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European alternatives for digital products
- bserge 5y ago
- maxdo 5y agoUS has no regulations, no GDPR, nothing. Just fair competition. If you are EU based vendor, there is 0 issues to work with US. So yeah, regulations will definitely work :) It will just create more lazy corps that have no motivation to be competitive
- pkz 5y agoIt would be interesting to know how many of these SaaS services run on US cloud platforms. And what that means in relation to Schrems 2.
- tekkertje 5y agoGreat initiative! It's getting more important to be able to find local vendors, making it easier to comply with privacy frameworks.
- 1cvmask 5y agoThese listings seem limited from a cursory glance. And what does European mean? If a German company hosts everything on Google or AWS is it still considered European? Or if a Romanian company moves HQ to New York and still does development mainly in Romania like UI Path? Or what if you are an American company with all or most of your dev team in say Sweden or Hungary? Does that make you European? And if you are say a non-European company but meet all the European data protection and compliance requirements and the European counterparts do not?
- s_dev 5y ago> And what does European mean? In this context "European Union" and the company is registered primarily in the EU and where the vast lionshare of profits are declared. The companies mentioned do appear tastefully (or limited in your words) curated are definitely EU based and lends some credence to the overall claim and purpose of page. I'm not seeing controversial 'European' companies that are actually American like Stripe. (Sometimes people claim Stripe to be Irish) -- Adyen is definitely Dutch for example and Mullvad is Swedish. I'm not seeing anything with a Union Jack on the page and the UK would normally have some entries here. Switzerland and Norway are part of the EU institutions like Schengen and the EEA -- just not full members. So the author of the page does appear to have very good working definition of 'European' but it's not clear what exactly that is -- it's not in the terms page for instance.
- CRConrad 5y ago> Mullvad is Swedish. Indeed, it's the Swedish word for "mole". Chosen, I assume, because like a VPN, the animal digs tunnels.
- 1cvmask 5y agoTo complicate matters there are "European" companies like Booking that are totally Dutch but owned by a hands off US holding company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking_Holdings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking_Holdings
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- sschueller 5y agoI think the idea is companies that do not have a conflict of interest with the US. Although Microsoft claims their data in European data centers can not be given to the US government the US government doesn't see it that way and there are court cases being fought over this.
- speedgoose 5y agoMicrosoft can claim whatever they want, they must respect the USA law.
- mrweasel 5y agoIt's that why they don't operate the one of the Azure datacenters in Germany? It's managed by Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft doesn't have access. Edit: They may have changed that, it's a Deutsche Telekom company that managed the physical access, that seems a little pointless, if everything is available via the internet.
- speedgoose 5y agoI don't know, but it could be one of these older deals in which local companies could operate some kind of Azure datacenters. We had one like this in Norway with Evry before it stopped and got replaced by two Azure datacenters operated by Microsoft.
- unmole 5y agoThe same Deutsche Telekom whose own data centers are powered by Huawei?
- sebow 5y agoYes it probably means european as in the legal sense (where it's registered). As for the last question, that doesn't mean you're an european alternative, you just do what you mentioned: either don't violate or are compliant with the EU policies.The website is probably meant for people who want to use services from inside the EU. However, this needs to be reminded: if the EU wants to keep this dream of promoting tech development, it needs to look itself in the mirror when it comes to supporting/not supressing entrepreneurs with shitty legislation. They won't do it obviously, but the discussion needs to keep happening. Right now you still have the vast majority of old "boomers" that don't understand the way in which the whole pipeline works, the second biggest group is right out activists who frankly exaggerate when talking about technology(and it mostly has nothing to do with tech regulation/support but forcing tech into their own ideology) and the third group is probably the least popular one, with sensible people who understand you cannot regulate because that suppresses development, but at the same time recognize values and rights needs to be adapted to this medium, while being individual-focused.
- karussell 5y agoGood questions ... e.g. look where the founders of Elastic come from (Israel & Netherlands & Germany) and they initially incorporated in the Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_NV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_NV
- marbu 5y agoWeird that no service provided by seznam.cz is listed (I would expect at least their maps or email to be mentioned, while the search engine is tailored to czech language only so listing it would be less useful to most people outside of Czechia).
- spixy 5y agoyeah their maps are the best tourist maps there (and classic maps are also decent), and are also used outside of Czechia
- ColinHayhurst 5y agoThey should be mentioned and also incorrect. Those listed are not search engines but search services, mostly using Google or Bing. Self-diclosure of bias but they also missed our independent no-tracking international search engine (own crawling/indexing) https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-it-work.html https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-...
