14 ms·
European Alternatives
- s_dev 8mo agoSame submission from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627097 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"
- hackomorespacko 8mo ago[flagged]
- po1nt 8mo agoDo you have a license to ask these questions?
- OKRainbowKid 8mo agoBe the change you want to see in this world.
- enopod_ 8mo agoWow, nice! Great resource, thanks a lot!
- oulipo2 8mo agoIf you want an EU-made (and repairable!) e-bike battery, check what we're building at https://infinite-battery.com https://infinite-battery.com :)
- agumonkey 8mo agoan European energy sector (mainstream or industrial) HN would be great btw ps: congrats on your success
- pjmlp 8mo agoCategories missing: - Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads - Programming language toolchains - Hardware vendors
- jimnotgym 8mo agoI 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
- pjmlp 8mo agoYou 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.
- jimnotgym 8mo agoFor the OS stuff wouldn't a European distribution of Linux do. Worst case if Europe could no longer get access to patches it could fork it. OK Europe might get behind, but that doesn't seem like an immediate issue, in the same way that not having AWS would be? On programming languages it is a concern how popular .net and Java are in Europe. However being stuck on the current state of Python is less of a worry. I feel like I was always 10 years behind on needing new features.
- tarkin2 8mo agoUsing a French server has been a pain. Their level of customer service is much worse than that in the US sadly
- jimnotgym 8mo agoHave you tried Hetzner
- tarkin2 8mo agoNo, 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
- retired 8mo agoIs there a European alternative for this website?
- noodlebird 8mo agotechposts.eu i reckon
- timeon 8mo agoSeems to be US-hosted.
- culi 8mo agoWhat makes you say that? It was explicitly created as an EU alternative to HN by a person from the Netherlands. They posted about it on HN a few days ago. I haven't found anything public about where its hosted
- timeon 8mo agohttps://hosting-checker.net/websites/techposts.eu https://hosting-checker.net/websites/techposts.eu or: whois "$(ping -c 1 techposts.eu | awk -F'[()]' '/PING/{print $2}')"
- FireInsight 8mo agoFly.io probably serves in on the edge, and so it always appears to be near the request origin.
- timeon 8mo agoI was probably not clear in my original comment. My point, in context of this thread, was that it is hosted in US-based company. So things like Cloud Act still apply.
- breezykoi 8mo ago
- marsven_422 8mo ago[dead]
- loehnsberg 8mo agoIsn'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?
- AndroTux 8mo agoCompetition 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.
- Archelaos 8mo agoNothing against global standards and similar. But even "global alternatives" are usually rooted somewhere locally, and that starts to matter more and more, it seems.
- NoboruWataya 8mo agoThis 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.
- nolok 8mo agoI'm really not sad about having alternative and choices, especially it also leads to reduce corporate overlordship.
- madwolf 8mo agoWhat 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?
- troupo 8mo agoLast 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 https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1835649083345649780
- s_dev 8mo agoI'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.
- troupo 8mo ago> 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
- alberto-m 8mo agoA 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.
- noo_u 8mo ago[flagged]
- Etheryte 8mo agoHave you considered discussing TFA instead of tropes so worn and boring even you yourself can't be bothered to write them out?
- noo_u 8mo agoAre the worn, boring tropes false? Are they worth writing out again?
- tomhow 8mo agoInternet tropes are explicitly outside the guidelines, because they're not really compatible with curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- noo_u 8mo agoThere are tropes on both sides of this conversation, but whatever. Quote the guidelines to your mom.
- gtirloni 8mo agoThis 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.
- s_dev 8mo agoHigh 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.
- yodsanklai 8mo agoI 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.
- u8080 8mo agoTech jobs in IT in Moscow are paid(net) relatively similar to what you could get in EU.
- nazgob 8mo agoSo not US salaries.
- u8080 8mo agoIndeed, but cost of life is different as well. People usually compare US Bay area net salaries to Western EU salaries - but there are so many different things to consider as well(rent, insurances, taxes, etc) which imo spoils any constructive comparasion.
- 8mo ago
- PlatoIsADisease 8mo agoUgh, 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?
- sublimefire 8mo agoBuy 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.
- mg794613 8mo agoCan 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.
- PlatoIsADisease 8mo agoDepends 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.
- vldszn 8mo agoI 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 https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
- s_dev 8mo agoIt'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.
