Best European Alternatives to Google Cloud
Looking for a European alternative to Google Cloud Platform? GCP offers powerful services but is a US company subject to American data access laws.
European cloud providers offer similar capabilities with guaranteed data residency in Europe and full GDPR compliance.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
4 European Alternatives to Google Cloud
UpCloud
High-performance cloud with MaxIOPS technology
Hetzner
Cost-effective cloud with excellent performance
Scaleway
Modern cloud platform with Kubernetes and serverless
OVHcloud
Full cloud suite with AI and big data services
Key takeaways
- The free EU Data Boundary package keeps resources in EU regions, and Google states those support cases are routed to global support personnel.
- Restricting support to EU-based staff needs the premium EU Data Boundary and Support package, so European handling of your tickets is a line item.
- Switching the package on disables features: Gemini in BigQuery, MCP servers, Data Catalog and SQL-based alerting in Cloud Logging are among the named exclusions.
- Google's hardest sovereignty answers in Europe are sold by Thales through S3NS and by T-Systems, not by Google itself.
- OVHcloud holds SecNumCloud directly, which is the qualification Google reaches only through a French joint venture.
Why people leave Google Cloud
Google Cloud has the best network of the three hyperscalers, BigQuery has no real equivalent anywhere, and GKE is still the reference implementation of managed Kubernetes. People do not leave because the engineering is weak. They leave after reading how sovereignty is actually delivered.
It is delivered as a product you switch on per folder. Assured Workloads offers an EU Data Boundary control package in its free tier that restricts resources to EU-only regions — and the same documentation states that support cases for those workloads "are routed to global support personnel". Keeping your support in the hands of EU-based staff requires the EU Data Boundary and Support package, which sits in the premium tier. Residency is free; the people are an upgrade.
The second thing they read is what the package costs in features. Inside it, Gemini in BigQuery is unsupported, Google Cloud MCP servers are not supported for EU Data Boundary products unless noted otherwise, SQL-based alerting in Cloud Logging is disabled and Data Catalog is deprecated and disabled. The compliant configuration is a smaller Google Cloud than the one in the demos, and nobody mentions that during the evaluation.
- European support staff is a paid tier The free EU Data Boundary package controls where resources live. It does not control who picks up your ticket, and Google says so plainly: those support cases go to global support personnel. The package that limits support access to EU personnel based in the EU is a premium one, and there is a third, EU Data Boundary with Access Justifications, for organisations that need to see why an engineer opened their data. Three tiers of answer to a question a European provider answers once, for free, by existing.
- Turning on the controls turns off the product This is the part that surprises architects rather than lawyers. Assured Workloads restricts more than location: named services are excluded, features are disabled, and the documentation lists them one by one. Gemini in BigQuery is out. MCP servers are out unless a product says otherwise. Data Catalog is deprecated and disabled. You are not choosing between Google Cloud and a European provider with fewer features; you are choosing between two reduced catalogues, and the reduction on the Google side is invisible until you configure it.
- The strongest sovereign version of Google is sold by someone else In France the answer to a hard sovereignty requirement is PREMI3NS from S3NS, which describes itself as an alliance between Thales and Google Cloud, runs three French data centres, and is qualified SecNumCloud 3.2 by ANSSI. In Germany it is T-Systems, selling a sovereign cloud powered by Google Cloud with operations performed by EU employees only. Both are good answers. Both mean the contract, the operators and the liability sit with a European company, which is the conclusion this whole page is about.
- Things get switched off Google's willingness to retire products is not a rumour, it is checkable: the URL that used to document IoT Core now redirects to a generic architecture guide. Every vendor deprecates, and Google does it with more conviction than most. For a platform choice with a ten-year horizon, that history belongs in the risk register alongside the jurisdiction question rather than being treated as folklore.
What you have to replace, not just match
Split the estate into three before you look at any provider, because the three parts have completely different answers.
The ordinary part is Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and GKE. Every provider on this page covers it, and moving it is a scheduling problem rather than an engineering one.
The Google-specific part is BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Spanner and Vertex AI, where there is no drop-in replacement and the honest options are open-source software you operate or a different architecture. The third part is the organisation layer — projects, folders, org policies, Assured Workloads itself — which describes Google and does not move at all.
