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European Tech Alternatives
- redrove 8mo ago“Tech alternatives” yet a good portion of the companies I randomly clicked on are software services/outsourcing, especially on the eastern side. Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc. Hell, I’ll take a European one man company that can reach all 27 markets. Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy. Von der Failen can only add _more_ regulation. Someone wake me when they actually make something easier.
- raincole 8mo agoYeah. Not sure if it's the intention, but what this site really shows is "the lack of European tech alternatives."
- budududuroiu 8mo agoRealistically, what you're asking for won't happen unless there's a strong push for Federalisation. Unfortunately, most Eastern Bloc countries are led into the false belief that the EU is encroaching on their ways of life and "making them eat ze bugs", and the Brussels elite is more concerned with using their slim remaining political capital to push restrictions on internet freedoms rather than federalisation.
- redrove 8mo agoYes, precisely. Going federal is the only viable l, unified, way ahead.
- coredev_ 8mo agoSo there are of course a lot of large EU based IT/tech companies but I guess you already know this. As for leaders, von der Leyen might not be the best but still lightyears better than the orange pedo in the wh.
- redrove 8mo agoThere are many many degrees of harm before the extreme. They can both suck at the same time.
- cyberax 8mo agoHow about European ASML? > Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy. ?!? You can trivially sell your software inside the EU. As for software that I use almost daily: OsmAnd. LanguageTool, which is spell-checking this message, is made in Germany. IntelliJ products are made in Czechia, and I'm using them right now.
- redrove 8mo agoYou can sell products anywhere but you’re battling 27 different sets of rules and legislations. Look at how a burger shop becomes a continent wide franchise overnight and you’ll see how that’s impossible in the EU. We just lack the regulatory freedom and deep financial markets, access to credit, etc.
- jimnotgym 8mo agoA burger shop is a hard example. Software is trivial. Distribution of goods is no harder than the US and its sales tax regime, that is different in all 50 states and can be different in each county inside that state. In EU you can use the One Stop Shop.
- cyberax 8mo agoIf you're selling software that needs to _battle_ 27 different rules, then you're doing something seriously wrong.
- XorNot 8mo agoI don't know why this is held up as some insurmountable challenge: every US state has different laws, if you sell any software to solve business problems you'll be dealing with 50 different legal codes and regulations you have to support too.
- ragall 8mo agoIn the US you're battling 51 different rules and legislations, plus the countless county and city legislations if you're shipping or doing anything physical. The EU is better.
- karambahh 8mo agoFeels like you're addressing two different topics in one comment. Legally speaking, a one person company can address the whole EEA market. From a marketing/sales standpoint yeah, sure, it's probably hard to address culturally different markets like Portugal, Poland and Sweden. But it does not have much to do with regulations, especially not ones decided at the EU level. I'm all for better integration but diverse cultures are here to stay.... Sample size of one, but done business in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany: main issues were not regulation related...
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- stackghost 8mo ago>Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc. The "avoid dependence on the US" movement only really started picking up steam with Trump's accelerating dementia in his second term. The iPhone, Microsoft, and nVidia all took multiple decades to develop into the behemoths they are today. Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. It wasn't until the 3G model and the App Store that it became a true success.
- jmchuster 8mo ago> Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
- stackghost 8mo agoYes, as I wrote initially: the iPhone is a behemoth today, but its first version was underwhelming to say the least. My point, which you seem to have overlooked, is that parent poster complaining that a "european iphone" doesn't exist is not realistic, considering how it went for Apple.
- shiroiuma 8mo agoThe consumer market embraced it despite its shortcomings because it looked nice and was easy to use; the alternatives were not. Yeah, it didn't do that much, but it did more than a flip phone. The alternatives wanted you to use a stylus just to use your phone, and tried to basically recreate the MS Windows UI on a tiny screen; their UI was terrible.
- brabel 8mo agoI had a flip phone at the time and it certainly did more than the iPhone, but admittedly harder to use and not as good looking.
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- puchatek 8mo agoI believe the EU inc initiative attempts to fix the capital aspect
- redrove 8mo agoIt’s just a shortcut for broken Germany to be able to found a company without a notary and 25000EUR.
- 9dev 8mo agoThat is false. You can absolutely found a company by just getting an entry as a merchant here with neither of the things you listed. If you want to found a limited liability company though, then yes, you need some monetary backing to cover for fuckups (likely the 25k are not fully covering it anyway) and a notary to make it official.