- Tajnymag 5y agoExactly. Mapy.cz is a brilliant service with a ton of its own technology. So does Seznam.cz search engine, which, I believe, has it's own crawler and rankings. Email.cz is used by the most of Czech citizens. When someone asks you for an email address, it's common to reply with the username alone and just confirm it's hosted on Seznam.
- najqh 5y ago
- colbyhub 5y agoI love the idea behind this, a "support local" spin on digital products. Myself and others would appreciate one for Canada! Perhaps I should build it.
- martin_a 5y ago> Perhaps I should build it. Do it! Be the change you wish for. :-)
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI use two of them, protonmail and mullvad and they work great and have had zero issues with them.
- caust1c 5y agoNotably absent: Social Media Services. Weird! /s
- blibble 5y agoseems a bit odd that "EU" is green (good) but Switzerland is yellow (not as good) bit of a stretch to say Switzerland isn't European (and there seem to be zero UK companies)
- outside1234 5y agoIts not in the EU in terms of being part of all of the accords. (In particular, free movement of people in the bloc as I understand it.)
- jahnu 5y agoThere is free movement between EU and Switzerland
- qnsi 5y agoif u want to travel sure, if u want to work u need a permit. So not a freedom of movement in the full EU way
- jahnu 5y agoIt's almost exactly the full EU freedom of movement. In theory Swiss have to provide priority to Swiss nationals but otherwise there are no restrictions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_for_workers_in_the_European_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_for_work...
- blibble 5y agothe page is labelled "European Alternatives" not "EU Alternatives"
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y agoBut its logo has the 12 gold stars of the EU flag over a blue cloud. And it has the EU TLD.
- outside1234 5y agoYikes - what a sad list. I think this might be a hint that perhaps people want something else.
- neither_color 5y agoNot sure if it's listed or not but one I'm pretty happy with is smallPDF based in Switzerland. https://smallpdf.com/ https://smallpdf.com/ I got pissed off when I wanted to rotate a PDF 90 degrees on my dad's computer and adobe wanted to charge for it, then I found that smallPDF could do that and a whole lot more like edits and signature collections. I ended up subscribing him but the free tier already does several things that adobe would charge you for so I encourage anyone to use this service.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago>"I wanted to rotate a PDF 90 degrees" I am continually frustrated at just how difficult of a problem simple PDF operations are on Windows PCs. Even looking for alternative PDF readers is a complex and confusing task. And, every top result wants to either charge or require an account to use it. The FOSS tools aren't great either. Why can't Microsoft make a product like Preview for Mac which allows for such things?!?
- druadh 5y agoBasic PDF manipulation has been a constant thorn ever since I started using a computer. I still don't have a single source for it, either. Definitely looking into smallPDF
- WalterBright 5y agopdftk can do many of these things. I use it frequently. https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
- rzzzt 5y agoNAPS2 is primarily a scanner app, but it can also import existing PDF files, following which you can re-arrange and manipulate pages: https://github.com/cyanfish/naps2 https://github.com/cyanfish/naps2
- 5y ago
- shakermakr 5y agoGonna get some hate of course but where’s SAP here? SaaS, private cloud in Rot, BW, Germany, and stringent data privacy as it’s a German company. Executes entirely under GDPR, ticks every of the boxes. Europe’s biggest software company, never mentioned…
- s_dev 5y agoBecause SAP isn't an "alternative" it's the dominant player of it's own field. What alternative does the US have to SAP might be another perspective worth examining?
- nopcode 5y agoSalesforce, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft
- thescriptkiddie 5y agoSAP is like Salesforce or SoftBank, in that nobody can figure out what they make or do, but the suits keep shoveling boxcars full of money at them for some reason.
- foepys 5y agoA company I worked for introduced Salesforce shortly before I left. The license costs are off the charts, it's insane. Lidl wanted to introduce SAP and after investing 500 million Euro into it, they stopped and aborted the project entirely.
- spaniard89277 5y agoSo why does Europe have such hard time popping new software ventures like the US? Is it market fragmentation? Languages? Is it capital allocation related problems? I feel that the ability to bootstrap projects in all the large EU countries is way harder than the US, or smaller euro ones (like the Netherlands or Estonia). In Spain for example, the cost of something similar of an LLC is way higher than in the US, not to mention that you have to pay almost 400€/month (at minimum) just for owning the company as Social Security fee, even if I'm also working for someone else paying my social security through my salary. It's a huge burden if you're in my situation, which is having an average salary, not a lot of savings and you don't have a family that bails you out. Also, this listing lacks a few more that I listed here: https://iagovar.com/mapas/european-web-hosting-alternatives https://iagovar.com/mapas/european-web-hosting-alternatives
- JumpCrisscross 5y agoCost of incorporating; cost of hiring and firing (this is a big one); and fragmented market in terms of policy, culture and language. Capital availability, until recently, but I don't think that's an issue anymore.
