European Alternatives

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.

Open-source security framework (1). Applied 16 August 2025. Company registered in Switzerland (EFTA). No reply.

However, European Alternatives is a personal (sole proprietorship) website and has nothing to do with Europe, despite the name and style, which are slightly misleading as they mimic official EU website aesthetics.

1. GitHub: https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno

Unfortunately they did really well at SEO at one time, and more active alternatives appear far below in the search results.

Maybe this was enough to not include it?

Just moved all my hosting and dbs from a US company to Hertzner after 15 years of good service. Moving domains now.

https://www.taler.net

The digital Euro has not been implemented yet. Some analysts are skeptical but this is the EUs answer for Visa/Mastercard.

Wero is coming and it should work across Europe

Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...

Open source is the global alternative you're looking for. There's even interesting hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/

The US also has had an unfair advantage in tech/defense and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With this newfound isolationism, tariffs etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere.

While I agree with your sentiment, European and nationalistic are two contradicting positions, unlike the other three mentioned superpowers.

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.

But that's not what's happening. It's a clear and obvious security risk to their sovereignty. If the government can't guarantee that to its citizens then what even is its purpose? The Trump admin has already tried to use American tech dominance as leverage.

Ask yourself this question, what if there was a foreign tech competitor that managed to scale up to be basically a better cheaper AWS. Would the US government ever allow it to encroach its market to the point that AWS or Azure did in Europe? Look at what happened to tiktok if you want to see what approach they'd likely take.

So how exactly would you envision an objective and neutral provider in a world of geopolitical competition?

As long as they're actual alternatives of course, rather than just another monopoly but at a smaller scale.

It's not even that. We euros were more than willing to look the other way (see the umpteen attempts to reconcile our privacy-friendly legislation with the free-for-all of American services, ongoing for decades) in the name of convenience and fundamentally shared values. The turning point was really in 2024/2025, when those shared values were summarily swept away on the other side of the Atlantic.

Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.

We should not; we must. But at the same time we need to recognise that we are powerless to affect the American government, which can go rogue at any moment. So from a pure risk analysis, we also need to have local alternatives. I regret this state of affairs, but it is an unavoidable consequence of the US threatening its nominal allies.

What we should work towards, though, is interoperability and open source solutions.

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”.

Hardware you can buy from China. Distant, predictable authoritarianism that doesn't make annoying social media posts is sadly preferable to .. whatever is going on over there.

Hardware vendors is a different issue

Some projects, especially high profile ones, do have US companies behind them (e.g. Google, etc) so you could claim they are US-centric, but at this point it becomes a question of why you are looking for an EU alternative. If it is to help EU businesses (like others mentioned), then unless you financially support these US companies (either directly or indirectly via, e.g., your data) it doesn't matter if the FLOSS project you are using is made by them or not.

I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.

Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.

Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.

There are some things that are difficult to avoid, like CPUs and GPUs, but software is much more doable.

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Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.

All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.

"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.

He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.

https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...

I can appreciate some don't care about their data especially in this world of people pouring their lives in to social media but some people do care.

That’s really not a good comparison. Many of the listed services and companies have been well established for a long time, in some cases for decades, and aren’t small businesses.

Americans compare their salaries to European ones but never stop to imagine the insane high “taxes” they pay for stuff that we get cheaply or for free.

I'm not even saying the one is better than the other. There's a lot to be said for the American system of only paying for what you need. It's just.. you can't just compare dollars/euros like that. There's reddit posts of people who earn $900k/y and openly wonder whether that's enough to live in NYC and that shit is equally unfathomable to the average European as the idea of a dev earning €70k/y is to the average American.

I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.

Biggest problem has been talent going to US.

This problem is rapidly being solved by the US government.

The startup I work for was planning to raise next round in the US. This will not happen as the CEO refuses to travel to the US.

It’s the best time to build in the EU or UK there has ever been. I don’t expect America to pull out of this nose dive. The future of western software is in europe now, and globally I expect China to be the lead beginning with AI.

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.

Please explain your working. These last 40 years or more there has been a cliff of money, but Europeans continue to live and work in europe.

You have to have an incredibly narrow definition of "only good people work for more money and only poor/ineffective people work for less" to say people who don't chase the millions in a US company are somehow failures.

Also working for companies located in Ireland[0] or Switzerland you can have your US salary, it's just that the pool of jobs is limited.

[0] Provided it's a company in the first of Ireland's two economies.

Having enough is what I care about and things are a lot cheaper here too. Not to mention free healthcare, social security. I don't need a car and a public transport pass is 25€ a month. That alone saves me so much money. The time till the next metro train counts down in seconds here.

When I had a car in the past it would cost me hundreds per month and it was such a headache.