If your estate is mostly the first part, this is a straightforward migration and the rest of the page is about picking a supplier. If it is mostly the second, be honest with yourself early: replacing BigQuery is a data platform project with its own budget, and pretending otherwise is how these migrations acquire a bad reputation.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | UpCloud | Helsinki, Finland | From about €5/month (Cloud Server) | EU (Finland) |
| #2 | Hetzner | Gunzenhausen, Germany | From about €4.51/month (Cloud VPS) | EU (Germany) |
| #3 | Scaleway | Paris, France | From about €0.0025/hour (DEV1-S) | EU (France) |
| #4 | OVHcloud | Roubaix, France | From about €3.50/month (VPS) | EU (France) |
How each alternative compares to Google Cloud
- Which law reaches it. EU (Finland). Google Cloud is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Finland, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Poland, Spain, and beyond.
- Source code. Closed source, as Google Cloud is.
- Independently checked. 100% uptime SLA.
Best for: Teams tired of configuring compliance into a platform that defaults elsewhere
UpCloud Ltd has run from Helsinki since 2011 and sells cloud servers, managed databases and Kubernetes with a plain console and prices from about €5 a month. It leads this page for a structural reason rather than a technical one: there is no control package to enable, no premium tier that keeps support inside the EU, and no list of features that stop working when you comply. A Finnish company operating European data centres is already the configuration.
Where it competes on engineering it does so specifically. MaxIOPS is UpCloud's own storage layer and is consistently fast, which matters for exactly the databases that make a Cloud SQL bill large. It publishes a 100% uptime SLA, a firmer commitment than the credit schedules the hyperscalers publish.
What it does not have is Google's depth, and the gap is honest rather than embarrassing. There is no analytics warehouse, no managed streaming, no machine learning platform, and its network is a European network rather than a global backbone. If your architecture depends on any of those, UpCloud is a component of your answer and not the whole of it.
What UpCloud does better than Google Cloud
- No sovereignty configuration to buy: the jurisdiction is the company, not a control package with a premium tier
- Support is answered by the provider itself rather than routed to global personnel unless you upgrade
- MaxIOPS storage is consistently faster than a standard managed disk, which is where Cloud SQL bills usually come from
- A published 100% uptime SLA rather than a tiered credit schedule
- Locations across Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, all under EU law with no boundary product involved
Where UpCloud is a step down from Google Cloud
- No analytics warehouse, no managed streaming and no machine learning platform, so the Google-specific half of an estate has nowhere to go
- A European network rather than Google's global backbone, which matters for worldwide latency
- A far smaller catalogue, so more of the architecture becomes software you run yourself
- Smaller community and fewer third-party integrations than any hyperscaler
Standout against Google Cloud. It is the only entry here where compliance is the default state rather than a package you enable and then discover has disabled four features.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Google Cloud is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (Falkenstein, Nuremberg) and Finland (Helsinki), plus Oregon, Virginia and Singapore.
- Source code. Closed source, as Google Cloud is.
- Independently checked. ISO 27001.
Best for: Estates whose Google Cloud bill needs a specialist to explain
Hetzner Online GmbH runs from Gunzenhausen with European data centres in Germany and Finland, plus locations in the United States and Singapore, and sells a cloud server with two vCPUs, four gigabytes of RAM and forty gigabytes of SSD from about €4.51 a month.
Against Google Cloud the difference is not only the number but the absence of a model: there are no sustained-use discounts to reason about, no committed-use contracts to sign, no per-project quotas and no separate charges for API calls or snapshots.
That matters because Google Cloud pricing is genuinely clever, and clever pricing has a staffing cost. Somebody in your organisation understands the discount structure, and that person is not doing product work while they do. A published list price removes the role rather than optimising it.
The limits are the same ones that apply to every plain infrastructure provider on this page, and they are sharper against Google than against anyone else, because Google's managed data services are the best in the market. There is no warehouse, no streaming service, no ML platform. If your estate is virtual machines, disks and a database, the saving is enormous. If it is BigQuery and Dataflow, this is not the entry that answers you.