- redrove 8mo agoNo, you CANNOT found a company like that. It’s an absolute fabrication. You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital. You can open a UK LTD in a few days with 12GBP. Similar in DK/NL/CZ… the list goes on. I’ve learned firsthand that germans will bend over backwards to justify this insanity.
- joshuaisaact 8mo agoHave you heard of a little company called Arm Holdings? It was a travesty that the UK government let it be sold, admittedly.
- shiroiuma 8mo agoUK isn't European. They made that clear when they voted for Brexit.
- SkiFire13 8mo agoThe UK is not in the EU, but it is surely european.
- domh 8mo agoThe UK is no longer in the EU; The UK is still in Europe and is very much European.
- hardlianotion 8mo agoUK is European. Membership of EU is unnecessary for that criterion to be met.
- Lio 8mo agoWe are. Do you think someone dragged the whole country to new location? Norway, Iceland and Switzerland are also not in the EU. Are they also on a different continent?
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- g-mork 8mo agoFar more usable (and older AFAIK) site: https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/
- culi 8mo agoVery different sites with very different goals. I think this post is useful if you are, say, a European that wants to find a nearby tech company to work for or are curious where the tech "scene" is at in Europe
- gib444 8mo agoAnd correctly named: 'European' instead of 'EU'! (yes, I see the .eu domain but that's minor)
- m00dy 8mo agowe need european chip makers.
- dadoum 8mo agoI think that it would require there to be a European chip demand. Today that demand is almost entirely for cars, so we only get mediocre car infotainment chips (+ a few other similar niches). There was more hope 20 years ago, when there were widely successful European mobile phone makers.
- joshuaisaact 8mo agoASML is European and is arguably the most strategically important company in the entire semiconductor supply chain.
- Manheim 8mo agoASML Holding is dominating the chip technology with their machines. It's not the lack of invention or intellectual capability that holds Europe back from the digital industry, it's the lack of willing long term European invenstors. If you want to scale your digital tech startup in Europe the most viable way is to look to the US for investors.
- nomercy400 8mo agoASML is not a chip maker, it is a chip-maker maker. Still important though. Europe should request a discount for ASML machines in a EU factory.
- TiredOfLife 8mo agoThe hardware is in europe. The IP and control is in USA
- NekkoDroid 8mo agoTo be fair, there is ESMC now which is being built out in collaboration (read major involvment) of TSMC. https://www.esmc.eu/en/index.html https://www.esmc.eu/en/index.html
- zabzonk 8mo agoIf you are going to post a link to a site like this, please also say what point the link is making.
- flobanana 8mo agoUsing a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me. Sounds like we’ve done this kind of nationalism in the past and failed. There are other reasons why Europe isn’t attractive for bringing these kinds of technologies to life, and investor money is only a small part of it. Especially in a company’s early days. Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent. Maybe Europe shouldn’t copy the nationalism, but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist. Think about how they got that far, and especially how China caught up so fast.
- breppp 8mo agoCreating mediocre alternatives sometimes pave the way for real alternatives as you create a talent pool. China is an example, countries that had become technology independent through sanctions is another
- redrove 8mo ago> Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent. You can’t foster excellence if you don’t reward it monetarily (enough). No unified capital markets, no high reward as an investor. As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast. As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee. It’s a trifecta of shit.
- jimnotgym 8mo ago> As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast. That is not true in the UK. In the first two years of service you can fire someone without a reason so long as you were not being deliberately discriminatory. Burden of proof on the employee for this After that you just have to go through a fair process. Your decision is not in question, just whether you followed a fair process. I have worked in a place that routinely fired people for being 1 minute late on three occasions. Late once, verbal warning, late twice, written warning, late three times fired. > As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee. As a sole trader in the UK you can set up instantly. You have 3 months to let the tax authority know what you did, but no real threat if you leave it a bit longer. Setting up a corporate entity takes 10 minutes online. You can have that done by your accountant and the annual accounts done for maybe £300. No need for an audit until you have cross 2 out of three of these thresholds Annual turnover of no more than £15 million Gross assets of no more than £7.5 million Average number of employees of no more than 50 Immediately you get a significant tax advantage over employees. Easy access to capital is harder, unless you went to high-end private school that is. Development capital is not that hard to get, but seed funding is harder.
- breppp 8mo agoIt took a minute to load the map points here, and I was sitting thinking this is an attempt at a clever joke
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- phaser 8mo agoEvery time I see an idea like this (or a politician talking about tech 'sovereignty') I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace. > Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence edit: formatting
- andsoitis 8mo ago> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace. Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.
- marssaxman 8mo agoYes, all of our 20-year-old selves eventually learned that. No need to rub it in!