- estaseuropano 5y agoSomeone else already said acquisitions but the other half of the answer is finance. The US has the most rich and ruthless financial system in the world, with gigantic flows with comparatively little oversight. There's simply enough built up to finance eternal unicorns.
- unionpivo 5y agoBecause we don't want them. Ok I perhaps misspoke because we would want them, if they came without costs. And by cost I mean law and regulatory environment necessary for such companies. In EU generally speaking law is in favor of the people (individuals) a lot more than in USA (there are huge exceptions to this like defamations (or anything to do with banks), but I still believe its true.). There are stories about EU fining USA corporations and how that is unfair. But they fine local ones as well, so breaking things (as in breaking/ignoring law ) and moving fast ends up with law breaking you long before you are successful enough that you can shrug it off. It's not hard to start business in EU, but it's hard to get hokey stick growth. There are plenty of small to mid level companies in EU that pay well to founders and it's employers. But if you are trying to get hokey stick growth, EU is not optimal, so why even bother starting there since you can go straight to USA most of the time ? And honestly speaking if we would have to import American style laws/ regulatory environment in order to get them here, I would rather choose not to have them
- kybernetyk 5y ago>Support local businesses Sorry, but that's not a reason for me to buy something. I prefer solutions that perform good over something whose only merit is that it has been made by my neighbor. Instead of trying to guilt-trip people into buying why not come up with products that can compete in the global market? There's a few - I mean I'm a Spotify customer. But most EU tech is just garbage.
- nopcode 5y agoI'm interested in products that are not made with slave labour or under dictator regimes. I feel like the site is trying to imply this... but Europeans are actually really good at modern day slave labour.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago"I prefer solutions that perform good over something whose only merit is that it has been made by my neighbor." I prefer supporting competition in the market, because I know that as soon as monopoly gets established it starts abusing all marlet participants and acting like a little dictator. Of course it doesn't have to be local. Also Skype was really good before Microsoft bought it, i have no idea what that department is smoking
- stjohnswarts 5y agoAnd that's great! Lots of us consider more than just "this is a well oiled global machine". That's the beauty of diversity and markets that support a diversity of opinions. I love and use some of these companies because they are in the EU which I consider further up on the "freedom" and "responsible global player" scale than my home country of the USA.
- amai 5y agoDon‘t forget: Local business means local taxes. So by supporting local businesses near your place you might indirectly profit from better infrastructure, better school etc. (things which are paid by the government with these local taxes).
- ricardobayes 5y agoI just clicked on the first one I liked (grape - in telecommunications), and it was just closed down due to insolvency. It mentions it had 500,000 users, which baffled me that they couldn't find investment for such an obviously liked and used product. EU startup landscape looks a bit depressing honestly.
- lucumo 5y agoHow can we add to this list? It's missing some notables.
- cgraf 5y agoI am always open to suggestions. You can write your suggestions here, in the chat bubble on the site or on Twitter.
- toastedwedge 5y agoThere is an address (email) on the Imprint: https://european-alternatives.eu/imprint https://european-alternatives.eu/imprint
- test0account 5y ago
- nicofo 5y agoCool! nice initiative. For me is important my privacy, and using EEUU apps/services/dns/cloud/third parties things for using internet it should pass through EEUU services, threath analysis, NSA, FBI, Goverment interest, that's why this kind of initiatives are important.
- ggambetta 5y agoFYI "EEUU" only makes sense in Spanish-speaking countries (AFAIK). When writing in English, for English-speaking audiences, use "the US". Otherwise everyone will be very confused, especially in the context of an article about the EU.
- nicofo 5y agoGracias por tu correccion ;)
- cblconfederate 5y agonow i m curious why it is written like that
- pessimizer 5y agoAccording to some guy on Quora, it's a way to pluralize initialisms.
- ggambetta 5y ago"United States" translates literally to "Estados Unidos" in Spanish. Because some rule that sounds unfathomably stupid to me, in Spanish you can turn that into EEUU instead of EU, because both the "E"s and the "U"s are plural ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There's a few other examples I'm aware of, like FFAA for "Fuerzas Armadas" ("Armed Forces"), but I have the feeling this is an obsolete practice.
