De-Google your business: a European replacement for every Google product
By the EU Alternatives team Published
A business can replace every Google service with a European tool, and none of the individual swaps is exotic. The right order is by effort: search takes minutes, analytics an afternoon, documents and file storage a few weeks, and email and calendar come last because they involve DNS changes and years of accumulated filters. This guide maps each Google product to its European replacements, then walks through the migration in four phases. Our guide on why switch to European software covers the reasoning; this one is purely practical.
The replacement map
One row per Google product, ordered roughly by how much work the swap takes. Picks follow the relevance scoring we use across the directory, and every row links to the full list of alternatives for that product.
| European replacements | Replaces | Full list |
|---|---|---|
| Qwant (France), Ecosia (Germany) | Google Search | All Google Search alternatives |
| Plausible (Estonia), Simple Analytics (Netherlands) | Google Analytics | All Google Analytics alternatives |
| komoot (Germany), HERE (Netherlands) | Google Maps | All Google Maps alternatives |
| Whereby (Norway) | Google Meet | All Google Meet alternatives |
| Dailymotion (France), Jet-Stream (Netherlands) | YouTube | All YouTube alternatives |
| Zeitkapsl (Austria) | Google Photos | All Google Photos alternatives |
| Standard Notes (Switzerland), BrewMemo (Germany) | Google Keep | All Google Keep alternatives |
| CryptPad (France), Nextcloud (Germany) | Google Docs | All Google Docs alternatives |
| Nextcloud (Germany), Proton Drive (Switzerland), Internxt (Spain) | Google Drive | All Google Drive alternatives |
| Proton Calendar (Switzerland) | Google Calendar | All Google Calendar alternatives |
| Proton Mail (Switzerland), mailbox.org (Germany) | Gmail | All Gmail alternatives |
| Scaleway (France), Hetzner Cloud (Germany) | Google Cloud | All Google Cloud alternatives |
If you run the full Workspace bundle rather than individual products, see the Google Workspace alternatives page and our Nextcloud vs Google Workspace comparison, which covers the most common suite swap.
Phase 1: the zero-risk swaps
Start with the changes that cannot break anything.
Search is a browser setting. Qwant is a French engine building its own European index, with no search history stored and only contextual ads. Ecosia is a Berlin steward-ownership company that puts its surplus into reforestation. Either takes two minutes per employee to set as the default, and there is nothing to migrate.
Analytics is one script tag. Plausible (Estonian, open source) and Simple Analytics (Dutch) both measure traffic without cookies or personal data, which means no consent banner for the analytics itself. The honest cost: your Google Analytics history does not come with you, so export what you need and expect a clean break in your dashboards. The whole job fits in an afternoon; our guide on switching from Google Analytics to a European alternative covers it step by step, and the Plausible vs Google Analytics comparison shows what you keep and what you give up.
Phase 2: maps, meetings, video and new documents
These swaps touch your website and your habits, but not your data.
Maps embeds on contact and location pages are the main business use of Google Maps. HERE, headquartered in Eindhoven, provides maps, routing and SDKs covering more than 200 countries, built for this integration work. komoot is the German consumer pick for navigation and route planning.
Meetings move easily because meeting links are disposable. Whereby, from Norway, runs entirely in the browser with no download or account needed for guests, and its permanent room links replace the calendar-generated Meet URL pattern well.
Video hosting depends on what YouTube does for you. Dailymotion (French, owned by Canal+) offers an embeddable player with analytics and monetisation, and Jet-Stream (Dutch) handles professional live and on-demand streaming. If YouTube is your audience channel rather than your infrastructure, keep it; that is a reach decision, not a data decision.
New documents are the low-friction way into the office suite question. Rather than converting your archive, start creating new files in CryptPad (French, open source, encrypted collaborative editing) or Nextcloud Office. The old Google Docs remain readable where they are until phase 3. The same logic applies to notes: Standard Notes (Swiss) and BrewMemo (German) both sync encrypted notes across devices, and Zeitkapsl (Austrian) backs up company photo libraries with end-to-end encryption and storage in German data centres.
