All the products and services listed on European Alternatives meet the following criteria:
The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country.
If the company has a parent or holding company, this company is also based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member state.
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.
Example: Hosting provider that just configures servers on AWS.
Because they have a website and they make the rules, it's not a law. The west Balkans and Belarus are also part of Europe but in none of the unions, associations, etc. mentioned so the domain is misleading too. It's not european, it's "those unions we like".
I've been using Time4VPS for a few years at this point, they've always been pretty decent. That said, they have been gradually rising prices and I think that something like Hetzner is more affordable at this point. Well, either that or Contabo for the cases where I just need a box that has enough RAM and don't do anything super CPU intensive. Scaleway also used to be competitive with them price-wise, but I don't think that's been the case for a while, it'd have to be more of a feature based comparison.
I think there's a bunch of smaller companies in the Baltics as well, but maybe that'd make the list quite long and many of them seem to focus on local services mostly (nano.lv for hosting comes to mind).
Either way, really cool site, I'm glad that this exists!
I can only speak positively of Hetzner. I particularly like that they have a Terraform provider.
I've only used them for personal projects, though, so I can't say anything to the suitability in a corporate environment. In particular their support. That's quite an important factor when working in a corporate setting.
I wish they already had that S3-like service they've announced for some time. It would be really handy.
They have an outstanding professional support with in depth Linux knowledge and provide help, even if it is out of scope e.g. failed distro updates on a vps
Avoid using Tuta, I am talking as a person with more than 4 years experience using their product. Its search extremely bad, UI is so simple and everything is unnecessarily big, not event possibility to add any label.
They barely improved their product within my >4 years of usage. I have already migrated most stuff to another mail provider.
> They barely improved their product within my >4 years of usage.
Same with mailbox.org, having had my (paid) account with them for over 4 yrs since I went sans-Google, it was mostly a terrible experience. I recently tried Proton and they just kept flooding the inbox with conversion reminders, which I absolutely hate. Which different provider did you go with?
I actually fell back to Gmail for the time being - I just don't like to "advertise" any Google product for known reasons, even though Gmail is a quite solid product, sorry about the confusion - but that's my temporary solution.
I am planning to either give Migadu a try or host my own mail provider. (I have seen some good feedback about https://mailcow.email)
Yep, it's still hard to beat Gmail as a product. I had been with them since beta, I think it was by invite only back then. Time flies. I'm giving iCloud a try, even though it's rather painful on non-Apple systems.
It's honestly so embarrassing that they are a 'top 5' for commercial email service made in Europe.
Proton mail is 'getting there' and I think the best we collectively have to offer but let's be honest, it's not patch on Gmail,O365, iCloud, Zoho or one of the plethora of other services that hail from the US.
Redefining Europe to mean something other than the geographical location is a very bad habit of the pro-EU contingent. The EU institutions do this all the time but they aren't the only offenders, which is how Eurovision ends up including Australia and Israel. These people seem to really hate that Europe is a geographically defined landmass (which includes Russia), and would much rather it be a social construct reflecting a specific set of cultural values.
But I guess "EU/EFTA Alternatives" is not as snappy.
Your comment about Eurovision is simply wrong. The countries participating, with the exception of Australia, are all current or prior members of a European Broadcasting Union. The event was devised as content and when Israel joined the broadcasting organization they got the opportunity to pay to participate. Australia is involved because they requested participation as the event is massively popular there.
Europe is a political concept more than it is a geography. Copenhagen and Berlin are tied together by law. Moscow and Berlin are not. Saying “Europe” in this context without reference to politics is meaningless. There is borderless trade within the EU but not with the UK. That is a fundamental difference and just one example.
I don't get it. How is my comment about Eurovision wrong when you then immediately agree with what I just said? It calls itself the European Broadcasting Union and the Eurovision song contest, but as you clearly agree, its membership rules have nothing to do with being in Europe.
Europe is quite obviously not a political concept. It's an ancient word that always has and always will mean a geographical area. You're repeating the exact behavior we are openly criticizing in this thread. Misusing language in that way is not only a cheap attempt to manipulate and socially engineer populations, but actively divisive. This thread is a perfect example. Europe hasn't managed to produce many Google competitors, but there's one in the UK and now the people who run it are hurt and upset because they were excluded from a list that claims to represent all of Europe, but in reality the list is some sort of ideological construct defined by political allegiances.
