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 =)
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.
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"
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.
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.
- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
- Programming language toolchains
- Hardware vendors
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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 sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.
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.
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.
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
In both countries English is only one of the official languages.
You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
ps: congrats on your success
"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.
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?
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.