Following up to my in-depth Google Alternatives post and the short Google Alternatives listicle version, several comments mentioned that it's not only Google's dominance but also other commercial corporations that we shouldn't rely too much upon, and that there is a website called European Alternatives, featuring software and web services mostly made or maintained in Europe, the EuroStack initiative, and the principles of free and open-source software vs. our current dependency on commercial services by Microsoft, Google, and other, mostly American, service providers.
Prevent Vendor Lock-In, Data Loss, and Insecurity
Why? Vendor lock-in is a critical and potentially costly point of failure, even more so if the manufacturer must comply to other countries or economic areas' legislation, or the current political leaders' moods, or compromise their users' privacy and security.
Some services like GitHub, Google Search, StackOverflow, and npm, are so important that their temporary outage can disrupt (and has disrupted) many developer's workflow. GitHub is a bad example of a web service with a short network timeout. They are always the first service that fails when I try to work on a train without a stable internet connection.
Ability to Work Offline
As a freelance web developer, I work for different individuals and companies, and it's often my customers or business partners choice of software. However, I tend to prefer several services that won't work offline and many of which are maintained by foreign, mostly U.S. American, providers. Not all off them, so let's start with a positive list of services that might be my personal points of failure but that I'd still recommend for various reasons.
Recommendable Favorites
- Wikipedia
- Linux is a popular open-source operating system,
- GIMP is a versatile open-source bitmap-based image manipulation software,
- LibreOffice is an office suite with word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation, that can open and import popular Microsoft Office documents,
- deepL, linguee, LEO, and TurEng are translation services, at least partially obsoleting Google Translate,
- MAPY is a Czech client for Open Street Maps, partially obsoleting Google Maps if it weren't for the Google Business reviews,
- Sygic is another Czech maps and navigation app,
- GMX and Posteo are German email providers, partially obsoleting Google Mail,
- K9, Claws, and Mozilla Thunderbird are email clients,
- Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messenger,
- Ecosia and MetaGer are search engine frontends,
- JetBrains from Prague/Amsterdam produces IDEs like PhpStorm,
- MDN, the Mozilla Developer Network, a knowledge base for web technologies,
- BrowserStack, despite its US-based devices, is based in Mumbai,
- flickr, a Canadian photo community that pioneered social web 2.0
- DEV.to ?❓👇
I never cared to ask if DEV is based in the United States until too many digital service providers changed their policies to comply with the new Trump administration. Hopefully, DEV will honor its unique mixture of being open and inclusive without sacrificing quality too much to junior and spam content, and abstain from implementing obtrusive personalized ads like most other content platforms and communities do.
Many free community services rely on some kind of funding or support by big companies that might try to influence decision making beyond their fair share.
Commercially Influenced Open-Source Software
Chromium is a free and open-source browser, but its development is strongly backed and influenced by Google.
Codium is an alternative release of Visual Studio Code, which is controlled by Microsoft.
AOSP is the Android Open Source Project, but Google still determines where Android is going.
WordPress, WooCommerce, and Shopware are freemium software packages used for web development and e-commerce. There are free and open-source community editions, the business versions are backed by Shopware from Germany, and Automattic from the USA, respectively.
The world-wide-web started as a military and scientific network to make the USA less vulnerable against military attacks. Even the current international version that we know a the internet still relies largely on American infrastructure (like intercontinental cables) and decisions of influential US-based actors (like Alphabet, Meta, and the ICANN).
Commercial (US/Chinese/Overseas) Services
Many commercial companies offer free services, often paid by advertising, collecting user data for commercial purposes, or offering paid professional upgrades to their free versions.
Critics used to warn people, when they don't have to pay, then "they are the product". Some services don't even offer a professional plan.
Here are some popular commercial web services that I use regularly:
- WhatsApp (USA)
- Instagram (USA)
- Pinterest (USA)
- LinkedIn (subsidiary of Microsoft, USA)
- ChatGPT by OpenAI (USA)
- Google Search (USA)
- Google Calendar
- Google Keep
- Google Photos
- Google Pixel and the default Google Play app store
- Apple iPhone and Apple's app store
- Chinese and Korean smartphones and their default app stores
- Slack (subsidiary of Salesforce, USA)
- Zoom (USA)
- Atlassian (Australia)
- Docker (USA)
- npm (subsidiary of Microsoft, USA)
- GitHub (subsidiary of Microsoft, USA)
- GitLab (USA)
Some of those don't have better alternatives, some do, but I still can't ditch WhatsApp, Slack, or Teams, if my business partners or family members insist on using it.