What Hetzner does better than Google Cloud
- A published flat price with no sustained-use or committed-use arithmetic to model or negotiate
- Twenty terabytes of outbound traffic included on most plans, against a metered egress line on every hyperscaler bill
- A German company under EU law, so there is no boundary package to enable and no support tier to upgrade
- Dedicated servers alongside cloud instances, so a database that outgrows virtualisation stays with the same supplier
- Roughly three to five times cheaper than the equivalent hyperscaler instance
Where Hetzner is a step down from Google Cloud
- No analytics, streaming or machine learning services of any kind, which is where Google Cloud is strongest
- Two European countries, Germany and Finland, against Google's global region map and private backbone
- Managed Kubernetes is nothing like GKE in maturity or tooling
- Support is efficient and technical rather than an enterprise support organisation
Standout against Google Cloud. It is the only provider here whose price list makes the FinOps role unnecessary rather than cheaper, which for a mid-sized Google Cloud estate is a larger saving than the servers.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Google Cloud is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw — EU only.
- Source code. Closed source, as Google Cloud is.
Best for: Architectures built on Kubernetes, object storage and managed databases
Scaleway operates from Paris as part of the Iliad group, with regions in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw and nothing outside the Union. Its catalogue is the widest of any EU-owned provider on this page: managed Kubernetes, object storage with an S3-compatible API, managed Postgres and MySQL, serverless containers and functions, private networking and GPU instances.
Against Google Cloud specifically, the GPU range is what changes the conversation. Teams currently on Vertex AI who discover that model inference has to stay in the Union usually find themselves choosing infrastructure and inference at the same moment. Running open models on Scaleway GPUs in Paris keeps both decisions with one French company rather than splitting them across two jurisdictions.
Where it does not compete is the part of Google Cloud that made Google Cloud interesting. Its Kubernetes is competent and it is not GKE, which remains the most polished implementation in the market. There is no warehouse comparable to BigQuery, no managed streaming of Pub/Sub's calibre, and support below the enterprise tiers is community-based.
What Scaleway does better than Google Cloud
- The widest EU-owned catalogue here, so Kubernetes, storage, databases and GPUs sit in one account under one French contract
- GPU instances in Paris, so inference does not need a separate jurisdiction decision from the rest of the estate
- Every region inside the Union, with no control package required to keep it that way
- S3-compatible object storage, so tooling built against Cloud Storage adapts with a configuration change rather than a rewrite
- Hourly pricing from about €0.0025 with no discount programmes to model
Where Scaleway is a step down from Google Cloud
- Managed Kubernetes is good but not GKE, which is the benchmark the whole market is measured against
- No BigQuery equivalent and no managed streaming comparable to Pub/Sub
- Three regions against Google's global footprint and private network
- Community support below enterprise tiers, and thinner documentation for anything unusual
Standout against Google Cloud. It is the only EU-owned provider here that can absorb the Kubernetes, storage, database and GPU parts of a Google Cloud estate without a second supplier appearing halfway through.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Google Cloud is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. 30+ data centres, majority in Europe.
- Source code. Closed source, as Google Cloud is.
- Independently checked. SecNumCloud (ANSSI), GAIA-X founding member.
Best for: Buyers whose requirement names SecNumCloud rather than a region
OVHcloud SAS is based in Roubaix, designs and builds its own servers, runs more than thirty data centres with the majority in Europe, and holds SecNumCloud qualification from ANSSI on part of its range. That is the sharpest contrast available on this page, because Google's route to the same qualification in France runs through S3NS, the Thales joint venture, whose PREMI3NS offering is qualified SecNumCloud 3.2.
Put plainly: if the qualification is what you need, you can buy it from a French infrastructure company directly, or you can buy Google technology from a French company that has wrapped it. Both are legitimate. Only one of them leaves you with a supplier whose entire business is the infrastructure rather than a distribution arrangement.
The rest is the familiar OVHcloud picture. A very broad catalogue covering bare metal, public and hosted private cloud, storage, CDN, domains and DNS, from around €3.50 a month for a VPS, with a console built for people provisioning infrastructure. The breadth makes product selection slower than it should be, and the qualification applies to part of the range rather than to everything, so it has to be checked service by service.