- vldszn 8mo agoThanks 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 =)
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> About European Product Hunt - very good idea. Older members of HN will remember that Product Hunt probably came to life a lot because of HN and the submissions/comments from rrhoover (founder of Product Hunt). He's still active here, but before/during Product Hunt launch he was very active if I remember correctly. Maybe a grander idea is a European Hacker News, that has the potential to spawn the European Product Hunts of tomorrow :)
- tialaramex 8mo agoI don't know that an EU Hacker News makes sense, a core EU idea is Freedom of Movement. This started out as an ideal about Goods. You make a Doodad in Venice, clearly there should be as few obstacles as possible to prevent somebody in Dublin having that Doodad, so no export taxes between Venice and Dublin, shared regulatory framework so that your Venice "This Doodad won't choke a baby/ burn down a house/ spy on you/ etc." paperwork is valid in Dublin, and so on. But immediately people who make goods said well this rule needs to include Capital, it's great that I can sell Doodads from Venice in Dublin, but if I want to build a Doodad factory in Venice but my money is in Dublin that should be easy too. And Workers realised if it's just Capital and Goods then it's a race to the bottom for Labour, the Capital and Goods will go where it's cheapest but the workers can't move. So very soon Workers can move freely too, in order that Hans the Doodad Engineer can move to Venice and the courts ended up deciding that in practice everybody gets this freedom, a 5 year old can't have a job and a 105 year old probably doesn't want one, but maybe Hans needs to support his 5 year old grand-daughter and his 105 year old grandfather, so Freedom of Movement must apply to all EU citizens. So, with that idea in mind, I suspect the EU's perspective is that you should come to Europe and write software here, rather than that you should stay exactly where you are and if it's not an EU country then too bad, no EU Product Hunt for you.
- johneth 8mo agoIs 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.
- kieranmaine 8mo agoOn https://european-alternatives.eu/about 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.
- s_dev 8mo agohttps://european-alternatives.eu/about https://european-alternatives.eu/about It's all clarified here. If you think it's missing some great companies add them!
- Semaphor 8mo agoThought 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).
- gassi 8mo agoThey 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.
- sleepyhead 8mo agoTheir servers are in the US
- Semaphor 8mo agoUS servers, though.
- gassi 8mo agoAh wasn't aware of that, thanks.
- roelschroeven 8mo ago
- sublimefire 8mo agoIt 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.
- freekh 8mo agoWanted 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/3daefd69-85bb-4e76-9eb3-559c7520a8e2 https://european-alternatives.eu/admin/category-votes/3daefd... Oh, and here's the product page: https://val.build https://val.build GitHub is here: https://github.com/valbuild/val https://github.com/valbuild/val
- jacquesm 8mo agoThis 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?
- yabones 8mo agoIsn'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.
- jacquesm 8mo agoYes, 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.
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoIs there a mechanism the EU could use to inhibit acquisition by a non EU entity?
- atmosx 8mo agoIt’s not a matter of mechanism. It’s a matter of mindset. Until today the mindset wasn’t there. Maybe this will change.
- palata 8mo agoI'm not convinced. If a company owner can get rich by selling their company to the devil himself, they will rationalise it so well that the employees will think it's helping humanity.
- rambambram 8mo agoThe 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.
- ogogmad 8mo agoAlternatives 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.
- mk89 8mo agoIn DE probably Otto.de is the closest you get (?). In NL I remember Bol was quite good.
- wolvoleo 8mo agoYeah bol and coolblue are good in Holland
- realityking 8mo agoFor 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.
- dutchCourage 8mo agoIt 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.
- 202508042147 8mo agoThere's galaxus.com
- layer8 8mo agoGalaxus.eu, even.
- whackernews 8mo ago
- m00dy 8mo agowe should have also claude-alternatives like projects that are entirely built by vibe-coders.
- 202508042147 8mo agoDoing 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.
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoWhat EU based registrars would you recommend?
- wolvoleo 8mo agoFor 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.
- 202508042147 8mo agoI 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-registrar https://european-alternatives.eu/category/domain-name-regist...
- mindhunter 8mo agohttps://www.inwx.de/en https://www.inwx.de/en
- hulitu 8mo agoFunny, the first 3 are web analytics, cloud computing and CDN. So surveillance. I would have expected an OS, an Office platform.
- 202508042147 8mo agoOne 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.
- mpol 8mo agoWero is coming. Currently it is only available in a few countries.
- 202508042147 8mo ago+1 for Wero! Unsure where I can see their timeline.
- pronik 8mo agoAnd 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.
- sam_lowry_ 8mo agoNo 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.
- Cwizard 8mo agoI am unfamiliar with Wero. Can you explain why it is an engineering fiasco? Side note: Looking at their job listings I don't see any engineering positions (with the exception of a security engineer which is a grey area in a bank IMO), only managers and business roles.
- sam_lowry_ 8mo agoI see one engineering job ad https://careers.epicompany.eu/jobs/6909459-senior-full-stack-engineer-digital-identity-eudi-wallet-eidas2-remote-first https://careers.epicompany.eu/jobs/6909459-senior-full-stack... if we can call EU Digital Wallet speculation "engineering". But you just answered your own question. Wero is a money extraction business that secured European Commission support. There is no engineering nor payment system to it.