Phase 3: the Drive migration
This is the first phase with real project management in it. Moving files is easy; moving the sharing structure around them is not. Every “anyone with the link” URL breaks, every external collaborator needs re-inviting, and folder permissions that grew organically over years have to be mapped deliberately onto the new system.
Nextcloud is the most common destination because it reproduces the shared-folder model most completely: file sync across all platforms, granular permissions, and collaborative editing in one self-hostable, open-source platform. Proton Drive encrypts everything client-side and now includes Docs and Sheets for collaboration. Internxt, from Valencia, takes the same zero-knowledge approach with an open, audited codebase. The Nextcloud vs Google Drive comparison goes through the trade-offs. Plan a few weeks of parallel running: migrate team by team, keep the old Drive read-only, and revoke access only when nothing has been touched for a month.
Phase 4: email, calendar and the domain cutover
Email is last for a reason. It is not the message archive, which imports cleanly over IMAP. It is everything around it: MX records pointing at your domain, SPF, DKIM and DMARC entries, years of filters and labels, aliases nobody documented, and third-party services that send on your behalf.
Proton Mail (Swiss) offers end-to-end encryption with custom domain support on paid plans, and Proton Calendar completes the pair with an encrypted calendar. mailbox.org (Berlin) is the closer Workspace analogue: mail, calendar, cloud storage, office and video conferencing in one account, with data held in German data centres. Our Proton Mail vs Gmail comparison covers the daily-driver differences. Do the cutover on a quiet week: set up the new mailboxes, import mail, lower the DNS TTL in advance, switch MX records, and keep the Google account alive for a while to catch stragglers and re-point logins that used Sign in with Google.
Google Cloud, if you use it, is its own project, larger than the email migration. Scaleway (French, part of the iliad Group) covers the full stack from managed Kubernetes and databases to object storage and GPUs; Hetzner Cloud (German) runs its own data centres and is the standard answer for straightforward compute at low cost.
What you gain, what you lose
The gains are concrete. Your operational data sits under European jurisdiction instead of being one subpoena framework away from US access. Cookieless analytics removes a consent banner. Several of the replacements are open source, so the code can be read and self-hosted. Costs are often lower, though that varies by product and headcount.
The losses are equally concrete. You give up the deep integration of a single suite: comments in Docs will not land in your mail client, and meeting links will not auto-attach to calendar invites. Some polish goes too; Google’s search across everything is genuinely good and nothing matches it exactly. You end up with focused tools from several vendors rather than one integrated platform. For most businesses the trade is acceptable, but it is worth naming before you start.
Frequently asked questions
What is the easiest first step to de-Google a business?
Change the default search engine in company browsers to Qwant or Ecosia. It takes minutes, requires no data migration, and is fully reversible. Swapping Google Analytics for a cookieless European tool like Plausible is the natural second step and usually fits in one afternoon.
Can a business really leave Google entirely?
Yes, at the level of services: every Google product a business typically uses has at least one credible European replacement, as the table above shows. The honest caveats are YouTube as a marketing channel, which is about audience reach rather than infrastructure, and Android devices. Plan the exit in phases rather than as one big-bang migration.
What about Android phones?
Android is the hardest part, because the operating system itself is Google’s and this guide covers services, not devices. You can still reduce exposure by using European apps for mail, calendar, notes and search on Android hardware. Fully de-Googled phones running alternative Android builds exist, but managing them across a company is a specialist project most businesses skip.
Is Google Workspace GDPR compliant?
It can be operated in a GDPR compliance program: Google provides a data processing agreement and relies on the current EU-US data transfer framework. The weakness is that this legal basis has failed twice before, when courts struck down Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield, and US law can compel access to data held by US providers. A European provider does not remove your GDPR obligations, but it does remove the transfer question entirely.