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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