An incident cutting overseas cables between the USA and Europe, an additional blow to their European servers, or a legal action with similar effects could severely disrupt my daily business.
Services that I rarely use, that are similarly important to others:
- Adobe Creative Suite (USA)
- Microsoft Windows, Bing, Copilot, Teams, Outlook, and Office software (USA);
- ChatGPT (USA) and DeepSeek (China) AI/LLM services;
- Amazon (USA), Alibaba (China) and Temu (China) online stores,
- Shopify (e-commerce hosted in Canada)
- Squarespace (USA) and Wix (Israel) host websites,
- BlueSky is a free Twitter clone (how do they make money?)
- TikTok (China), YouTube, and vimeo (USA) are video platforms.
TikTok is an interesting example. It has been very popular among very young people while most older people like me didn't seem to care, which left a whole generation under the influence of right wing political parties but also potentially under Chinese surveillance. Eventually its role in society became so critical that the USA banned it, and TikTok disappeared from the official app stores.
Other companies risk to deprecate their services without legal intervention when they fail to listen to their customers' needs.
Deterioration / Self-Deprecation
Google Search results are broader and less accurate than they used to be, not only in my personal experience, but according to other peoples' reviews as well.
Google Maps navigation is still quite good for cars on main roads, but have become less trustworthy about road closures and construction works despite their large user base. Maps have always been misleading to useless for cycling and hiking, and that hasn't improved either.
Twitter used to be a popular and important platform for short messaging, communication, and discussion, although it had been criticized for fueling hate speech and not doing enough fact checking in the past. After Elon Musk bought the platform and renamed it to X, many important users and advertising customers turned their back on it and signed up for BlueSky instead.
Medium is another popular platform that seems to have moved past its highest popularity. I favor paying for good content and products, but neither Medium nor Substack do a good job getting content creators paid without ruining their site's usability.
Grammarly is a US/Ukrainian online service for language checking, but only supports English and its suggestions have deteriorated a lot recently.
StackOverflow started as a free, community-based Q&A platform as an alternative to paid or proprietary services like ExpertsExchange or MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network), that most people don't even know or remember. As the platform grew over time, old answers got outdated, and senior community members' efforts to keep StackOverflow free from low-quality content turned away a lot of potential new users. Recently, AI chat bots and coding assistants have become an alternative go-to resource for clueless developers, drastically reducing StackOverflow's website traffic (and possibly its potential ad revenue).
Firefox was a disruptive new browser engine ending the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, a historic browser not even maintained anymore. Google Chrome later became the most popular browser, while Firefox maintainer Mozilla struggled for relevance amidst controversial decisions. However, Mozilla's MDN knowledge base is still among the most popular and authoritative resources for current web technologies.
The USENET and its newsgroups was a popular, decentralized alternative to forum websites before Web 2.0 defined "social media" as a playful interactive real-time experience on MySpace, flickr and YouTube.
New (Nerdy?) Alternatives
The Fediverse might become the USENET of the Web 3 era, but several useful independent services have remained unknown and unpopular maybe because of their design, usability, or for being considered too nerdy and complicated (which might or might not be true - decide for yourself!)
- Mastodon and other, lesser known Fediverse servers, form a decentralized message network somewhat similar to BlueSky or Twitter,
- Jitsi is a video messaging service software that you can, but don't need to host yourself,
- PeerTube is an alternative approach to YouTube-like video sharing,
- WEchange is an online collaboration service,
- ownCloud is an iCloud alternative,
- Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS are mobile operating systems.
Linux and free open-source applications like GIMP and LibreOffice would have shown up in the list of nerdy software fifteen years ago, before becoming well-known stable household brands on their own behalf.
Conclusion
Times are changing and we are changing with time.
In practice, we make compromise and go along with popular choice instead of investing too much time and effort into seeking 100% independence services that are beyond our control.
There have been search engines before Google, there has been social media before Instagram and Twitter/X, and new alternatives will eventually obsolete most software that we are using now. Events like security breaches, ownership change, or political influence and legislation can change people's choice of software quite quickly, so we should be prepared and be ready to abandon them at any time and be able to recover and migrate our data.
Top comments (2)
For email, two options I would add:
I use LibreOffice quite a lot for any .docx files that I need to work with. It certainly doesn't look the best, but it's a really nice tool. Glad to see it in this article!
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