I'd never move to the US even if I could make 3x as much. In fact I got an offer from a FAANG once (with the whole H1B managed by some agency I think) but I declined. I only applied because they advertised it as a local job but then when the offer came it was in California. Nope.

As much as you may detest all the other great powers jostling for position with seemingly cursory attention paid to moral considerations, making your core identity the cultured "nice guy" is likely a trap. I'd love to see the resurgence of a strong Europe. I think this will require some introspection and more action than simply boycotting Google and Amazon.

After that I bet some people would actually pay to develop software to defang the American threat.

I had offers from companies across the pond, and likely could make about 2x-3x what I make here.

What for? I live a comfortable life here.

- I could not get out of my San Francisco Hotel to get to a deli across the road without having to step over at least 5 homeless people.

- I could not fail to notice that even those people who did have jobs and not lost their homes to tech bros had a surprisingly low number of healthy teeth for a modern western first-world society

- An apartment with noisy air conditioning, dirty carpets and questionable building codes would cost more in rent than a villa at the Côte d’Azur.

- The air quality during fire season was a nightmare. During my time there I developed asthma.

- Everybody hated the arrogant ignorant tech people that invaded their communities, forced them out of their houses to then have to commute into the city or valley to serve tech bros. Yes, as a European I am not that well trained to constantly ignore that my privilege are causing the community around me to suffer. That I do not "earn" this gigantic salary, I am just grabbing the resources pretending the "normal" people don't deserve to have any of that.

You are getting paid so much because you in exchange are living in a sh*thole country without education, healthcare, public transport, clean air, or anything else that I as a "wealthy" developer person would expect to receive in exchange for my work.

Take your US salary, and invest it into a travel into some of the more up-to-date regions of the world. Those with clean air, education, healthcare. Places I have visited that are better than the Valley in this regard include:

- Pretty much all of Europe. Maybe with the exception of Greece and Spain, when they are now burning thanks to the "drill drill drill" people. - China - Iran - New Zealand - Australia - Canada ...

Yes, the amount of zeros on your US salary might look soooooooooooooooo impressive. But they are zeros. They don't buy you a livable live in a modern civilization.

Right now you are just bribed with money not to see the civil war getting ignited in minnesota.

Oh oh oh, now I remember! I have even been to two countries with civil wars a while ago, who had clean air, education and healthcare. And I think even directly after the civil war, all of Kosovo had a lower percentage of homeless people than the US has today.

Yes, another one of my drastic postings. But you will survive. Be brave: With someone who clearly is being paid a lot for being clever, I can assume that you think this through again, to calculate what the better deal is. You know the average amount of student debt people who want to become programmers have? Zero.

You are not getting more VALUE out of working in the US in high-tech compared to other places. There are places on this world, where being a good programmer buys you a wonderful life with nobody around you being poor, or without healthcare, or homeless. Try Estonia. They have a lovely tech community, a fully digital government. You can become a digital citizen, open your own company in minutes. And you will have a far better life.

ps: congrats on your success

> The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country or in the UK.

but

> For hosting providers: It is not allowed that a hosting provider is simply a sub-hosting provider of a company that is not based in an EU or EFTA member country.

It's all clarified here. If you think it's missing some great companies add them!

It's the exact same, and it doesn't take much wisdom to understand.

In NL I remember Bol was quite good.

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.

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.

People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

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.

That’s a bit of a negative way to think about things. We’ve tried globalism, I don’t think it works. It’s utopian.

Small and distributed, this is the way. Not large and centralised. Stop over complicating things. If people just looked after themselves, their family, and their neighbours (in that order) the rest would figure itself out. This is how love works, it’s personal and intimate. I wish people would just stop trying to meddle with the world and let people be.

You're at 2 out of 3, while Biden was mid at best and your senate has been horrendous for a very long time.

It's been ten years of Trumpism. This wasn't a flip of a dime. The opinion flipped after we were threatened with annexation. These aren't jokes.

I hope you understand now that not even half of Democrats support these things, let alone most of the population, of any country in the world

A huge proportion of your electorate is actually not only fine with the current direction, but actively cheer on this.

> One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."

This sounds a lot worse than you imagine. We will be always one election away of anothe asshole that will want to leveraged the US relative strength to cause harm. Better to not keep strengthening it.

> 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?

I almost choked at this.

The US has a long history of fucking over other countries.

The only thing that changed is that it just decided to be more direct about it, even with former allies.

I actually prefer it this way.

I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense for consumers or small business to have to wrangle dozens of IT providers. How can we consolidate them?

This is basically just saying "we need to start by replacing 5 of the richest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen".

I think the EU should start a little smaller so they might actually make some progress on digital sovereignty within the next century.