev earning €70k/y is to the average American.
Do you want to live in a school, on the streets, in a train, in a hospital, in a park or in a grocery store?
As long as housing is extremely expensive in Europe, nothing else matters except for higher salaries.
5 replies →
True. But the systems are more and more breaking down. Its unsustainable. At least what I can tell from Germany and the Netherlands. to see a healthcare specialist, you wait 3-6months in some cases. Not talking about the trains. Germany DB runs on time in only 50% of the cases. So thats a big problem
9 replies →
"trains exist"
Like Spain's commuter trains?
1 reply →
I suspect China or Russia don't have higher salaries, they still manage to build their own alternatives. And Airbus builds better planes than Boeing with European salaries.
I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.
Tech jobs in IT in Moscow are paid(net) relatively similar to what you could get in EU.
2 replies →
Not true. Plenty of European products are better. Consumer example: Spotify is better than Apple Music. Business example: Attio is better than every American CRM at SME/early stage startup stage.
Biggest problem has been talent going to US.
This problem is rapidly being solved by the US government.
The startup I work for was planning to raise next round in the US. This will not happen as the CEO refuses to travel to the US.
It’s the best time to build in the EU or UK there has ever been. I don’t expect America to pull out of this nose dive. The future of western software is in europe now, and globally I expect China to be the lead beginning with AI.
Assuming that people are solely motivated by money, which most aren't. You can't pay me enough to put my children into a school system that has "active shooter" drills. After a certain point money stops being a motivation, that point is well within the average EU tech salary band (perhaps excluding places like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia and that general area).
But why? What's unsustainable about an email service, for example, run by competent European engineers at European salaries?
The huge influx of competent European engineers to the US is a real thing.
9 replies →
High US salaries come from US VCs having to bid against other to capture talent. US VCs have more capital than EU VCs. This is why.
The EU is now going to start pumping money in to building European alternatives. EU software dev salaries are going to increase. All 27 states agreed to establish the saving and investments union.
Nothing will happen overnight but you'll see this start to play out over the next 5 years. It will take decades to catch up but we are starting.
Over what period of time do you predict economic downfall for European tech because of salaries?
Please explain your working. These last 40 years or more there has been a cliff of money, but Europeans continue to live and work in europe.
You have to have an incredibly narrow definition of "only good people work for more money and only poor/ineffective people work for less" to say people who don't chase the millions in a US company are somehow failures.
I might get lower salary, but if I break my leg I pay nothing and I am paid during my leave.
I doubt you break your leg every year though. The kind of companies that we're talking about (big tech that are national champions) offers health insurance (among other benefits) and 200-500k USD/year salaries.
I think culture and quality of life not withstanding, the raw numbers simply don't favor the EU becoming a tech leader with the current incentives.
9 replies →
This talking point went out the window After America threatened to invade Greenland.
After that I bet some people would actually pay to develop software to defang the American threat.
I wouldn't want US salaries with US costs of living.
Also working for companies located in Ireland[0] or Switzerland you can have your US salary, it's just that the pool of jobs is limited.
[0] Provided it's a company in the first of Ireland's two economies.
Not sure about Ireland, but Switzerland used to be true, but now it is also far behind since 5+ years.
See, Google Zurich vs Seattle
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
Hm, after carefully reviewing the entries seem more or less the same, Zurich slightly lower.
11 replies →
It's not just about salaries, but also the lack of a culture for seeding and financing. The fear of failed investments really dominates. Government and EU-backed financing is a joke, and I'm not even talking about the terms or amounts, but who actually gets them. It's pure waste of taxpayer money and should be abandoned.
I am not saying you are wrong, but Trump has shown exactly how quickly a "culture" can crumble down. Despite "checks and balances" the American democracy has done nothing to slow down the slide into dictatorship.
So how long will the culture last?
Why not?
I had offers from companies across the pond, and likely could make about 2x-3x what I make here.
What for? I live a comfortable life here.
The higher US salaries are a bug, not a feature, in this context.
Personally it's not all about money. I even moved to a lower wage country in Europe for better quality of life.
Having enough is what I care about and things are a lot cheaper here too. Not to mention free healthcare, social security. I don't need a car and a public transport pass is 25€ a month. That alone saves me so much money. The time till the next metro train counts down in seconds here.
