European Software 🇪🇺

Right around the time of Trump's re-election, I discovered European Alternatives, a page dedicated to—well—European software alternatives. It was the first time I reconsidered my software choices in terms of origin. With that in mind, I was taken aback when I checked the apps I had installed on my phone. They had US and Silicon Valley written all over them.

Now what about these European alternatives? Can't we build software too?

Europe can build software too!

Bear is my favourite notes app. It‘s built in Ireland (previously Italy) and is therefore not only European but it also resisted the general tendency of today's software manufacturers to enshittify their tools with the likes of AI. Plausible is my analytics tool. Not only built in Estonia but also the polar opposite of what Google Analytics does: namely, it doesn't track any identifying information about my website‘s visitors. It's built for privacy-minded people like me who are fed up with big tech and surveillance capitalism.

Then there's Proton Mail, a Swiss-based email service with a similar focus: privacy. If only they had calendar integration would I have gone with them instead of Australian-based Fastmail when I ungoogled my life back in 2019. Today, Proton finally comes with a calendar (yay), and they also have a password manager, cloud storage and a VPN.

N26 is my favourite banking app and it's from Germany. Revolut is English (I once falsely believed Lithuanian but that's only where they had their banking licence for some reason) and WISE is English, too. Even though we have so much Fintech from Europe, we almost entirely rely on America to handle our digital payments (hello Mastercard, VISA and PayPal). The same is true for digital wallets, which are also US-based (Google Pay and Apple Pay). But hey, WERO is on the horizon, a digital wallet made in Europe, already in use in Germany, Belgium and France.

Spotify is Swedish, but we don't talk about Spotify here (I'm very much on the fence whether I'm still cool with using it for various reasons). For anyone who is on the fence like me, Deezer is a music-streaming service from France! And they have an interesting take on AI music, tagging songs accordingly and removing them from its recommendation algorithm. A change in my software usage that I am currently considering.

Mastodon is built in Germany and many instances are hosted in Europe. Opera is Norwegian and Vivaldi is too (as it was founded by Opera's co-founder). So many search engines are European, among them Startpage (Dutch), Ecosia (German) and Qwant (French).

And then there's so much software from Austria! No wait, there isn't. Bitpanda is Austrian though (I've just remembered), so here goes even more European Fintech. And you know what else is Austrian? Exactly, the very website where I have researched many of the tools listed here: European Alternatives, feel free to check it out and send my love to Vienna.

I think we have relied on American software for long enough. If you agree, have a look at Paris Marx's guide to getting off US tech. I'm ready for so much more software from Europe!