- cblconfederate 5y agoLooks intuitive to me
- mrich 5y agoHetzner is missing!
- jacquesm 5y agoHosting isn't even a category, it only has 'Cloud Computing' but that's not the only way to host your stuff. Leaseweb, OVH (is mentioned in the cloud section), Hetzner all deserve a mention.
- cgraf 5y agoHetzner is now listed in a new category for VPS hosters. https://european-alternatives.eu/product/hetzner https://european-alternatives.eu/product/hetzner
- sz4kerto 5y agoThis list is just sad. I was thinking about what else could I say, but it's just sad. There's no area listed with an European solution that's comfortably in the top 3 in the world in its field. Maybe it is because this list is deliberately listing areas where the alternatives are less known (someone in another thread brings up SAP as an example).
- majani 5y agoYes, Europe has some tech areas where it is number one. Gambling is one I can think of. All the major sportsbooks, casino sites, poker sites and gambling backend companies are European. Also in porn many top sites are European. Onlyfans, Xvideos, Xnxx, LiveJasmin are all European. The Pornhub network was also started in Europe then sold to a Canadian. Also all major pirate sites and apps are European
- wutwutwutwut 5y agoI just looked at VPN section and as a Mullvad user I disagree with you.
- cblconfederate 5y agoIt's even sadder that we can't have this discussion in a european forum. Are there any, really?
- kornelijus 5y agoI would consider DeepL to be comfortably the best translation service for the 24 languages they support. Their decision to support a lot of the less spoken languages in the EU (which have quite terrible support in Google Translate) has made the internet much more accessible for older people in my country who generally can't read English.
- jmfldn 5y agoWhy does the US dominate digital products? 1. Enormous internal market 2. Extremely wealthy 3. Well-developed capital markets for investment So it's an enormous, wealthy country where there is lots of investment. Obviously there are other factors but these seem blindingly obvious as starting points. I find the UK's inability to compete with the US web giants depressing. I don't like the idea of relying on a few American companies for search, cloud infra and so on. I'd love to see us build a British Google for example. I don't like the guy at all, but I agree with Dominic Cummings that we should focus our efforts on something like this. I'm not arguing for web service nationalism but, for economic and security reasons, way more nation states should be looking to encourage the building of their own web backbone companies. It would also be good for general Internet resiliency to not have so few companies and single points of failure.
- rjakobsson 5y agoGreat points, I agree but would like to add: 4. Common language
- Hakashiro 5y agoI just recently saw someone posting on LinkedIn that 500k for a Senior Engineer role was too low. Half a fucking million. All good European engineers are leaving to USA. And I would too.
- jmfldn 5y agoI guess this is a Silicon Valley megacorp right? Who could afford those wages?! Over here in the UK, if you're absolutely shit hot, principal engineer type material, I guess £150k + is common. Maybe more if you're a true elite engineer, but US wages are surreal. As others point out though, we get a lot of great public services, state pensions and so on. All a tradeoff.
- nostrebored 5y agoIn what world are you valuing good public services at like 200k a year? Regardless, even in Australia wages for tech workers are higher than most of Europe. Europeans are truly in denial about what they’re getting. Nationalism is a great blindfold.
- ilhamsgenius 5y ago
- maxdo 5y agoD̶e̶u̶t̶s̶c̶h̶l̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶ EU Über Alles ? Digital nationalism? I don't really get this fragmentation in a free world. Why should i use product that is less competitive just because companyX servers a located in a country that is theoretically more friendly? Even that is a big question. If you live in Poland or any Eastern European EU member, in this case GB, US do more to protect you from absolutely real War risk. Germany, France, Austria government is absolutely corrupted they lead to situation when Russia think it can claim rights on other sovereign countries. Half of eastern Europe felt left behind. Same with China relationship. How many people will lose their job because china is building their capital on not fairly regulated market, stolen Intellectual property. EU don't care. No real protection. They afraid tensions(polite form of saying corrupted) even when this tension means protect own citizen. At the same time ex german counselor works at Gazprom to Lobby corrupt interests. He got an official title. Russia takes this money and execute, poison people, blow up military objects in European countries. But EU built a nice website to support corrupted governments via taxes. Maybe first get some responsibility and do your job?
