European Alternatives
european-alternatives.eu
european-alternatives.eu
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Conditions for a listing
All the products and services listed on European Alternatives meet the following criteria:
The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country.
If the company has a parent or holding company, this company is also based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member state.
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. Example: Hosting provider that just configures servers on AWS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
For China - the law is whatever they want it to be.
The listing itself says it's an American company's product (RedHat).
Lots of places use it completely self-hosted or even offer EU-hosted keycloak for clients as SaaS.
I've been using Time4VPS for a few years at this point, they've always been pretty decent. That said, they have been gradually rising prices and I think that something like Hetzner is more affordable at this point. Well, either that or Contabo for the cases where I just need a box that has enough RAM and don't do anything super CPU intensive. Scaleway also used to be competitive with them price-wise, but I don't think that's been the case for a while, it'd have to be more of a feature based comparison.
I think there's a bunch of smaller companies in the Baltics as well, but maybe that'd make the list quite long and many of them seem to focus on local services mostly (nano.lv for hosting comes to mind).
Either way, really cool site, I'm glad that this exists!
I've only used them for personal projects, though, so I can't say anything to the suitability in a corporate environment. In particular their support. That's quite an important factor when working in a corporate setting.
I wish they already had that S3-like service they've announced for some time. It would be really handy.
Avoid using Tuta, I am talking as a person with more than 4 years experience using their product. Its search extremely bad, UI is so simple and everything is unnecessarily big, not event possibility to add any label.
They barely improved their product within my >4 years of usage. I have already migrated most stuff to another mail provider.
Same with mailbox.org, having had my (paid) account with them for over 4 yrs since I went sans-Google, it was mostly a terrible experience. I recently tried Proton and they just kept flooding the inbox with conversion reminders, which I absolutely hate. Which different provider did you go with?
I actually fell back to Gmail for the time being - I just don't like to "advertise" any Google product for known reasons, even though Gmail is a quite solid product, sorry about the confusion - but that's my temporary solution.
I am planning to either give Migadu a try or host my own mail provider. (I have seen some good feedback about https://mailcow.email)
Proton mail is 'getting there' and I think the best we collectively have to offer but let's be honest, it's not patch on Gmail,O365, iCloud, Zoho or one of the plethora of other services that hail from the US.
A damming state of affairs.
One of the largest Western world indexes outside of Bing/Google, own crawler/ranking and privacy friendly.
But I guess "EU/EFTA Alternatives" is not as snappy.
Europe is a political concept more than it is a geography. Copenhagen and Berlin are tied together by law. Moscow and Berlin are not. Saying “Europe” in this context without reference to politics is meaningless. There is borderless trade within the EU but not with the UK. That is a fundamental difference and just one example.
Europe is quite obviously not a political concept. It's an ancient word that always has and always will mean a geographical area. You're repeating the exact behavior we are openly criticizing in this thread. Misusing language in that way is not only a cheap attempt to manipulate and socially engineer populations, but actively divisive. This thread is a perfect example. Europe hasn't managed to produce many Google competitors, but there's one in the UK and now the people who run it are hurt and upset because they were excluded from a list that claims to represent all of Europe, but in reality the list is some sort of ideological construct defined by political allegiances.
I really don't think self-proclaimed "European citizens" realize how much damage they do to the continent with this approach. It's not just the UK, I live in Switzerland and these games get noticed here too. Many problems are geographical in nature (war, famine, energy, immigration etc). Europe could use as much collaboration as it can get. Alienating some of the continent's most successful countries is the worst way to bring that about.
https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i...
Meanwhile the UK has at least one serious option (e.g https://mojeek.com) with it's own index, possibly larger than yandex and privacy friendly - but can't be included because we're not in the right protectionist club.
Well guys, I hope this works for you. I voted against Brexit, but the behaviour of folks on the continent since has been beyond childish and has been making me reconsider the whole EU concept.
> As a business that operates in Europe, it is possible to get a VAT refund for products/services of other European companies.
> European companies also tend to offer payment methods that are commonly used in Europe.
> Within the EU, many laws and framework conditions are set by the EU, which helps to cover a large market without having to consider large country-specific differences.
> It is also easier to enforce your rights against another company located in the EU.
That sounds to me like there are plenty legitimate reasons to exclude the UK from a European (Union)-based list.
They do seem to conflate Europe with the EU, which is unfortunate.
I just tried Mojeek too, and found the results to be reasonable on a selection of programming related queries. I didn't know Mojeek existed, but the design is clean and the results are fast. Ranking isn't as precise as Google but that's OK, the right result is usually still in the top results. The summarize feature worked well and was also very fast. The news is clean, hopefully more trustworthy than Google News. I love the idea of their Substack search, but they should consider unlaunching it and trying again. Although the rendering of the results is a bit off (the date runs into the URL) the bigger issue is that there doesn't seem to be any way to rank by date, and old blog posts are often near the top. That's probably not what's wanted for a blog search.
Honestly I don't know why this site isn't better known, if it's genuinely an independent index which it seems to be. It feels like Google in the early days. I'll definitely try it out and see how viable its ranking is.