When I had a car in the past it would cost me hundreds per month and it was such a headache.
I'd never move to the US even if I could make 3x as much. In fact I got an offer from a FAANG once (with the whole H1B managed by some agency I think) but I declined. I only applied because they advertised it as a local job but then when the offer came it was in California. Nope.
It very much is sustainable. See China, Russia, Korea and Japan, all varying degrees of being much less dependent on US tech than the EU is.
The actions of the current US administration seem to have provoked intense negative reactions, or perhaps caused long simmering resentment to boil over. I hope some of this energy goes towards cultivating a more entrepreneurial, less risk-averse culture in Europe.
As much as you may detest all the other great powers jostling for position with seemingly cursory attention paid to moral considerations, making your core identity the cultured "nice guy" is likely a trap. I'd love to see the resurgence of a strong Europe. I think this will require some introspection and more action than simply boycotting Google and Amazon.
Before we closed our office in Mountain View years ago, every time we went over there:
- I could not get out of my San Francisco Hotel to get to a deli across the road without having to step over at least 5 homeless people.
- I could not fail to notice that even those people who did have jobs and not lost their homes to tech bros had a surprisingly low number of healthy teeth for a modern western first-world society
- An apartment with noisy air conditioning, dirty carpets and questionable building codes would cost more in rent than a villa at the Côte d’Azur.
- The air quality during fire season was a nightmare. During my time there I developed asthma.
- Everybody hated the arrogant ignorant tech people that invaded their communities, forced them out of their houses to then have to commute into the city or valley to serve tech bros. Yes, as a European I am not that well trained to constantly ignore that my privilege are causing the community around me to suffer. That I do not "earn" this gigantic salary, I am just grabbing the resources pretending the "normal" people don't deserve to have any of that.
You are getting paid so much because you in exchange are living in a sh*thole country without education, healthcare, public transport, clean air, or anything else that I as a "wealthy" developer person would expect to receive in exchange for my work.
Take your US salary, and invest it into a travel into some of the more up-to-date regions of the world. Those with clean air, education, healthcare. Places I have visited that are better than the Valley in this regard include:
- Pretty much all of Europe. Maybe with the exception of Greece and Spain, when they are now burning thanks to the "drill drill drill" people. - China - Iran - New Zealand - Australia - Canada ...
Yes, the amount of zeros on your US salary might look soooooooooooooooo impressive. But they are zeros. They don't buy you a livable live in a modern civilization.
Right now you are just bribed with money not to see the civil war getting ignited in minnesota.
Oh oh oh, now I remember! I have even been to two countries with civil wars a while ago, who had clean air, education and healthcare. And I think even directly after the civil war, all of Kosovo had a lower percentage of homeless people than the US has today.
Yes, another one of my drastic postings. But you will survive. Be brave: With someone who clearly is being paid a lot for being clever, I can assume that you think this through again, to calculate what the better deal is. You know the average amount of student debt people who want to become programmers have? Zero.
You are not getting more VALUE out of working in the US in high-tech compared to other places. There are places on this world, where being a good programmer buys you a wonderful life with nobody around you being poor, or without healthcare, or homeless. Try Estonia. They have a lovely tech community, a fully digital government. You can become a digital citizen, open your own company in minutes. And you will have a far better life.
Can you talk more about the Estonian tech scene? I am a Canadian-Estonian and I have been considering moving to Europe in the next year or so.
2 replies →
I’m building something similar for Japan: https://altstack.jp. Still work in progress!
Let me know when someone spots a "Rival Castle" to GCP, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Oracle. These are Hamlets.
Hertzner?
I'm a happy customer of Hetzner, but AWS revenues are 440x theirs. Not much of a castle.
10 replies →
Wanted to submit my CMS, Val, but there's no CMS category yet?
I tried to create a category here if it is useful for others as well: https://european-alternatives.eu/admin/category-votes/3daefd...
Oh, and here's the product page: https://val.build
GitHub is here: https://github.com/valbuild/val
Trump's attitude motivated me to finally get away from Gmail. I tried several of the providers mentioned on this website and stuck with tuta.com. After almost a year, I'm very happy, would recommend.