- paulus_magnus2 5y agoWho said the product is inferior? Have you checked any of these? More discoverability of alternative offerings is always better, for both the customer and supplier, unless the supplier is a monopolist. In my experience middle sized companies that still have to prove themselves and build good will offer (much) better servivce / product than mature corporations run by beancounters who are focused on "monetising" their userbase most effectively.
- maxdo 5y agobecause that what market shows. One market has 0 regulations and it strives. Other with all regulations and theoretically bigger population by almost 50% still struggles to be at comparable size. One pays up to $500k a mo for a dev position other pays pennies promising you some kind of pension. Classical regulated vs free market
- maartn 5y agoI don’t know who runs this but it’s definitely incomplete. Too bad the “European alternative” to webchat doesn’t even work on mobile. Maybe that’s the reason why it’s so incomplete
- cgraf 5y agoI run the site and as many things in life this site is a work in progress. I got many suggestions for new services in the last days, so there will be many more services in the future. I just added a new live chat service to the category called crisp (https://european-alternatives.eu/product/crisp https://european-alternatives.eu/product/crisp), maybe it better fits your needs.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoIf you have suggestions I'm sure you can email them, and they will welcome then. This is probably just someone's hobby page like those “Awesome _________” pages on GitHub.
- mathverse 5y ago
- cblconfederate 5y agoBut europeans are generally familiar with remote work, why would that be a problem?
- mathverse 5y agoTax residency.
- thenaturalist 5y agoUhm, generally curious is anything you mentioned sans the language barrier and the tribalism which might come with it in some places really be that different from the US? You got local taxes, why would the success of a company in SV mean anything to an engineer in NY? People move around EU all the time, London, Stockholm and Berlin are full of engineers from all over the place. Just like in the US, people move where there are jobs to be had and they care about success of companies. Are there places which are keen on keeping to themselves? Sure maybe, but they are not the majority? Really hard for me to see your point with such sweeping generalizations.
- mathverse 5y agoBecause you cant get employed in Europe as full time employee due to different tax residency and location where the company is HQd. Most FTE positions are either - employed by local branch of the company (it is not the same) - you have your own llc and work as a contractor - cross border worker with double taxation agreement Moving around in Europe is not the same like in the US. There is nothing like “european citizenship”. It means nothing. It makes more sense for me to move to Singapore or the US rather than Berlin. Also a lot of europeans that do move to these EU locations never really can feel at home. Because after all it is a different country and you will always feel like a foreigner. You work in Berlin but your heart is still in Warsaw.
- inaprovaline 5y agoEU investors, banks are too conservative, they only invest small amount of money and they are not comfortable taking risks. US on the other hand has built a much high tolerance for taking risks. They are ok with taking risks and loosing big time.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- npteljes 5y agoI'd extend the list with ONLYOFFICE. It works as a Google Docs, Sheets / Office Online alternative, with a free personal tier to test the stuff. https://personal.onlyoffice.com/ https://personal.onlyoffice.com/
- cgraf 5y agoThank you for the suggestion. I just added ONLYOFFICE to European Alternatives. https://european-alternatives.eu/product/onlyoffice https://european-alternatives.eu/product/onlyoffice
- RamblingCTO 5y agoThis list is trash. Why, for example, is Hetzner missing in the cloud computation section? Or SAP? I could understand that they didn't want to over-emphasize any country and give a fair selection, but many countries, especially Germany, has many more companies in any of these spaces.
- cgraf 5y agoThanks for the constructive criticism! Hetzner is now listed. (https://european-alternatives.eu/product/hetzner https://european-alternatives.eu/product/hetzner) Since Hetzner mainly provides virtual servers, I have created a separate category for them. I just wrote down SAP, here I still have to think of a suitable category.
- RamblingCTO 5y agoWhoops, so sorry! I thought this was an official thing. If it's a WIP, then not a problem. There is going to be a lot of stuff you can list, like email providers taking privacy into account like protonmail or posteo.
- amai 5y agoThe sad state of EU IT is also due to the fact that US companies are much, much better at marketing their solutions. Often even the european media landscape is only mentioning US services in reviews and comparison. The fact that it needs a page like this says a lot about how bad marketing of these european companies even in their home market is.
- rognjen 5y agoI can see this list get more useful as the categories get more complete. I do question the design of the logo which makes the site look like an official EU initiative, which it is not. At best it's unintentionally misleading and at worst it might not be entirely legal. https://european-union.europa.eu/legal-notice_en https://european-union.europa.eu/legal-notice_en
- acd 5y agoIf you buy from a smaller local euripean provider they will local taxes. Local taxes pays for schools, roads and nurses.