European alternatives to Microsoft 365 and Google for your business

European alternatives to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace used to be a niche for privacy enthusiasts. Now ordinary businesses ask about them. The reason is not that Microsoft or Google store your data badly. It is that both are American companies, and American law can reach your data wherever it is stored.

That law is the CLOUD Act of 2018. It obliges a US provider to disclose data in its "possession, custody, or control" when a US authority presents a valid warrant or order, "regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States" (18 U.S.C. § 2713). A server in Amsterdam or Frankfurt does not change that.

Microsoft has said so in public. On 10 June 2025, a French Senate inquiry asked Anton Carniaux, then director of public and legal affairs at Microsoft France, whether he could guarantee under oath that French citizens' data would never be passed to the US government without French consent. His answer, in translation: "No, I cannot guarantee that, but, again, it has never happened."

Two more things push companies to look around. Prices: Microsoft raised Business Basic from $6 to $7 and Business Standard from $12.50 to $14 per user per month on 1 July 2026. And dependency: the German state of Schleswig-Holstein moved more than 40,000 mailboxes from Exchange and Outlook to Open-Xchange and Thunderbird in October 2025. Its staff also faced downtime and delayed mail along the way, a reminder that how you move matters as much as where to.

Using Microsoft 365 is not illegal. Transfers to certified US companies are lawful under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework of 2023. For most businesses the question is control: which data you are comfortable leaving within reach of a foreign government, and how dependent you want to be on one supplier.

You do not have to move everything at once, and you do not have to move everything at all. Start with what is easy and reversible, and leave the parts that change how people work for last.

The website is the quickest win, and it is where we should be clear about our own setup. Our standard managed website hosting runs on Cloudflare, a US company that falls under the CLOUD Act. Files we store for clients, such as signed contracts and reports, sit in a storage bucket with EU jurisdiction: that fixes where they are stored, not which country's law applies to Cloudflare. If you want your website outside US jurisdiction, we can host it with an EU-owned provider instead, on request.

Email is where most businesses start in earnest. Your address stays the same as long as the domain is registered in your name: you create the mailboxes at the new provider, copy the old mail across, and point the domain's MX record to the new provider. You also set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC again for the new provider, or your mail lands in spam. Our guide to SPF, DKIM and DMARC shows how.

What a website costs to run each year, wherever it is hosted, is in our guide to website maintenance costs.

There is no single European Microsoft 365. There are suites that cover most of it (Infomaniak kSuite, Proton), mail providers with office features (mailbox.org), and open-source building blocks that you run at a host (Nextcloud). This is how they compare with what you have now, on six questions that matter for a small business.

A few things the matrix cannot show:

• Proton encrypts mail end to end. That protects the content even from Proton, but Outlook and other mail apps only work through Proton's Bridge app on a computer, and some integrations are not possible.
• Nextcloud is software, not a provider. Its host decides the jurisdiction: Nextcloud at a German or French host is European, Nextcloud on a US cloud is not. It has no mail server of its own, so pair it with a mail provider.
• Being European does not make a provider secure. Check two-factor login, backups, a data processing agreement and where support staff sit, just as you would with Microsoft.

For software you run yourself, such as OnlyOffice or Collabora, what counts is where you run it, not where its maker sits. For a hosting company, check that it has no US parent company and no US operations: those bring a provider within reach of the CLOUD Act.

Licences are the smaller part of the decision. For a team of ten, the suites differ by a few hundred to about €1,100 a year, and the migration itself is a one-off cost of a few thousand euros in outside help. These are the list prices today.

Nextcloud is priced differently: a host charges per server or amount of storage, not per user, and you add a mail provider. Ask the host for its current price. Now add the move itself and look three years ahead:

Read the chart the right way round. Over three years, moving rarely saves a small team money; with mailbox.org it costs about the same as staying. What you buy is control over where your data sits and which law applies, and a supplier you can leave. If cost is your only reason, cleaning up unused licences usually saves more than moving.

This is how a team of ten moves mail, calendars and files to a European provider without losing a working day. Larger teams, or setups with managed laptops and single sign-on, take longer.

Five things make the difference between a calm switch and a stressful one:

• Time it to your renewal date. Annual Microsoft licences usually cannot be cancelled halfway, so moving early means paying twice.
• Lower the TTL of your DNS records a few days before the switch, so the change takes effect in minutes instead of hours.
• Run a pilot with two or three people before moving everyone. They find the shared calendar nobody mentioned.
• Keep the old accounts read-only for a month after the switch, so nothing is lost while people settle in.
• Tell customers nothing changes for them: the same addresses, the same phone numbers.

Want someone to run this plan with you? Advise draws up the inventory, compares providers for your situation and guides the switch. You can ask us a question about your migration first.

Moving is not always the right call. Stay on Microsoft 365, at least for part of the business, when:

• Your work runs on Excel macros, Power Query or Access databases. They do not run in the European editors, and rewriting them costs more than the licences.
• Your clients work in Teams and expect you there. You can join their meetings from a browser as a guest, but living in shared Teams channels from outside is daily friction.
• Your business software only works with Microsoft: a bookkeeping package built around Excel, or an industry app that needs Outlook or Microsoft sign-in.
• You have no time for it this year. A rushed migration hurts more than staying another year.

Hybrid is a legitimate answer. Many businesses move mail, calendars and files to a European provider and keep a few Microsoft 365 licences, such as Apps for business, for the people who really need desktop Excel. That lowers both your exposure and your licence bill without forcing everyone to change tools.

Not sure where your line is? In a free 15-minute first call we hear what you use and tell you honestly whether moving is likely to be worth it. We earn nothing from licences, whichever provider you choose.