- j1elo 8mo agoDoes 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence
- mschae23 8mo agoThe 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”.
- palata 8mo ago> 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.
- mschae23 8mo agoThat depends on your interpretation of what a “derivative work” constitutes, which the EUPL delegates to copyright law. For the GPL, it includes other programs linked to the work (which is how it affects other projects using the work as a library). If this definition held true for the EUPL as well, it would behave the same way. (By the way, I don't really like describing copyleft as “viral”, because that implies the GPL (and similar licenses) are like infectious diseases.) However, the compatibility clause allows relicensing to other licenses that are explicitly weaker in their copyleft, which is what I meant with the quoted sentence. Another comment just made me aware though that apparently, copyleft extending to other programs linking with the work is just not a thing in the EU? I'll have to read more into the details of that.
- Mojah 8mo agoWe’ve been seeing a surprising amount of leads come through this site, clearly the demand for a EU alternative is high.
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoHearing from our customers they are abandoning US products. Really surprising how many times I hear it tbh.
- ulrischa 8mo agoThis is great. Since the greenland crisis I'm busy replacing all my us software and other products (e.g. no Heinz, no Apple...)
- viscousviolin 8mo agoSomething 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.
- golem14 8mo agoMore 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
- roter 8mo agoSomewhat similar for Canada: https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives
- 202508042147 8mo agoThey should add EU membership as alternative to CUSMA. I really like the idea!
- sodapopcan 8mo agoWhoa, was unaware of this! Thanks!
- nickdothutton 8mo agoLet me know when someone spots a "Rival Castle" to GCP, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Oracle. These are Hamlets.
- mejutoco 8mo agoHertzner?
- nickdothutton 8mo agoI'm a happy customer of Hetzner, but AWS revenues are 440x theirs. Not much of a castle.
- direwolf20 8mo agoWhy do you want to be a customer of a company with extreme revenue? That only means you'll pay too much money.
- missedthecue 8mo agoCustomers can benefit from scale too
- abc123abc123 8mo agoHmm, how starnge that AWS then seems to be the most expensive option around. I've saved loads of money by using Hetzner instead. I can also easily move to other providers should I want thanks to open standards and open source.
- direwolf20 8mo agoThey can't benefit from high prices
- nickdothutton 8mo agoGreater chance of survival, greater chance of being a winner in any consolidation in the industry, generally revenue translates to higher share price which means ability to acquire useful and interesting companies, likely lower cost of capital for borrowing for build-outs. Attracts greater talent with better packages. Now as teeny tiny (personal) customer of these guys... I'm not really going to care about most of this stuff. But in my $70B company market cap day-job... I do.
- mlitwiniuk 8mo agoSpeaking 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.
- evaneykelen 8mo agoInteresting, 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.
- mlitwiniuk 8mo agoNo, 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.
- evaneykelen 8mo agoThey also do not carry out the audit themselves (for the same reason) but the do all the legwork for you. Huge benefit imo.
- mlitwiniuk 8mo agoMakes sense. We're working toward making the auditor connection easier on our end too. Not there yet, but it's on the roadmap.
- 8mo ago
- DiggyJohnson 8mo agoWhat 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.
- pixelpoet 8mo agoIf 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.
- DiggyJohnson 8mo agoPlease 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.
- malauxyeux 8mo agoI answered above, but answering here as well in case it's buried. > But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software. Yes. If you're a European sanctioned by the US, it's illegal for American companies to provide you service. That means no Amazon, PayPal, Expedia, Visa, etc. See this case of a French judge from 2025: https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-sanctions-effectively-blacklisted-by-much-of-the-worlds-banking-system/ https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...
- 202508042147 8mo agoTo 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.
- dutchCourage 8mo agoTrump'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
- Xixi 8mo agoI’m building something similar for Japan: https://altstack.jp https://altstack.jp. Still work in progress!
- culi 8mo agoIn this thread I've seen - https://altstack.jp https://altstack.jp for Japan - https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives for Canada - and ofc https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/ for the EU But I just wanted to point out that https://alternativeto.net/ 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/ 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.
- looshch 8mo agoso 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?
- deaux 8mo agoMost 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.
- looshch 8mo ago> 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
- ptman 8mo agoOpenDesk isn't mentioned. That seems like one of the most complete alternatives to goole workspace
- leke 8mo agoIs this getting popular because of Trump's shenanigans?
- toonalfrink 8mo agoI 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.
- freakynit 8mo agoI summarized all comments using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/european-alternatives/ https://hn-discussions.top/european-alternatives/