Interesting to know before going in: - They encrypt the emails when storing them, so the only way to access emails is to use their own apps. I was hesitant at first but their web app, desktop app and android app are great
Speaking of missing categories — there's no "Compliance Tools" or "GRC" category yet. I'm building humadroid.io (SOC 2 / ISO 27001 compliance platform, based in Poland) and as far as I can tell, there aren't many European alternatives in this space. Most of the established players (Vanta, Drata, Secureframe) are US-based. Would be great to see this category added.
Interesting, do you also provide the actual audit for ISO 27001 as part of your service? That’s why I went with Oneleet, but a EU-based solution would be attractive.
No, we don't do audits — and that's intentional. I think there's a conflict of interest when the same company advises you on compliance and then certifies you. Incentives get weird.
The good news: there are plenty of EU-based ISO 27001 audit firms. We can recommend one or two if you need a pointer — we just don't have a formal catalogue or marketplace for that yet (though it's on my list).
So you'd use Humadroid for the preparation - policies, controls, evidence, risks, continuity plans, ISMS workbook - and then bring in an independent auditor for certification.
3 replies →
I summarized all comments using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/european-alternatives/
Last time this came up I decided to try Scaleway which is at the top of their "cloud computing" list.
"European alternative" that doesn't know that European addresses have non-ASCII characters: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1835649083345649780
I'm sure there are much bigger and more worthwhile criticisms to be had than this.
It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway? I think you would consider other factors first.
A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
> A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
I lost a VPS in that fire, but I was up and running a few hours later with a new VPS at a different OVH location.
Not to deflect blame away from OVH and their large screw up, but we should never rely only on the redundancy of the hosting provider. Even on AWS, I wouldn't trust them to not lose my data if one of their datacenters burns down.
At the time I was making regular backups to two different providers with servers somewhere else. When I noticed that it was serious, I ordered a new VPS and restored everything. If OVH itself went down, I could have used Scaleway, Hetzner, Contabo, etc.
A lack of Unicode support in 2026 is like someone coming with dirty clothes to a job interview: it might not affect too much how the work is done, but immediately raises doubts about the underlying level of professionalism.
1 reply →
> It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway?
You know why I have this screenshot? Because I literally tried to switch to "great European alternative" that is "as slick as DO".
After a third or a fourth screen, most of which felt completely isolated and disconnected from any previous ones, I gave up on the screen that couldn't handle a standard European address.
This was literally the point that I gave up.
So I went ahead... and signed up with Hetzner.
Edit
So I decided to try again. Literally the first page of account sign in tried to trick you into accepting tracking
Since I apparently had an account, I could login... So redirected to a subdomain with the same cookie popup. On a site that is solely for billing address collection
which then redirects you to a third domain with the a similar but different popup.
Which ends up on an empty page indistinguishable in "usability" from Hetzner (or worse)
That's the end of my experience of my "European DO that is Scaleway".
They did fix the addresss boxes, kudos to them
Hetzner/Linode were MITMing their client(jabber.ru): https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
4 replies →
Wow, nice! Great resource, thanks a lot!
Alternatives to Amazon.com? I'm totally serious when asking about this. I think delivery apps (like the one comically named "Deliveroo") are all potential alternatives to Amazon, but I think they charge a premium.
It depends where you live. There's no one company that's implented in all European countries. All countries have a shop similar to Amazon (often with fewer sponsored products and less drop shipping garbage). There are also a few specialized shops (for books, sports, electronics...). Since 2020 I only buy Amazon if they're significantly cheaper than other sellers. That's about 10% of my purchases.
In DE probably Otto.de is the closest you get (?).
In NL I remember Bol was quite good.
Yeah bol and coolblue are good in Holland
For clothes Zalando is a big one.
Beyond that it gets fragmented into companies serving only a few markets. Alza, Cool Blue, and Media Markt are some that come to my mind.
There's galaxus.com
Galaxus.eu, even.
Lol. What the heck are you using Amazon for? Stop buying shit man. Go outside.
I don't like it.
We should be divesting from unethical businesses, not from american ones.
Nationalism can be so seductive but if you engage in it you're being pulled down to "their" level.
Instead, consider your true "country" is the set of good people, no matter where they live. Keep spending your money on ethical american businesses, and european ones, and russian and chinese ones, if you can find them. Stop spending your money on unethical businesses, even if they're local.