- isodev 8mo agoCyberspace promised us we can all work together to create things, like one species coming together to solve problems. Now in 2026, we need to “space” for every little tribe…
- ares623 8mo agoit was true for about 3 years give or take
- westpfelia 8mo agoI maintain the peak of the internet was Numa Numa. After that its been a ever gaining speed decline of the internet.
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- jamesblonde 8mo agoThey need to fix the addresses. In Stockholm, all of the companies are placed in the old town. At Hopsworks, we are in Sodermalm (hipster) - we are not old school money.
- mikae1 8mo agoWas just looking at the map thinking: have the all moved to Gamla stan? :)
- ph4rsikal 8mo agoOver the last 20 years, Europe has become irrelevant. There is not a single European LLM on the same level as US or Chinese models. France's Mistral reached 400M in revenue, but I believe it could have been more relevant if the EU had not slowed everything down with overregulation.
- michelb 8mo agoWe have been overly reliant on non-European partners we could trust and rely on. That is now gone. So right now is a good opportunity for Europe to focus inward. Imagine having all the social benefits AND tech. We also need to make sure keep malignant actors like the USA & Russia at bay. One can dream.
- ph4rsikal 8mo agoYes, I agree. But it was Europe that has become complacent and lazy. "Doing good" is more important than "doing right". As a result, with energy prices high, dependence on Russia only increased, and car manufacturers (Stellantis, Mercedes -50% revenue) are dying as have shipbuilders before them.
- ragall 8mo agoRussian propaganda is strong in you, little padawan.
- sehansen 8mo agoDependence on Russia is quite sharply down. In Q1 2022 the EU imported 63 billion EUR worth of goods from Russia, in Q3 2025 only 5.7 billion. So down 90%. In terms of fossil fuels: - Russia isn't even in the top 6 oil supplies of the EU. The top 6 are USA, Norway, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iraq. They make up ~60% of EU oil imports. - In raw natural gas: Norway, Algeria, UK and Azerbaijan supply 81% of EU imports. - In liquefied natural gas: USA, Qatar and Algeria supply 68% of EU imports. Add to that Dutch and Danish North Sea oil and gas and it's evident the EU is not "dependent" on Russia.
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- DeathArrow 8mo agoI tried to find on that website the equivalents of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, TSMC, Nvidia, OpenAI, Meta, Broadcom, Oracle but didn't succeed.
- Heliosmaster 8mo agoZoom in Veldhoven and then try to see the equivalent of ASML anywhere else.
- vasco 8mo agoThis is not the flex it could be. As far as I know ASML licensed their core tech from US research. Which is why they can dictate who ASML sells to.
- menaerus 8mo agoThat's nonsense. Why is there no ASML in the US then?
- vasco 8mo agoI made two assertions and I believe both are true. You seem to be stretching what I said to some form of "and ASML has done nothing else on top", which I didn't say. Maybe I should reduce "their core tech" to EUV, but that's clearly what I meant if you look up the history of the company.
- karel-3d 8mo agoEuropean startups, when they are successful, will eventually end up being bought by Oracle or move to USA. Such is life.
- Manheim 8mo agoThe European digital scene isn't a pipeline problem; it's an institutional 'safe harbor' problem. We have world-class publicly funded research and education, and the talent, just look at the startup floor at Vivatech or WebSummit, but European Private Equity and late-stage capital remain structurally locked into 'Old Economy' models. In Europe, valuation is still largely tied to tangible assets and steady EBITDA. This creates a massive 'Patient Capital' gap. While US investors have evolved to price the long-term unit economics of digital scaling, where high initial burn is the cost of building a global moat, European private equity remains culturally risk-averse. They prefer the predictable, incremental returns of a specialized factory over the 'winner-takes-most' volatility of digital platforms. By prioritizing collateral over code, our domestic capital is effectively subsidizing the past rather than financing the future. That's our problem.
- marsten 8mo agoWell said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they strongly favor large predictable companies over startups. No economy has both: (1) a predictable investment and work environment, and (2) a vibrant technology sector. You make your choices and you live with them.
- brabel 8mo agoIs Spotify US based? They did get listed on the NY Exchange but I think they are still headquartered in Sweden. Not that one example says much but if true, at least one tech giant managed to not succumb to American capital.
