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 =)
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.
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 =)
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 :)
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.
Millions and millions of people need to make and send invoices. Many more than people who need domain name registrars, uptime monitoring services, content delivery networks, or microblogging services.
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.
Btw tirreno looks very cool, just starred on GitHub :)
Unfortunately they did really well at SEO at one time, and more active alternatives appear far below in the search results.
I've also found other problematic ones:
https://euro-stack.com/ (I couldn't understand how to submit a new entry)
https://www.goeuropean.org/ (all submissions fail with an AirTable error [sic] that the workspace is at the record limit)
I plan to add a paid “pro” version with more features, but the current functionality will remain free.
Maybe this was enough to not include it?
=)
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.
Unfortunately there's not that many and often the process is broken.
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"
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence
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”.
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.
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.
I mean sure, your example shows that the virtue of being "European" represents a certain demographic and a sovereign territory. Again, it's a continent, so what?
As long as they're actual alternatives of course, rather than just another monopoly but at a smaller scale.
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?
What we should work towards, though, is interoperability and open source solutions.
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.
This is, in fact, what "overlord" means!
You're confusing Europe and the EU
You're forgetting about Ireland and Malta
You're thinking that because the UK left the EU it will change the main language countries use to speak to each others
Yes, and that's precisely the irony. Europeans still need to subject themselves to Anglo "cultural imperialism" or absolutely nothing works, starting with communication across national borders.
Do you have a single clue about Europe? That's not true at all.
In both countries English is only one of the official languages.
:P
Your average educated European speaks at least three, one of which is English because it is a good language to have because it is the language of international commerce. This has been the case since many decades and has nothing to do with using the language internally.
But: many people do use it internally. French tourists abroad are more likely to use English than French. European colleagues usually standardize on English, both for their communications as well as for their documentation needs.
Scientific literature is predominantly in English (at least, for now).
So there are many reasons to use English which have nothing to do with allegiance or dependence.
ok ok I get the point but let's not exaggerate
But I think two languages is probably not exagerating. And not only in Europe. People have their native language and usually an international one (in Europe that would be English).
And then there are similar languages. Say a Spanish person will speak Spanish and English, and possibly French/Italian/Portuguese, so that quickly goes up to 3. Also in many countries there are already multiple languages (a portion of Spain speaks Catalan and Spanish as native languages, then probably English as international language, and they are probably not bad in French/Italian because of the similarity).
Same in the northern country that are all germanic languages: Swedish is pretty similar to Norwegian for instance, both are not too far to German, and everybody there speaks English fluently.
And then if you go in the Eastern Europe... like in Slovenia people seem to all speak 5 languages, it's insane :-).
The two Americans, not knowing a fraction of German, stared blankly at the driver. “Sorry, but we have no idea what you are saying.”
The driver tried again in French and again was met with blank stares and shakes of the head from the two tourists.
Getting frustrated, he tried again in Italian, in Spanish, each time receiving nothing but sheepish smiles from the two of them. Finally, he cursed under his breath and drove away angrily.
The first American asked his partner:” Maybe we should learn a second language.” His partner shrugged and replied:” Why? That dude knew four languages and it didn’t help him.”
Being able to string together a couple of sentences is not "being fluent." By that standard, all of America would be fluent in Spanish.
You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
Totally. All Northern countries to be fair. And then in my experience at least some Eastern countries (like Slovenia).
Really it seems like the South of Europe is a bit weaker in English, my guess being that their native languages are latin and not germanic (so it's further away from English).
- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
- Programming language toolchains
- Hardware vendors
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.
Java is FOSS by the way, however it is also a good example, its runtime capabilities isn't the product of long nights and weekends.
What was the problem between Android and Java then? Wasn't there some dispute between Google and Oracle on that? Genuinely interested.
We can worry about feature growth later, if at all. It may be age finally changing my preferences, but so much of what I've seen sold as "new" in tech in recent years has been either worse than what I already had or a reinvention of something that already existed. Like, contactless payments were already a thing before they were available in phones, and social media didn't start with FB and twitter, and Apple's API updates in the last few years feel like as much of a downgrade to me as their icons seem to be to UI blogs.