I really don't think self-proclaimed "European citizens" realize how much damage they do to the continent with this approach. It's not just the UK, I live in Switzerland and these games get noticed here too. Many problems are geographical in nature (war, famine, energy, immigration etc). Europe could use as much collaboration as it can get. Alienating some of the continent's most successful countries is the worst way to bring that about.
The only search engine with its own index in Europe (not EU) is Yandex. There is a lot of controversy around it for obvious reasons, but at least it exists
All of these are bing based and/or have US parent Cos. So how exactly are they "European"? A European company put a react UI ontop of the bing API - seriously?
Meanwhile the UK has at least one serious option (e.g https://mojeek.com) with it's own index, possibly larger than yandex and privacy friendly - but can't be included because we're not in the right protectionist club.
Well guys, I hope this works for you. I voted against Brexit, but the behaviour of folks on the continent since has been beyond childish and has been making me reconsider the whole EU concept.
> As a business that operates in Europe, it is possible to get a VAT refund for products/services of other European companies.
> European companies also tend to offer payment methods that are commonly used in Europe.
> Within the EU, many laws and framework conditions are set by the EU, which helps to cover a large market without having to consider large country-specific differences.
> It is also easier to enforce your rights against another company located in the EU.
That sounds to me like there are plenty legitimate reasons to exclude the UK from a European (Union)-based list.
They do seem to conflate Europe with the EU, which is unfortunate.
UK meets all of these points too FYI :). VAT is not paid/or refunded, we use the same payment methods and many will even accept euros if push comes to shove. GDPR is enshrined in law, we have an EU trade and co-op agreement.
I just tried Mojeek and it's is probably the worst engine I've ever used. My first query I went with something standard out of my niche, "minju kpop" and #1 result was deepfake porn. The subsequent searches in other niches didn't do much better. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Google and pagerank, dude. At least it's not deepfake porn.
The problem is not their ranking but that by default SafeSearch is off on Mojeek. This is a questionable choice. Click the cog, enable SafeSearch and repeat the query. The deepfake porn is gone.
I just tried Mojeek too, and found the results to be reasonable on a selection of programming related queries. I didn't know Mojeek existed, but the design is clean and the results are fast. Ranking isn't as precise as Google but that's OK, the right result is usually still in the top results. The summarize feature worked well and was also very fast. The news is clean, hopefully more trustworthy than Google News. I love the idea of their Substack search, but they should consider unlaunching it and trying again. Although the rendering of the results is a bit off (the date runs into the URL) the bigger issue is that there doesn't seem to be any way to rank by date, and old blog posts are often near the top. That's probably not what's wanted for a blog search.
Honestly I don't know why this site isn't better known, if it's genuinely an independent index which it seems to be. It feels like Google in the early days. I'll definitely try it out and see how viable its ranking is.
It's really sad (but absolutely 100% predictable) to hear that self-proclaimed "Europeans" refuse to mention it. To such people "Europe" is not and never has been about regional alliances or collaboration. It is and was always a social ideology of control. The UK rejected that system and is thus in their minds no longer "European", despite that it's still there and not going anywhere.
My point was that vanity queries often look for very specific things, and beyond Google and Bing you're struggling to get that. That's the current reality. Maybe ask yourself why.
It's not an intuitive query because it yields about precisely zero results with those two words in a consecutive manner, on Google. You're chucking two spaghetti words together and expecting the search engine to figure out what you mean, which is fine to an extent but OTOH, wth do you mean?
I have an European alternative, my own iron in my own home, it's European since I'm an EU citizen living in the EU...
The alternative to the modern computing is the classic iron ownership instead of living on the shoulder of giants, otherwise there is no difference between a US company and an EU one selling the same services. They are both third party whose job is making money for their shareholders.
"But.... HW cost money!", yes, because someone else computers are notoriously free... https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-gets-a-billion-dollar-wor... and of course owned hw is not a asset with an eventual resale value and a vast series of possibilities if a startup idea fail...
Oh, yes, bandwidth might be tricky but co-location until a company is large enough to pay a personal proper link it's still an option, on their own hw.