- gib444 8mo agoPerhaps attitudes will shift. Trying to type with a straight face: maybe the investors/owners will have a conscience and not sell out to the US
- waihtis 8mo agoPeak EU mindset thinking all we need is a nifty little map application to find alternatives. Meanwhile, tech companies are continuing to bail into the US the moment they reach significant revenue due to crushing tax and labour costs (see e.g. Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday) Unfortunately the EU and many local governments have chosen to double down on crippling socialism (presumedly to "own Trump") so this continue at an accelerating pace.
- jimnotgym 8mo ago> labour costs Where in the EU is a software engineer paid SV FAANG rates? > Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday The article I read said they were moving their HQ domicile to Delaware in preparation for a US stock market listing. A bit like US companies do. It said firmly that roughly half of its staff were already in the US, half in Finland, and that wasn't going to change.
- menaerus 8mo ago> Where in the EU is a software engineer paid SV FAANG rates? Maybe Switzerland but regardless I agree - it is the labour cost that _attracted_ US companies to plant their labs across Europe and not vice versa.
- leccy_wizard 8mo agoThe Paris addresses are definitely not correct, some may be, but the cluster near the Seine in the centre doesn't match where offices generally exist
- wald3n 8mo agoI don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?
- notrealyme123 8mo agoIirc: mistral has American investors, black forest labs hq has been moved to silicon valley.
- oytis 8mo agoThat's another problem with the idea of tech sovereignity. Anything succesful, even if it started in Europe, will go global, including literally going to the USA
- 21asdffdsa12 8mo agoHub and spoke market model of the world. Some realities can not change. could move back to britain-canada though.
- oytis 8mo agoUsed to be much more distributed before WWII, or even before the dotcom boom. SV looks like an unstoppable vortex for everything high tech, to the point it becomes a security risk for everyone else
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoIf the political regime in the US continues, that will come to an end. You can see it happening already - London has been a big beneficiary of Trump’s agenda.
- schubidubiduba 8mo agoBasically every company has American investors. But for Mistral, ASML is the biggest, I think, and the french founders also still hold significant amounts. And Black Forest labs is still headquartered in Freiburg, Germany. They just have a lab in SF.
- Keyframe 8mo agonot all that useful. for a more useful alternative I'd prefer to see companies up from a certain size (I've noticed some small startups on the map) and if the're (not) using aws/azure/gcp/chinaCloud (whatever the names are).
- resonious 8mo agoRight, the page starts up and shows them in alphabetical order. Didn't recognize a single one.
- galkk 8mo agoI briefly went thought the list - a lot of hosted systems (probably kubernetes underneath etc). This is not unique or anything. The list is quite sus ;) did you know that cockroachdb is a German company? :) it’s in the list. And this is like 3rd company in the category that I was checking https://eutechmap.com/company/cockroachdb https://eutechmap.com/company/cockroachdb —— On more sad note. Europe still loves their old money, (hidden) class system and deeply entrenched bureaucracy way too much to allow some plebs to get rich that quickly. European way of doing things to me feels like fundamentally incompatible with high pace way of doing things in software area. Personally, I don’t believe that anything significant can come up from places other than US or China. About 10 years ago Russians were doing a lot of “own” stuff (clickhouse comes to mind first), but I suspect that isolation and brain drain will eventually capture them.
- simonask 8mo agoThe fact is that Europe is a lot of things. You have the British class system (not that hidden), you have French and German bureaucracy, but you also have the unique combination of egalitarianism and mercantilism in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and the zeal of Polish progressivism, shared by a number of their former east block neighbors. There are places in Europe where you can easily achieve a higher standard of living (on average) than the US, and there are places where you can't. I believe the reason that Europe is behind on commercial software is just economic: Solid, standardized solutions were available coming from US companies, and they were seen as low-risk for decades, so why would any company try to compete? Network effects apply to things like office suites and e-mail clients just as much as social media. Microsoft doesn't have any serious US or Chinese competitors in this space either. That's not to say there aren't problems: The pipeline from startup to big tech firm is extremely difficult in Europe, largely because capital is much more conservative, stemming from the fact that European capital tends to be concentrated in things like pension funds. For years, successful European tech startups have at some point or another hooked into the US Bay Area ecosystem (capital, talent pool, etc.), because the local environment was way too risk-averse. But I think you, like many, have succumbed to anti-European propaganda, which comes in a couple of forms: pro-corporatist, pro-Putinist, orientalist/sinophile, etc.
- RobotToaster 8mo agoThe title is wrong as they only included EU/EEA/EFTA/UK companies, at least according to their faq page. Which would exclude multiple balkan countries and some others.
