Why it exists

De-Googling used to be a privacy hobby; since 2025 it's also procurement policy. Data-residency rules, GDPR enforcement, Schrems II and simple geopolitical risk have organizations of every size asking which services are actually European — and discovering that "European" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. European Alternatives is the most rigorous public answer: a categorized directory (15+ categories from web analytics to VPS hosting) with published listing criteria that check the whole corporate chain — the company, and its parent or holding company, must sit in the EU, EEA, EFTA, DCFTA or UK, and "hosting" providers that merely resell AWS don't count.

Main features

• 15+ curated categories — web analytics (30 alternatives), VPS hosting (23), email providers (20), domain registrars (17), CDNs, cloud platforms, time tracking, uptime monitoring, machine translation, navigation, file hosting and more, each with per-product detail pages.
• Strict listing criteria — company and parent company based in EU/EEA/EFTA/DCFTA/UK; sub-hosters of non-European clouds explicitly rejected; self-hostable open-source projects get their own track with an "easy to host" bar.
• "EU hosted" labels with teeth — for non-hosting categories, the label requires both servers and the operating company (including parents) in the EU: Hetzner-US ❌, Cloudflare-fronted API ❌, Azure login page ❌, Hetzner Finland ✅.
• Sustainability marks — a green leaf flags services on renewable energy, with a sustainability section on the product page.
• Community suggestion tool — additions and corrections flow from users; new products are researched before entering a category.
• EN/DE bilingual — made in Vienna, with a blog tracking the sovereignty landscape.

Who it's for

• European organizations (public sector especially) that must justify vendor data residency to procurement or compliance.
• Companies and freelancers "de-risking" from US cloud vendors without falling for pinkwashed resellers.
• Privacy-minded individuals building a European stack for email, analytics, hosting and apps.
• Founders checking competitors and gaps: the category pages double as a market map.

How it compares

• Community lists (awesome-european-alternatives & friends on GitHub) — crowd-maintained, no verification depth; European Alternatives enforces published criteria and parent-company checks.
• Privacy Guides — privacy-optics focus with global picks; this directory filters specifically by corporate geography instead.
• Disroot / Private.coffee — ethical collectives that are alternatives; this is the map of many more like them.
• Picking one per category — the library's own EU examples slot right in: Solidtime (time tracking — and a site sponsor), Pirsch / Offen (analytics), SimpleLogin / addy.io (email aliases).

Notes

• Sponsored placements exist but are labeled as such — the site's sponsorship is public (Solidtime, Proton among sponsors), which is also a good signal of who's investing in the space.
• "European" here includes UK and DCFTA countries per the criteria — read the About page before assuming the exact membership set.
• The EU-hosted label is deliberately hard to get (case-by-case for multinationals); absence of a label is information, not an error.
• No account needed to browse; signing up is only for submitting suggestions or corrections.

Useful links

• Official site: https://european-alternatives.eu/
• All categories: https://european-alternatives.eu/categories
• About & listing criteria: https://european-alternatives.eu/about
• Latest additions: https://european-alternatives.eu/latest