I submitted my project EasyInvoicePDF (a free & open-source invoice generator) a couple of months ago to European Alternatives but never heard back unfortunately.
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 =)
It's a cool project but it is 'niche'.
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.
Thanks for the comment. I hadn’t thought about this before, but it makes sense - I agree.
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 =)
Same here.
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.
tirreno looks very cool, just starred on GitHub :)
Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? I mean I get it, Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach, Russia and China reverted back into dictatorship, but Europe is also at the edge. Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free? And instead propagate global alternatives that are not subjected by some power-hungry state-/capital-sponsored overlord?
No,not sad, centralisation is always problematic even if well meaning. The presence of diverse alternatives is a feature, not a bug.
As long as they're actual alternatives of course, rather than just another monopoly but at a smaller scale.
What are global alternatives? Every company is connected to some country, there are no global alternatives. I live in EU and want to use EU services mainly because I want this part of the world to prosper. I want to leave my money and incentivise innovation in this part of the world because this is where I live and I want a better life here for me and my kids. And alternatives are always good, especially that they’re not closed. People in the US can use services from EU companies as well :) why not?
Theoretically possible in a distributed way, though usually inefficient. IPFS is a good example.
This might be possible for software, if we assume that being open source can protect software from state or corporate control (doubtful to be honest). For other things I don't really see how it would work. Your hardware has to be manufactured somewhere, your infrastructure has to be located somewhere.
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.
Competition is always good. It's sad that there's been so little alternatives in the past. I'm glad that this is now slowly changing.
What we should work towards, though, is interoperability and open source solutions.
> Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach
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.
Nothing against global standards and similar. But even "global alternatives" are usually rooted somewhere locally, and that starts to matter more and more, it seems.
I think the opposite as you. These global companies often act as a nation with laws unto themselves. Most of them don't actually have real support that can do anything unless you make a lucky Twitter post or something. Having a local company that is realistically beholden to local laws and local politicians that you can actually potentially go and talk to if needed is a major feature.
I'm really not sad about having alternative and choices, especially it also leads to reduce corporate overlordship.
Same submission from a few years ago:
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"
Categories missing:
- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
- Programming language toolchains
- Hardware vendors
I don't see the issue with Operating systems or programming languages. There are FOSS alternatives and since they are run locally have no connection outside of the EU.
Hardware vendors is a different issue
You are missing the big picture who develops them, pays the salaries of people in the trenches, implement LSPs, and whatever else around the ecosystems.
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.
Open source generally meets the needs of the first two. There's barely any proprietary toolchains left in common use; maybe Oracle Java is one of the last?
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.
Only if there are European resources to keep the lights on.
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.
Keeping the lights on is sufficient for the immediate concerns.
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.
They accept suggestions - https://european-alternatives.eu/register
Thanks
This is nice but if Europe doesn't fix their tech salaries situation (half US' in most cases, if not lower), I don't think it's sustainable.
You simply don’t need such inflated salaries if schools are free, roads are not broken, trains exist, healthcare is affordable, grocery stores are in biking distance, parks are good and free and plenty, labor laws are in your favour, utilities markets mostly aren’t dysfunctional and a 2-bedroom apartment doesn't cost $10000/m.
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.
But why? What's unsustainable about an email service, for example, run by competent European engineers at European salaries?
It's not just about salaries, but also the lack of a culture for seeding and financing. The fear of failed investments really dominates. Government and EU-backed financing is a joke, and I'm not even talking about the terms or amounts, but who actually gets them. It's pure waste of taxpayer money and should be abandoned.
I might get lower salary, but if I break my leg I pay nothing and I am paid during my leave.
I suspect China or Russia don't have higher salaries, they still manage to build their own alternatives. And Airbus builds better planes than Boeing with European salaries.
I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.
Tech jobs in IT in Moscow are paid(net) relatively similar to what you could get in EU.
So not US salaries.
Indeed, but cost of life is different as well. People usually compare US Bay area net salaries to Western EU salaries - but there are so many different things to consider as well(rent, insurances, taxes, etc) which imo spoils any constructive comparasion.
I wouldn't want US salaries with US costs of living.
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.
Not sure about Ireland, but Switzerland used to be true, but now it is also far behind since 5+ years.
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.
High US salaries come from US VCs having to bid against other to capture talent. US VCs have more capital than EU VCs. This is why.
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.
Is there a European alternative for this website?
journalduhacker.net (in french)
techposts.eu i reckon
The irony is that European alternatives are still in English, when no European country (since the departure of the U.K. from Europe) actually uses that language.
The amount of things wrong is impressive
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
> You're forgetting about Ireland and Malta
In both countries English is only one of the official languages.
And how does that change anything to what is being said ? English is only one of the official languages of the UN or NATO or the WHO or ...
Mae hyn yn wir o fewn y DU hefyd.
:P
The UK did not leave Europe. Just the EU. But also English fluency is widespread, so it’s not a bad starting point.
Ireland and Malta.
You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
It has been around 300 million years since the UK drifted away from continental Europe but it is still very much part of it!
The British isles were still connected to the continent 20k years ago.
Technically they reconnected 31 years ago with the tunnel.
The UK is still in Europe. They didn't move from the continent.
Except for Ireland.
I know what you are thinking while reading this list, but hear me out - healthcare and schools are pretty cheap there.
Have you considered discussing TFA instead of tropes so worn and boring even you yourself can't be bothered to write them out?
Are the worn, boring tropes false? Are they worth writing out again?
Is this only for companies within the EU or EFTA? I can't spot a single UK company listed, even though there are plenty that would fit.
On https://european-alternatives.eu/about the listing criteria state:
> 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.
https://european-alternatives.eu/about
It's all clarified here. If you think it's missing some great companies add them!
Wow, nice! Great resource, thanks a lot!
If you want an EU-made (and repairable!) e-bike battery, check what we're building at https://infinite-battery.com :)
an European energy sector (mainstream or industrial) HN would be great btw
ps: congrats on your success
Last time this came up I decided to try Scaleway which is at the top of their "cloud computing" list.
"European alternative" that doesn't know that European addresses have non-ASCII characters: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1835649083345649780
I'm sure there are much bigger and more worthwhile criticisms to be had than this.
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.
A lack of Unicode support in 2026 is like someone coming with dirty clothes to a job interview: it might not affect too much how the work is done, but immediately raises doubts about the underlying level of professionalism.
That was 2024 (still inexcusable), they managed to fix it at one point https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734771
Hetzner/Linode were MITMing their client(jabber.ru): https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
> It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway?
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
Ugh, back to nationalism.
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?
Using a French server has been a pain. Their level of customer service is much worse than that in the US sadly
"French server", what is that? Usually we judge customer service on the company, not the nationality of the hardware, care to share exactly where you had a bad experience?
I like it. No fake smiles, no tip required. They can be a bit grumpy but French food is amazing which makes up for it.
That's what I like in the US: the servers are so friendly... and yes, I know it’s all for the tip.
Well they're not friendly then are they? It's an act to get a tip - and if you don't you get chased down the street.
It's a different social contract. It's not just the waitress, it's service in general. One trying to judge the other is never quite going to work because it rubs us wrong in some weird internal way.
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.
OVH? I hate the dashboard, but the support seems fine to me.
Have you tried Hetzner
No, I was looking for a French one. I'll persist with this for a while and then switch if things don't get better. Thanks
Scaleway is slick. It's like a European Digital Ocean.
Last time I wanted to try it it was nowhere near DO: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1835649083345649780
You've posted that twice in this thread. I don't think it's as damning as you think it is.