- buovjaga 8mo agoThere are existing sites like https://www.goeuropean.org/ https://www.goeuropean.org/ Based on the creator of EU Tech Map having an AI-powered advertising company and the mistakes in the entries, I assume the site was populated using LLMs. For example, LibreOffice is incorrectly listed as being closed source, SaaS and paid: https://eutechmap.com/company/libreoffice https://eutechmap.com/company/libreoffice
- kkfx 8mo agoEU tech alternative is FLOSS, not copy the model someone else did earlier and better. As an EU Citizen I reject the initiatives of the Commission, which moreover, is not elected but appointed through a mechanism where the will of the people never plays a part, whose goals are the sinicization of the EU and its destruction for partisan interests against ours. To have a sovereign IT sector, we must ENFORCE FLOSS and open hardware in no uncertain terms, rather than copying Big Tech.
- mathverse 8mo agoThere are no european alternatives. These are all european companies but they dont benefit the whole union. If a germany company gets big it will eat other european markets leaving nothing in those markets and then beg Merz for more immigrants to Germany instead of hiring other europeans.
- menaerus 8mo agoStop being racist. Immigrants are given the lowest level type of jobs which nobody wants to do anymore. Others are then prospering to better jobs. That's how you keep the economy growing.
- gib444 8mo agoIt's not 2015 any more, people aren't buying that any more. Nuance is allowed in the discussion
- menaerus 8mo agoBuying exactly what? Bus and taxi drivers, people working in the supermarkets, in the low cost stores, food chains, delivery services, call agent support, then the workers in the industry plants etc etc Are you suggesting that locals are doing that type of work?
- gib444 8mo agoApologies, I have the flu and totally misread the meaning. Ignore me
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- jakobnissen 8mo agoBut I can move freely to Germany and get employed there as an EU citizen. Or, my competitors in the job market do, leaving more jobs for men And taxes pain in Germany also goes to the common EU budget. So the success of a German company also benefits me in another EU country. Isn’t the relationship exactly the same as a company in my country, but another town? I could also gripe that jobs in that other town will not pay my municipality’s taxes.
- dantegrassi 8mo agoHi all! I’m the person behind EU Tech Map. First of all, thank you Puppion for posting here! Was happy to see EU Tech Map being talked about on one the most interesting corners of the web. A few things upfront: 1) What the site is (and isn’t) The goal is to make it easier to discover European tech companies (EU/EEA/EFTA/UK for now) and, where relevant, find alternatives to commonly used tools. It’s not attempting to claim “we have a European Google/Amazon/Nvidia” today. It’s a directory that helps people answer: “If I want a European vendor in category X, who exists and where are they based?” 2) Accuracy concerns are fair A couple of you pointed out incorrect entries (LibreOffice classification, CockroachDB origin, etc.). Those are real issues and I’m fixing them. The site is only as useful as the trust people can place in the data. What I’m doing in the near-term: - Adding source/provenance per field (HQ, license model, pricing model, category, etc.) so it’s obvious what’s confirmed vs inferred. - Tightening the validation rules (e.g. OSS status should never be wrong for well-known projects). - Making it easier to submit corrections and see what changed. - If you spot bad entries, the most helpful thing you can do is drop the company page + what’s wrong + a source (official docs/site/Wikipedia is fine). I’ll prioritize the ones mentioned here first. 3) The map clustering / addresses Yep — geocoding is currently too naive in some cases (a few cities end up pinned centrally). That’s being addressed by improving address parsing and allowing companies to set a more accurate location when they claim their page. 4) Performance The slow load and delayed map pins are on me. I’m already working on: - better caching - loading pins progressively - reducing initial payload - a simpler “list-first” mode for people who don’t care about the map 5) “Why not use existing sites?” There are great lists out there. Some focus on product alternatives, some on buy-European movements, some on OSS. This one is trying to combine “ecosystem discovery” (who exists, where, what they do) with “alternatives” browsing. If it ends up redundant, it’ll deserve to lose. 6) Sovereignty / nationalism I’m not trying to sell nationalism or “Europe first because vibes.” People have different reasons for caring: procurement rules, data residency, risk management, legal exposure, preference for local support, or simply curiosity about the EU tech scene. The directory is just an information layer. Use it if it helps, ignore it if it doesn’t. Finally, appreciate both the feedback and to some degree criticism — if this becomes genuinely useful, it’ll be because people here kept the quality bar high. I built this as a hobby project myself and launched it "for fun" just 3 days ago, and it has really exploded online, more than I would ever anticipate. So, please bear with me as I'm working day and night to improve the site. Super grateful for everyone input! / Dante
- XCSme 7mo agoThanks, just added UXWizz there. First one in its city in Romania :D