It's really sad (but absolutely 100% predictable) to hear that self-proclaimed "Europeans" refuse to mention it. To such people "Europe" is not and never has been about regional alliances or collaboration. It is and was always a social ideology of control. The UK rejected that system and is thus in their minds no longer "European", despite that it's still there and not going anywhere.
The problem is their ranking also.
Vanity queries are pretty common for trying new engines.
It's also not a very intuitive query. Maybe you're conditioned to using Google and their vast history of query data that no one else has.
Your point was what?
> It's also not a very intuitive query. Maybe you're conditioned to using Google and their vast history of query data that no one else has.
What would have been an intuitive query?
It's not an intuitive query because it yields about precisely zero results with those two words in a consecutive manner, on Google. You're chucking two spaghetti words together and expecting the search engine to figure out what you mean, which is fine to an extent but OTOH, wth do you mean?
> protectionist club
> beyond childish
Seems like you have already made your mind.
The alternative to the modern computing is the classic iron ownership instead of living on the shoulder of giants, otherwise there is no difference between a US company and an EU one selling the same services. They are both third party whose job is making money for their shareholders.
"But.... HW cost money!", yes, because someone else computers are notoriously free... https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-gets-a-billion-dollar-wor... and of course owned hw is not a asset with an eventual resale value and a vast series of possibilities if a startup idea fail...
Oh, yes, bandwidth might be tricky but co-location until a company is large enough to pay a personal proper link it's still an option, on their own hw.
Dear devs startuppers where the recliner is the most valuable owned asset you have, it's about time to recalculate your economy.......
This was in Berlin btw, and I think their data center was somewhere not too far away in Germany.
This is a clear use of the Gitlab trademark, which gives two options for being permitted to use it:
1. An agreement with Gitlab themselves. Gitlab's own published trademark guidelines do not allow its use within a business name, but this company claims to be in a partner program with Gitlab, so they may have worked on the side. (This is also how Gitlab/Github were grandfathered in for their use of the Git trademark)
2. Descriptive use. This is what allows e.g. "Bob's Kia Repairs". The laws on this vary a lot from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and usually e.g. consider how likely it is to be confused with the trademarked business. I think gitlabhost would fail that test as you can see people thinking it is an offer from Gitlab themselves. And in general because of the non-uniformity of rules, you probably want to avoid relying on them for anything not inherently limited to a single jurisdiction.
In Europe you pay VAT, and as a company, you get to as a refund on the VAT.
But if, as a European company, you buy a service in the USA, you don't pay VAT. So no refunds to ask.
1. An American company without any EU representation is still happy to sell the product to anyone who can pay them regardless of location. They may or even will do the bare minimum to have compliance on paper, but that is often not enough for legal team/DPOs. If you are big enough customer you may push them to complete the checklist, but in the end see 2.
2. An American company with significant business in EU will do everything to be compliant, but they cannot overcome limitations of American laws and thus will never be compliant unless there will be a solution not leading to Schrems III/IV etc. A few of them are very creative and actually find such solution (see e.g. AWS CloudHSM), but most of them don’t have resources or technical possibilities to build such things.
I don’t think you really understand what are you talking about.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2020/6520...
When US and EU laws are in conflict, a business can be compliant only with one of them.
You're missing out on a massive plethora of services, London's tech industry is one of if not the strongest in Europe.
[1] It currently has GDPR included in law, but there's nothing keeping it in law.
Similarly, GDPR gave teeth to pre-existing privacy laws in EU. Private contracts are nowhere near as enforceable, especially in terms of consequences - but the EU side of the contract will still be on the hook for legal consequences if UK company fails to uphold their side, or if UK changes a law that makes it incompatible with GDPR requirements (as in with US CLOUD act and the like).
For example a Portuguese company selling a service to a German one will be under Portuguese jurisdiction.
Portugal "could" decide to unilaterally leave the EU and therefore GDPR tomorrow. But that's insanely unlikely.
UK "could" decide to remove GDPR tomorrow. But that's just as unlikely.
Tell me the difference between these two?
Realistically a B2B contract should draw in as first party terms that all the relevant protections will be provided, confirm in compliance with GDPR (which UK has in law) if the UK removes it the protections still apply.
That's more on security than just agreeing a contract with portugese supplier because 'they`re in the EU too'
The moment UK makes a legal change that overrides those protections, you're left with worthless words on paper. And the point of GDPR status as "EU Regulation" is that it's not exactly feasible for EU members to override it like that.
And leaving EU isn't instant thing.
Passing, revoking or changing a UK law is not an instant thing either, trust me. So the only difference in those scenarios are that Portugal leaving the EU would take a bit longer than the UK removing a law from the statutes? So essentially there's no difference whatsoever?
So it's not even a theoretical issue, it's a well-trodden path from attempts at trade-deal guaranteeing things with USA.
As in, this is base EU law. At best, you could get some agreement which would be accepted to treat UK as acceptable party for GDPR-conscious business, but you're still a third party, and navigating patchwork agreements is why some companies will want to deal with company completely in EU instead.