Here are 10 US tools you can replace right now with European alternatives

Europe’s dependence on American technology can be found in the most everyday of places: in company inboxes, cloud infrastructure, analytics dashboards, team chats, shared documents, and increasingly in the AI tools employees use every day.

The numbers make that dependence difficult to ignore. According to Proton research published in February 2026, 73% of people surveyed across the UK, Germany and France believe their societies are far too dependent on US technology companies, and 83% of those respondents said they were concerned about that dependence.

But switching is not as simple as finding a company with a European address. A company can be European-founded but incorporated elsewhere; an EU-hosted product can still be owned by a non-European company; and a European SaaS company can depend heavily on American cloud infrastructure, payment rails or AI models.

Switzerland, Norway and the UK are European but not EU member states, with their own legal frameworks. So the list below should be treated as a starting point for procurement, not a sovereignty certification.

With that in mind, here are some of the everyday business tools companies can start reconsidering – and the European names worth putting next to them.

AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud

This is a difficult one. Moving a social-media scheduler is an afternoon project; unwinding years of cloud architecture can be a company-wide programme. Amazon, Microsoft and Google also offer a breadth of managed databases, AI tooling, serverless products and developer services that few European providers replicate product-for-product.

There are nevertheless substantial European infrastructure companies to consider.

Europe’s AI question is particularly complicated because even a European-facing application can sit on models, chips or infrastructure originating elsewhere. Nevertheless, there are European companies building meaningful parts of the AI stack.

Cloudflare has become one of those pieces of internet infrastructure that many businesses barely think about until something goes wrong.

File storage is one of the categories where Europe has a healthy range of alternatives, from simple synchronisation products to heavily privacy-focused encrypted services.

Email is a particularly sensible place to reduce concentration risk because moving providers is possible without asking every client, supplier and employee to join the same new network. Owning the company’s domain also makes future migration considerably easier.

Analytics is another area where switching can do more than change the flag on the invoice. Several European providers have built their products around collecting less personal data in the first place.

Calendars contain a revealing map of a company: who is meeting whom, when teams are travelling, which clients are being visited and what senior staff are working on. There are European alternatives ranging from straightforward shared calendars to encrypted services.

Shared documents are where network effects become particularly noticeable. Sending someone a different storage link is easy; changing how an entire organisation writes, comments, shares and edits together takes more planning.

This may be one of the hardest cultural migrations on the list. The technical alternatives exist; convincing every department to stop sending “quick Slack messages” is another matter.

Notion has become the miscellaneous drawer of the modern company: wiki, notes, project tracker, database, meeting archive and sometimes a makeshift CRM. Europe has several interesting products approaching that workspace from very different directions.

A European technology stack does not have to go through one dramatic “delete everything American” weekend.

For most companies, that would be expensive, disruptive and probably counterproductive. A more realistic approach is to identify the systems where concentration creates the greatest operational or strategic risk, then replace them one layer at a time.

Europe does not lack software companies capable of providing everyday business tools. What it has lacked is the habit of putting them on the procurement shortlist.

For companies serious about digital sovereignty, this shortlist is a good place to start.