What OVHcloud does better than Google Cloud
- Holds SecNumCloud from ANSSI directly, where Google reaches the same qualification through the S3NS joint venture with Thales
- Designs and builds its own hardware and operates its own data centres rather than reselling capacity
- A founding member of Gaia-X, which several European tenders now reference by name
- Bare metal alongside public and private cloud, which suits workloads that a hyperscaler would price into a dedicated-host contract
- Euro pricing from about €3.50 a month for a VPS, with no control packages or premium support tiers in the way
Where OVHcloud is a step down from Google Cloud
- A sprawling catalogue where identifying the right combination of products takes real time
- SecNumCloud covers part of the range, so the qualification has to be verified per service rather than assumed
- Managed data services are far behind Google's in both depth and polish
- Support quality varies by tier, against a hyperscaler support organisation built for enterprises
Standout against Google Cloud. It is the only entry here whose sovereignty claim was audited by a national agency and sold without a partner in the middle, which is exactly the arrangement Google needed a joint venture to produce.
What actually breaks when you switch
The organisation layer does not come with you, and it is larger than anyone remembers. Projects, folders, org policies, service accounts, Workload Identity bindings and the Assured Workloads configuration itself are a description of Google Cloud, not of your system. Rebuilding access control by hand is the single largest line in most of these migrations, and it goes faster if one person owns it end to end rather than each team porting its own.
GKE manifests travel further than people expect and not all the way. Standard deployments, services and ingresses run anywhere. What breaks is the Google-specific surface: Workload Identity, Config Connector, BackendConfig annotations, the internal load balancer behaviour and anything that assumes Cloud Logging is underneath. Run the manifests against a European cluster in a test project early, because the failures are individually small and collectively a fortnight.
And check what the Assured Workloads package was already preventing. Teams that have been running inside a control package have architectures shaped by its exclusions, which means some of the things they assume are impossible are simply things Google disabled. It is worth listing those before choosing a replacement, because a few of them are available by default on a provider with a smaller catalogue.
If I pick europe-west regions, is that not enough?
It is enough for a requirement about storage location and not enough for anything else, and the gap between those two is where most of the disappointment in this category lives.
Choosing an EU region places the resources in the EU. The free EU Data Boundary control package enforces that choice across a folder so nobody can accidentally deploy elsewhere. Neither of them changes who answers your support ticket, which Google documents as global support personnel unless you buy the package that says otherwise.
So the practical question is what your requirement actually names. If it names regions, configure the free package and stay. If it names personnel, access justification or jurisdiction, you are buying premium packages to approximate what a European provider gives you as a side effect of being European.
What does Assured Workloads take away?
More than teams expect, and the documentation is refreshingly specific about it. Within the EU Data Boundary package, Gemini in BigQuery is not supported, Google Cloud MCP servers are not supported for EU Data Boundary products unless a product says otherwise, the SQL-based alerting policies feature in Cloud Logging is disabled, and Data Catalog is deprecated and disabled.
That list changes over time, which is the important part. A feature your team adopts this quarter may be outside the boundary next quarter, and the mechanism that keeps you compliant is the same mechanism that stops the feature working.
Read the supported-products page for the package you intend to use before the architecture is agreed, not after. It is the single most useful hour in a Google Cloud sovereignty evaluation and almost nobody spends it.
Is S3NS or T-Systems a better answer than moving to a European provider?
For some organisations, genuinely yes. If your application is built on Google technology and rewriting it is out of the question, PREMI3NS gives you a French company, French data centres and a SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification from ANSSI while the technology underneath stays familiar. T-Systems offers the German equivalent with operations by EU employees only.
The trade is cost and catalogue. A partner-operated sovereign cloud is a curated subset of the platform, priced for regulated buyers, and it is not the place to run a startup's side project.
It is also worth noticing what the arrangement concedes. If the acceptable version of Google Cloud in France is sold by Thales and in Germany by Deutsche Telekom's subsidiary, then a European operator holding the contract is already agreed to be the answer. The remaining question is only whether you need Google's technology underneath it, and for most workloads the answer is no.