Is this only for companies within the EU or EFTA? I can't spot a single UK company listed, even though there are plenty that would fit.
On https://european-alternatives.eu/about the listing criteria state:
> The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country or in the UK.
but
> For hosting providers: It is not allowed that a hosting provider is simply a sub-hosting provider of a company that is not based in an EU or EFTA member country.
https://european-alternatives.eu/about
It's all clarified here. If you think it's missing some great companies add them!
It is good to have a dedicated location to find these. The problem is that you want a sufficiently large company when buying the services so that it does not fall apart or get acquired and runs to the ground, and we have a few. Also, putting a country flag to the service is cringe, it might even be odd to some because it implies a specific language/culture. We just all want to consume a proper business staffed with pros and the one which does not resell AWS services.
OpenDesk isn't mentioned. That seems like one of the most complete alternatives to goole workspace
Funny, the first 3 are web analytics, cloud computing and CDN. So surveillance.
I would have expected an OS, an Office platform.
The open web is your European alternative, not the Silicon Valley-approach but then in Europe. That just invites the same abuse of data, the same enshittification and the same rent-seeking behavior.
Using a French server has been a pain. Their level of customer service is much worse than that in the US sadly
"French server", what is that? Usually we judge customer service on the company, not the nationality of the hardware, care to share exactly where you had a bad experience?
I like it. No fake smiles, no tip required. They can be a bit grumpy but French food is amazing which makes up for it.
That's what I like in the US: the servers are so friendly... and yes, I know it’s all for the tip.
2 replies →
Have you tried Hetzner
No, I was looking for a French one. I'll persist with this for a while and then switch if things don't get better. Thanks
6 replies →
OVH? I hate the dashboard, but the support seems fine to me.
Is this getting popular because of Trump's shenanigans?
so much reasonable scepticism here is being downvoted, i don’t get why
to add my 2 cents: why does anyone think the EU countries don’t or won’t pose the same risks as the US? They might just be doing it silently and illegally. Where is the guarantee that the mere fact a service is EU-based provides benefits over using US-based ones?
Most of it is entirely unreasonable and being posted by Americans with vested interests who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech - think Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this".
It's the exact same, and it doesn't take much wisdom to understand.
> being posted by Americans > Americans with vested interests
proofs, please?
> who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech
it’s just your assumption. I personally don’t know anyone from the states who would want this except their government
> Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this"
again, it’s the government who fights the dependency on China, not the regular people. You are confusing politics and normal people’s concerns
[dead]
[flagged]
Be the change you want to see in this world.
Do you have a license to ask these questions?
[flagged]
Have you considered discussing TFA instead of tropes so worn and boring even you yourself can't be bothered to write them out?
Are the worn, boring tropes false? Are they worth writing out again?
2 replies →
Ugh, back to nationalism.
I think there is some sort of Darwinistic reason for this. Maybe its inevitable.
Not to say that the US didn't help spur this, but its just sad to see.
When I was younger, I was such an idealist. Anarchy, open borders, free market open trade, pacifism.
Even as Trump started getting aggressive, I kept trying to tell myself: "Well, these other countries surly know that most of the population doesn't support this. Surely they know we are fans of liberalism, democracy, and human rights. One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."
But I saw the comments of how quickly it seemed the general population of other nations flipped like a dime.
It has shooken me. (And I don't blame that its shooken them)
It has made me the exact person I was against. Now I think we really do need to look toward the national interest. If 1 bad politician can alienate us from 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
People in the US need to become more aware of the dramatic impact this current administration has on the world. A paper in the Lancet, not exactly your average leftie rag, extrapolates the deaths resulting from the sudden USAID defunding to amount to about 14 million people. That's about 10x Pol Pot.
People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I'm sorry, my cognitive bias says 'Look! See! That proves my point at how great the US is/was.'
1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
4 replies →
Can you imagine, knowing so little of the rest of the world, you call this nationalism without irony.
Sir, please read up on Wikipedia what the EU is. What Europe is. Also, this is a very mild response to a "American first" new world order.
Depends on what level you are looking at. Did you know the US is comprised of 50 states with their own laws and security forces?
Pedantic. My state didn't vote for the US president, yet you are looking to buy from a different state now.