Dear devs startuppers where the recliner is the most valuable owned asset you have, it's about time to recalculate your economy.......
Good, I still have flashbacks to their awful cloud server uptime from a few years back. Every single hot summer afternoon when the temperature would hit 95 or 100 their servers would just mysteriously go offline.
This was in Berlin btw, and I think their data center was somewhere not too far away in Germany.
These all appear to be hosting-type services. Is there a similar list that's more consumer-oriented? Or are there zero alternative social network platforms?
In GitHub alternatives it shows https://gitlabhost.com/. Does anyone knows how copyright works when a different company uses GitLab name and offers competitive hosting to GitLab itself?
Trademarks, not copyright would be the issue here.
This is a clear use of the Gitlab trademark, which gives two options for being permitted to use it:
1. An agreement with Gitlab themselves. Gitlab's own published trademark guidelines do not allow its use within a business name, but this company claims to be in a partner program with Gitlab, so they may have worked on the side. (This is also how Gitlab/Github were grandfathered in for their use of the Git trademark)
2. Descriptive use. This is what allows e.g. "Bob's Kia Repairs". The laws on this vary a lot from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and usually e.g. consider how likely it is to be confused with the trademarked business. I think gitlabhost would fail that test as you can see people thinking it is an offer from Gitlab themselves. And in general because of the non-uniformity of rules, you probably want to avoid relying on them for anything not inherently limited to a single jurisdiction.
Avoid to sympathize for companies based on non-competitive parameters, they aren't your friends or do anything for you regardless of where they are, don't choose them for reasons like "Oh they pay taxes where you are so it will come back", chances are, they're not even paying taxes
Companies from everywhere selling on EU territories already have to be compliant with EU regulations, so EU CTOs maybe need to learn something about import/export
Have to be compliant != compliant, and there are multiple reasons for that.
1. An American company without any EU representation is still happy to sell the product to anyone who can pay them regardless of location. They may or even will do the bare minimum to have compliance on paper, but that is often not enough for legal team/DPOs. If you are big enough customer you may push them to complete the checklist, but in the end see 2.
2. An American company with significant business in EU will do everything to be compliant, but they cannot overcome limitations of American laws and thus will never be compliant unless there will be a solution not leading to Schrems III/IV etc. A few of them are very creative and actually find such solution (see e.g. AWS CloudHSM), but most of them don’t have resources or technical possibilities to build such things.
EU companies are the worst, I am from EU, born and raised. They say "The workforce needs to be flexible and competitive with people from all over the world" but then when they have to sell they break balls with the "We're an EU company", hell to them, I am going to pick the most competitive for me regardless of where they are
UK is kind of special. On paper, yes, there’s GDPR. In fact the most annoying people on this planet are UK recruiters using American data mining services. To the point where I have now a mental block for UK country code on business matters. Would I trust my data to an UK business? I‘m not sure.
It's exactly the same GDPR that every country in the EU has. That recruitment practice sounds like it could be a breach, I would go ahead and submit a SAR just to put the frighteners on them to be honest.
It seems incredibly petty to me to exclude UK companies from this list. We left, yeah ok. But this says European alternatives and we're in Europe as far as I'm aware.GDPR is enshrined in law and we've a EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
You're missing out on a massive plethora of services, London's tech industry is one of if not the strongest in Europe.
Trade agreements only get you so far.. The UK is also a member of five eyes, among other things, which is one of the reasons why someone might be seeking a “European alternative”.
Germany has 81 large US military bases, Italy has 26, UK has 14. Sorry but if you think your internet traffic isn't being tapped by the US regardless you're completely delusional. At least in the UK were probably not letting EU countries tap it too :')
Genuinely I'd love to understand why this is an issue. This can trivially be solved contractually, indeed any UK tech company will have it in thier standard contract since they encounter it so often.
National law trumps corporate contracts, that's essentially the core of it.
Similarly, GDPR gave teeth to pre-existing privacy laws in EU. Private contracts are nowhere near as enforceable, especially in terms of consequences - but the EU side of the contract will still be on the hook for legal consequences if UK company fails to uphold their side, or if UK changes a law that makes it incompatible with GDPR requirements (as in with US CLOUD act and the like).