Hardware vendors is a different issue
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.
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.
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.
The way things are going it becomes a national security issue where those PR are coming from.
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.
I tried to create a category here if it is useful for others as well: https://european-alternatives.eu/admin/category-votes/3daefd...
Oh, and here's the product page: https://val.build
GitHub is here: https://github.com/valbuild/val
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.
For healthcare if you get an IT salary you can either move to private insurance, or buy additional insurance, or just pay a consultation yourself for a fee that US people won’t believe.
the system is breaking down in front of our very eyes.
i am not living in Germany. i moved to fthe NL, but the situation is very similiar.
As long as housing is extremely expensive in Europe, nothing else matters except for higher salaries.
I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.
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.
I think culture and quality of life not withstanding, the raw numbers simply don't favor the EU becoming a tech leader with the current incentives.
So how long will the culture last?
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.
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.
See, Google Zurich vs Seattle
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
Hm, after carefully reviewing the entries seem more or less the same, Zurich slightly lower.
After that I bet some people would actually pay to develop software to defang the American threat.
- 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.
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?
Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway
It's a double edged sword: it may help in some cases but it hurts the investment scene overall because an exit to the USA is what most EU investors dream about because their returns overall are pretty crappy. Fragmented markets are a lot harder for investors than uniform ones.
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?
Consolidation of various open source projects is underway with projects such as owncloud but it is still very fragile and hard to maintain.
I think a pledge never to be bought out and a way to restrict stock to EU UBOs would be one step in the right direction, then you'll need a massive amount of capital to pull this off. But maybe the climate is finally right to raise a proper amount of money for such an undertaking.
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.
> 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!
ps: congrats on your success
I would have expected an OS, an Office platform.
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.
"European alternative" that doesn't know that European addresses have non-ASCII characters: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1835649083345649780
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.
I lost a VPS in that fire, but I was up and running a few hours later with a new VPS at a different OVH location.
Not to deflect blame away from OVH and their large screw up, but we should never rely only on the redundancy of the hosting provider. Even on AWS, I wouldn't trust them to not lose my data if one of their datacenters burns down.
At the time I was making regular backups to two different providers with servers somewhere else. When I noticed that it was serious, I ordered a new VPS and restored everything. If OVH itself went down, I could have used Scaleway, Hetzner, Contabo, etc.
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
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?
People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
It's also important to understand that those on the receiving end of the threats are not taking them lightly. No one's laughing. With that in mind, it's easy to understand the change in behaviour.
In the context of this thread, I've been looking at the services I use, and which ones might become unavailable if, let's say, the US takes Greenland. It has nothing to do with nationalism, I just don't want to be caught with my pants down.
If you think the US' "altruism" should buy us goodwill, then you're not for altruism, you're for good PR.
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.
Pedantic. My state didn't vote for the US president, yet you are looking to buy from a different state now.
There are racist European nationalists - the Anders Breivik type.
This website is not either. However I think its worth looking beyond Europe. Avoiding the US and China and a few other countries leaves a lot of possibilities.
You're at 2 out of 3, while Biden was mid at best and your senate has been horrendous for a very long time.
Eg go into a big store brand in most of the US and the cashier will be all flashy smile asking how is your day, and you ignore it and ask your request, and that's the game. A french person would mostly hate that, feel the question as annoying.
You go to a similar french store and the cashier and yourself will say the bonjour / merci / ... yada yada game and if someone doesn't do his part he's considered rude; I found a lot of foreigner surprised by that, the fact that you're not answering "merci" or asking "s'il vous plait" because it's nice, but because not doing it puts you in unpleasant person territory.
Ok business meeting, even in tech. American are always super optimist and happy, and seeing a solution and the end goal, French are over realist bordering on pessimist.
It's not that black and white of course there is a lot of inter mingling and differences, but overall which one you feel "better" is very personnal and based around what you're used to.