1 reply →
Buy local is a well known and used tactic globally in many places big and small. Another observation, saying it is nationalistic is odd given it involves multiple nationalities. US has protectionist policy EU has it, there is nothing new here. The odd thing is that it triggers the person for it being so small.
To clarify empowering the EU is literally the opposite of Nationalism or are you discussing the recent surge of 'American Exceptionalism' of the current US administration?
Brexit made to clear that for some people being in the EU is an important part of their identity so that enables EU nationalism for them.
There are racist European nationalists - the Anders Breivik type.
This website is not either. However I think its worth looking beyond Europe. Avoiding the US and China and a few other countries leaves a lot of possibilities.
> When I was younger, I was such an idealist. Anarchy, open borders, free market open trade, pacifism.
I hope you understand now that not even half of Democrats support these things, let alone most of the population, of any country in the world
> Ugh, back to nationalism.
That’s a bit of a negative way to think about things. We’ve tried globalism, I don’t think it works. It’s utopian.
Small and distributed, this is the way. Not large and centralised. Stop over complicating things. If people just looked after themselves, their family, and their neighbours (in that order) the rest would figure itself out. This is how love works, it’s personal and intimate. I wish people would just stop trying to meddle with the world and let people be.
>One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years.
You're at 2 out of 3, while Biden was mid at best and your senate has been horrendous for a very long time.
And who's to say it's not going to happen again in 2030?
>But I saw the comments of how quickly it seemed the general population of other nations flipped like a dime.
It's been ten years of Trumpism. This wasn't a flip of a dime. The opinion flipped after we were threatened with annexation. These aren't jokes.
> Even as Trump started getting aggressive, I kept trying to tell myself: "Well, these other countries surly know that most of the population doesn't support this. Surely they know we are fans of liberalism, democracy, and human rights
A huge proportion of your electorate is actually not only fine with the current direction, but actively cheer on this.
> One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."
This sounds a lot worse than you imagine. We will be always one election away of anothe asshole that will want to leveraged the US relative strength to cause harm. Better to not keep strengthening it.
> 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
I almost choked at this.
The US has a long history of fucking over other countries.
The only thing that changed is that it just decided to be more direct about it, even with former allies.
I actually prefer it this way.
> One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years.
That's what we thought the first time. And it did happen, a sane person did get elected a few years later, but then another few years later Trump got elected again. And it's pretty clear that he and his crew are rapidly turning the USA into a fascist authoritarian hellhole, and they show all signs of not being willing to step back from power. It's a real tragedy both for USA's own people, especially the ones that Trump doesn't like, but also for people in other countries.
That has real consequences. Here is, with thanks to user malauxyeux for neatly summarizing, a case that should anyone start thinking real hard of the consequences of using American services:
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738790)
we should have also claude-alternatives like projects that are entirely built by vibe-coders.
This list is very impressive, but it is the wrong approach. We simply need an EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon etc.
The closer to a drop-in replacement the better. Tying all of these functional bits and pieces together to form a consistent whole is just not going to happen. You need to approach this on a per-company level.
So, who will step up to the plate and re-implement as much of Google as necessary to catch 80% of the functionality and their EU customers?
Isn't massive tech conglomerates locking people into their ecosystems how we got here in the first place? The quest to replace US with EU products is really just treating symptoms of the problems that tech has created in the past 2-3 decades.
Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
17 replies →
A few friends and I have thought similarly, although we focused on Apple first and the Google/Office suite second. We wrote our thoughts here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/ and the alternatives here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html
I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense for consumers or small business to have to wrangle dozens of IT providers. How can we consolidate them?
Excellent question and great to see you thinking in the same direction.
Consolidation of various open source projects is underway with projects such as owncloud but it is still very fragile and hard to maintain.
I think a pledge never to be bought out and a way to restrict stock to EU UBOs would be one step in the right direction, then you'll need a massive amount of capital to pull this off. But maybe the climate is finally right to raise a proper amount of money for such an undertaking.
2 replies →
> EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon
This is basically just saying "we need to start by replacing 5 of the richest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen".
I think the EU should start a little smaller so they might actually make some progress on digital sovereignty within the next century.
You don't have to do all five at once, and a proper replacement based on the integration of a number of partial solutions should in principle be workable. What is required is the capital and the will to do it. If someone pulls this off they can count on my company as a subscriber and I think there are many more like me.