Yes, but a contract is under a country's law (which may or may not inherit some or all EU 'law').
For example a Portuguese company selling a service to a German one will be under Portuguese jurisdiction.
Portugal "could" decide to unilaterally leave the EU and therefore GDPR tomorrow. But that's insanely unlikely.
UK "could" decide to remove GDPR tomorrow. But that's just as unlikely.
Tell me the difference between these two?
Realistically a B2B contract should draw in as first party terms that all the relevant protections will be provided, confirm in compliance with GDPR (which UK has in law) if the UK removes it the protections still apply.
That's more on security than just agreeing a contract with portugese supplier because 'they`re in the EU too'
> Realistically a B2B contract should draw in as first party terms that all the relevant protections will be provided, confirm in compliance with GDPR (which UK has in law) if the UK removes it the protections still apply.
The moment UK makes a legal change that overrides those protections, you're left with worthless words on paper. And the point of GDPR status as "EU Regulation" is that it's not exactly feasible for EU members to override it like that.
No, I don't agree with that, they're first party terms so the only law that would impact it is if the UK said "you MUST NOT protect users privacy or you'll go to jail" that won't happen. They would only revoke default protection, which doesn't matter as the protection is expressly contractual.
Passing, revoking or changing a UK law is not an instant thing either, trust me. So the only difference in those scenarios are that Portugal leaving the EU would take a bit longer than the UK removing a law from the statutes? So essentially there's no difference whatsoever?
So it's not acceptable for a EU company to store any customer data with a US company? They very literally all do. We are also not the US, and are I'm sure happy to arrange a sensible agreement. Regardless I still don't think this is the big issue that some europeans make it out to be, back in the real world I don't think we've lost any customers due to brexit. I think the friction in gaining new ones from the EU is purely psychological "but brexit makes that hard" or "but you're not in europe, /yes we are/ oh you know what I mean".
Also you would of thought the EU would of accepted the UKs request of bringing GDPR into scope of the trade agreement and therefore not making it a third country (which is insane as the UK has the exact same GDPR in Law with no intention of removing it, we could of codified that the UK would keep it inline with the EUs version and forgo/have to renegotiate it's trade deal if it removes it).
You can't escape "third country" status with a trade deal, though.
As in, this is base EU law. At best, you could get some agreement which would be accepted to treat UK as acceptable party for GDPR-conscious business, but you're still a third party, and navigating patchwork agreements is why some companies will want to deal with company completely in EU instead.
Who says? The EU. There are other statuses that exist like EFTA and so on that don't have this issue, there's no reason at all why this couldn't be agreed (except that the EU haven't the incentive to make this work, quite the opposite).
"Third country" is a term of EU law in this case, and refers to one country's status with regards to EU law - including how entities in EU can deal with them.
Indeed. Creating imagined barriers where nobody (eu companies/citizens, uk companies/citizens, or the uk government) actually wants or needs them. In practice IMO they are just there because they're incentivised to make things difficult for us.
Hush mail and similar providers were supposed to be the go to private email back in the day. Turns out the FBI was running the servers for who knows how long.
I’ve had similar concerns about proton, looks like I’m not the only one.
Does it matter if it’s a front for the CIA? I assume the big governments can reach me. What I don’t want to participate in is giving more data to Google.
Well, I don’t want anybody to get access to my emails.
I understand that if they would spend any effort they could easily get access (via breaking my phone or bones), but I don’t want to voluntarily send over my emails.
(Happy proton subbcriber; that would change if those allegations would appear true)
They keep people so poor that Americans need to hire European people for the high-end AI researchers, because EU still has the best education, despite having probably ten times less money. (Unless you consider being "poor" is exclusively about money and not quality of life, enlightenment and improvements to the society. In this case I'm happy to be poor but have all of those)
EU companies are willing to pay for top talent too, it's just that the amounts they can afford to pay are smaller than US companies, for a variety of reasons.
The general premise is that they favor large institutions over small businesses, e.g. by having more and more complicated rules that require more overhead to comply with. As a result people are less able to start their own business, which is one of the major checks on the need for large employers to pay higher wages (competition for labor) or charge lower prices (competition for customers).
