Euro­pean Tech Alternatives 🇪🇺

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For a European with lots of friends and like-minded web folks in the US, it is both heartbreaking and bewildering to see how the political and societal climate in the country is changing right now. All of this is not only worrisome from a political perspective, but also poses very real risks in areas such as data protection, surveillance, legal frameworks, regulatory compliance, taxes, and (random) tariffs. The more digital economies outside of the US – and we as users – are intertwined with the US economy and Silicon Valley’s infrastructure, the more we will feel the repercussions of political, legal, or corporate shifts that happen across the Atlantic.

So, looking for European or non-US alternatives to popular digital products and services isn’t anti-American; it’s simply a reasonable thing to do. Because supporting a more diverse digital ecosystem will not only create and preserve more options, but also make our global and local economies more resilient – and give us a little bit more control.

The world isn’t black and white, of course, and so it is not always possible – and also not always necessary or feasible – to find an adequate replacement for a tool or service that is used by a lot of people. But that’s also not the goal. The goal is to realise that viable alternatives exist more often than we might think and that it always makes sense to give them a try. Will they always work? No, of course not. But sometimes they will. And sometimes, they might even surprise you.

If you want to give some alternatives a try, have a look at european-alternatives.eu or euroalternative.co, two sites that list products, tools, and services in various categories, from web analytics to web browsers to Ai chatbots. And Proton published a nice list of alternatives as well.

Here are a few of my favourites:

  • Ecosia is a search engine from Germany that plants trees and dedicates 100% of profits to the planet. Yes, it is currently still running on Bing, but they are now building a European search index with the French search engine Qwant.

  • Vivaldi is a browser from Norway based on the Chromium engine with an integrated tracker and ad blocker, a note taking feature, a mail, calendar, and feed reader, device sync, a translation tool, Proton VPN built in, and many more useful features.

  • For years now, iA Writer is my markdown writing app of choice. The company is based in Switzerland and Japan and the software couldn’t be more enjoyable to work with.

  • Things, developed by Cultured Code from my hometown Stuttgart, Germany, is an ingenious task-management app for Mac and iOS – you will still need Apple products to use it though.

  • Kirby, built by my friend Bastian and his team from Germany, is just a fantastic CMS. 💙

  • PenPot is a web-based open-source design tool from Spain that is quickly evolving into a serious Figma alternative. Sketch, from the Netherlands, is still alive as well. And the design tools by Affinity are powerful alternatives to Adobe’s tools for photo editing and desktop publishing – and there seems to be more coming on October 30. 👀

  • Plausible is an open-source alternative to Google Analytics from Estonia that is cookie-free and can be self-hosted. Alternatively, you can use Fathom, built by a team from Canada. (Hello, my analytics friends!)

As you can see, there are already some very good alternatives in a lot of areas. Tools that not only can compete with US products but are actually often even better. And I could go on and on, but now I’ll leave it to you to research more tools in all the categories that best fit your needs. And if you’re already using other tools, I’d love to hear which ones — and which ones you just can’t live without. Just mention me on … Mastodon. 😉

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This is post 4 of Blogtober 2025.

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101 Webmentions

  1. Photo of hamato hamato
    @matthiasott Haven’t returned to the personal web yet, but you sure inspire me to do so. You are lighting a fire that I thought had left me, yet it didn’t. Thanks so much for bringing back the feeling of the old web. Why didn’t Matomo make the list? I haven’t checked where the contributors come from and Wikipedia doesn’t tell, but it’s open software and was quite great back in the day (and seems to ...
  2. Photo of Sara Soueidan Sara Soueidan
    Do you know any good/reliable video streaming alternatives as well? I want to move off of Vimeo but am not sure where to host/stream my videos for performance.
    3. Photo of Matthias Ott Matthias Ott
      @bell.bz recently suggested bunny.net (which they are using for the Piccalilli courses IIRC). They’re based in Slovenia 🇸🇮 but have a worldwide CDN. I looked into it and it seems really nice:
        1. Photo of Antoine Antoine
          I never tried creating an account. It works with instances so it might be trickier to make an account than Vimeo. But if you simply want a platform to then share or embbed content on your website it could be a step in the right direction.
  3. Photo of Steve Frenzel Steve Frenzel
    @matthiasott nice article! I'd like to mention #GoatCounter for tracking (although I don't know if it's from Europe): https://www.goatcounter.com/ I'm using it to get an idea which of my blog posts are most "popular" and it's providing me with a lot of data in my opinion. GoatCounter GoatCounter – open source web analytics
  4. Photo of Matthias Ott Matthias Ott
    @stvfrnzl Thank you, Steve! 🤗 That looks like a European project, it also received funding by the European Commission: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825310 I’ll add it to post later! NGI Zero - Privacy Enhancing Technologies | NGI0-PET | Project | Fact Sheet | H2020 | CORDIS | European Commission
  5. Photo of Matthias Ott Matthias Ott
    I use Ecosia as my default search engine and it gets the job done about 85 % of the time. If the results are poor, I add !g and jump over to Google. I’m fine with that atm. And they have a few “bangs” now: support.ecosia.org/article/22-s... Don’t know about Qwant tbh, haven’t used it a lot yet
    1. Photo of Matthias Ott Matthias Ott
      Thank you, Roman! 🤗 They’re both from NaN type foundry in Berlin. NaN Tresor by @christoph.koe.berlin is the sans serif typeface, and the serif is NaN Tragedy by Jean-Baptiste Morizot. 🤩🖤
  8. Photo of Stefan Frede Stefan Frede
    @matthiasott Nice article! As an alternative to the evil company, I would like to mention #MetaGer [1]. I have been using them for quite some time now and I'm a happy customer. They get the job done and allow me to customise my search results. [1]: https://metager.org/ metager MetaGer: Privacy Protected Search & Find
  9. Photo of devolute devolute
    > So, looking for European or non-US alternatives to popular digital products and services isn’t anti-American Well it isn't *just* anti-American. But surely being anti-American is a pretty reasonable justification right now? Great list btw.
  12. Photo of Frontend Dogma Frontend Dogma
    European Tech Alternatives, by @matthiasott: https://matthiasott.com/notes/european-tech-alternatives #tooling #linklists Linklists tooling European Tech Alternatives 🇪🇺 · Matthias Ott

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