About

European Alternatives is a project by Constantin Graf, which collects and analyzes European alternatives to digital services and products, such as cloud services and SaaS products. We regularly receive advice and suggestions from European Alternatives users, so feel free to reach out!

Conditions for a listing

All the products and services listed on European Alternatives meet the following criteria:

• The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country.
• If the company has a parent or holding company, this company is also based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member state.
• For hosting providers: It is not allowed that a hosting provider is simply a sub-hosting provider of a company that is not based in an EU or EFTA member country.
  Example: Hosting provider that just configures servers on AWS.
  
  List of hosting categories:
  • virtual private server (VPS) hosters
  • Function as a service (FaaS) providers
  • managed Kubernetes services
  • platform as a service (PaaS) providers
  • object storage providers
  • WordPress hosting providers
  • cloud computing platforms

European Alternatives also lists open source projects that can be self-hosted. The criteria just mentioned are not relevant for these projects. However, it should be relatively easy to host the product itself.

If you notice that one of the products fails to meet one of the previously mentioned criteria, please contact us.

Special labels

EU/EEA/EFTA hosted

Services on European Alternatives get the EU hosted label if the core services are:

• hosted on servers in the EU
• servers are operated by EU based companies (incl. parent companies)

The label only applies to non-hosting categories, such as "web analytics" or "email providers".

Examples

• ❌ Core service are hosted on Hetzner, but on their servers in the US
• ❌ API of the service uses Cloudflare for DDoS protection
• ❌ Login page is hosted on Azure (US-American company), but on servers in the EU
• ✅ Core service ist hosted on Hetzner in their data center in Finland

Some, especially internationally active companies, have their own infrastructure for EU customers that meet the criteria. Since this is a bit more complicated, it has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. However, central services that are used by all customers must meet the criteria in any case.

The labels EEA hosted and EFTA hosted work accordingly to the EU hosted label.

Sustainability

All products listed on European Alternatives that use renewable energy to provide their services are marked with a green leaf symbol.

All products with the green leaf also have a sustainability section on their detail page that describes in more specifically what the service does and, if possible, links to its sustainability page.

Suggesting a product/service

Before adding each category, we do research and look for European solutions. As this research takes time and even with the most accurate search, not all great alternatives can be found, European Alternatives relies on suggestions from the community and is always grateful for them.

Suggestions for new alternatives can be submitted via the chat in the bottom right corner or via social media (currently Mastodon, Twitter and LinkedIn). At the moment, we are mostly a one-person team, making it very challenging to respond to your messages "live". It is therefore very helpful if you provide an email address so that we can get back to you, even if you are no longer on the site. Of course, all suggestions will be read and considered even if you don't provide a reply email address.

If possible, the following information would be helpful for a listing:

• Name or website URL of the product
• Category in which the product should be listed (if one exists)
• Link to the logo (optimally in SVG format and close to square)
• Link to information about the company headquarters

It may take time for us to reply and list a product. So please be patient; we will surely get back to you.

Financing

In order for European Alternatives to continue growing, we are looking for more financing possibilities. If you think you can help, please reach out. Partnerships and sponsors are always welcome.

Sponsoring

European Alternatives is currently sponsored by the following companies:

Affiliate marketing

For some services that offer affiliate marketing, the link to the service's website is already an affiliate link. These links are marked as such. We try to make sure that services with affiliate links are not given preferential treatment.