High levels of government assistance also tend to create poverty traps, because paying net benefits to high earning people is uneconomical but avoiding this when the base level of benefits is higher requires higher benefit phase out rates, which is equivalent to a higher marginal tax rate, in addition to the higher formal tax rates to pay for the benefits. The result is less incentive for individuals to try their hand at entrepreneurship, because the higher risk is still there (you could still go several years without making any money) but the higher reward is blunted.
The reality is more that USA built up VC and the like by having lots of capital (often government capital - Silicon Valley, Boston route 128, etc being built heavily on military funding), ridiculous demand (only western industrial country that didn't have its industry heavily damaged), lots of workforce (returning soldiers, considerably low losses). Hell, Marshall Plan essentially fueled demand for american goods, because funds provided in US Dollars pretty much translated to purchasing things that could be sold for USD.
The network effects were huge and paved the way for dot com boom and later cycles, especially with zero interest rates combined with huge 401k funds looking for any return.
I’m extremely pro EU but GP has a point. The field advantages the US had doesn’t change the fact that the EU as a whole is less friendly to small businesses.
Where I will disagree however is that it’s not an EU thing, it’s a country thing. The Netherlands for example is extremely SMB friendly. Yes EU has more regulations but most of the ones that matter, US SMBs also have to deal with them so it doesn’t change the playing field.
To me, the way it simply doesn't align with reality because of differences between countries in EU, makes the whole argument even more detached from reality.
Unfortunately, small companies when facing level playing field are also easier to be destroyed by bigger ones, and EU did level the playing field quite a bit...
We're talking about overall trends, not to mention EU-level rules like GDPR.
> Unfortunately, small companies when facing level playing field are also easier to be destroyed by bigger ones
That's not what a level playing field is. Large companies destroy small ones through regulations. The rules impose fixed costs, which the large company pays once and the small company pays once, but the large company has more money. Then large companies lobby for "uniformity", i.e. national/international rather than local rules, which helps only them because local businesses with local customers don't have to be concerned with foreign laws, but further harms the smaller businesses because the "uniform" rules are naturally more complicated since they end up just being the intersection of all the local rules that anybody wanted anywhere.
> We're talking about overall trends, not to mention EU-level rules like GDPR.
GDPR actually reduced complexity of rules you had to deal with, some of them imposed since 1998 if not earlier.
It's just that companies happily operated as if the rules didn't apply. Then GDPR changed one crucial bit of the equation by making fines for breaking the law actually be impactful (see also how NIS2 introducing personal financial responsibility for company boards started putting up a fire into them regarding security).
In my experience, the uniform rules are actually simpler than what came before often. Pre-unification you often had to deal with them anyway because otherwise you had smaller market... where the big corporation could easily just deal with the rules just as well as you.
A small company is not going to have considerable win from more rules to deal with, unless it's a subcontractor to a big corp (and that's a precarious situation often) or where it's going to deal with possibly ever-smaller niche.
> GDPR actually reduced complexity of rules you had to deal with, some of them imposed since 1998 if not earlier.
But as you point out, those rules de facto weren't enforced, and there are lower compliance costs if compliance is optional. The former situation is very bad because it leaves innocent people following the de facto rules at the whims of government officials who can then use violations to punish them for unrelated behavior, so unenforced rules are unreasonable should not be allowed to remain on the books, but that doesn't mean they're the same as rules that are actually enforced.
> Pre-unification you often had to deal with them anyway because otherwise you had smaller market
But you have the smaller market anyway, if you're small.
Suppose you want to create a new credit processing network. You're tiny and just starting out, you don't have the scale of e.g. Visa, but if you can get some local merchants to accept your new card, then you might get some local customers to put it in their wallet. And there might be some states willing to make it easier for you to do something like that because they want a local financial services industry instead of all that money getting hoovered up out of their local economy and into the coffers of New York banks.
But then most of the rules for that are federal, and onerous. Some of them are even international treaties. So you can't gain a foothold by starting in a jurisdiction that makes it easy, because the uniform rules make it hard. And then Visa and Mastercard end up with a de facto duopoly.
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Conditions for a listing
All the products and services listed on European Alternatives meet the following criteria:
The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country.
If the company has a parent or holding company, this company is also based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member state.
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. Example: Hosting provider that just configures servers on AWS.
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