What genuinely has no European replacement?
BigQuery, first and most. Serverless analytics over petabytes with no cluster to manage has no equal at any European provider, and pretending that a managed Postgres or a ClickHouse instance you operate is the same thing helps nobody. If your business runs on BigQuery, this migration has a data platform project inside it.
Spanner second, for the same reason at a smaller scale. Globally consistent relational storage is a research achievement, not a product category with competitors.
Vertex AI third, though this one is changing quickly. Scaleway sells GPU instances in Paris, and running open models on your own hardware in the EU is now an ordinary thing to do rather than a heroic one. It is more work than a managed platform and it is no longer a different sport.
Which one to pick
If your estate is virtual machines, disks, Kubernetes and a database, this is a supplier decision rather than an architecture one. UpCloud is the closest match in temperament, Hetzner in price, and both remove the entire question of which control package you should have bought.
If the estate is broad enough that you need managed services in one account, Scaleway is the destination, and the GPU range makes it the one that also answers the inference question you are probably a year away from asking.
If a procurement document names SecNumCloud, buy it from OVHcloud directly. Google's route to that qualification is a French joint venture with Thales, which works and which also demonstrates the point of this page.
And if BigQuery is genuinely the reason you are on Google Cloud, do not move yet. Configure the free EU Data Boundary package, read what it disables, price the premium package that keeps support inside the Union, and make the decision with those three numbers in front of you instead of a principle.
Frequently Asked Questions
UpCloud if you want plain, fast infrastructure from a Finnish company with a published uptime guarantee. Hetzner if the driver is the bill. Scaleway if you need a catalogue wide enough to hold managed Kubernetes, object storage, databases and GPUs in one EU account. OVHcloud if your requirement names SecNumCloud, because it holds the qualification directly rather than through a joint venture.
Not by default. Google's Assured Workloads documentation states that EU Data Boundary workloads have their support cases routed to global support personnel. The package that sets support access controls to EU support personnel based in the EU is EU Data Boundary and Support, which is in the premium tier. There is also EU Data Boundary with Access Justifications for organisations that need to see the stated reason for each access.
The basic one is. EU Data Boundary sits in the Assured Workloads free tier and sets data location controls to support EU-only regions, which is a genuinely useful guardrail at no cost. The packages that control support personnel and access justifications are premium. So location is free and people are paid, which is the opposite of how most buyers assume it works.
Named services and features, listed per package. In the EU Data Boundary package the documentation calls out that Gemini in BigQuery is not supported by Assured Workloads, that Google Cloud MCP servers are not supported for EU Data Boundary products unless otherwise noted, that Cloud Logging's SQL-based alerting policies feature is disabled, and that Data Catalog is deprecated and disabled. Check the current list for your package before designing anything around a feature.
S3NS is a French company describing itself as an alliance between Thales and Google Cloud, operating three data centres in France as a certified Google Cloud partner. Its PREMI3NS offering is a public cloud built on Google Cloud technology and qualified SecNumCloud 3.2 by ANSSI, with CRYPT3NS covering additional encryption requirements. In practice it is how a French public body buys Google technology under French law.
It can be used compliantly, with a data processing agreement, EU regions, Assured Workloads control packages and a long certification list. What none of that changes is that Google LLC is established in Mountain View, so a US disclosure order reaches the company. That is why the sovereign answers in France and Germany are structured as separate European operators rather than as settings inside Google Cloud.
Not like for like. The realistic routes are ClickHouse or DuckDB on your own infrastructure for analytical queries, or a managed Postgres with careful modelling if the volumes are smaller than you think. Both are more operational work than BigQuery and neither is serverless in the sense that matters. If BigQuery is the reason your company can answer questions quickly, treat replacing it as its own project with its own owner.
For plain compute, typically several times over, and the difference is structural rather than promotional. Hetzner publishes a price of about €4.51 a month for two vCPUs, four gigabytes of RAM and forty gigabytes of SSD, with no sustained-use calculations, committed-use discounts or per-project quota arithmetic to model. Where Google is hard to beat is the managed data services, and those are also the ones with no European equivalent.
Compute Engine, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL move in weeks. GKE moves in weeks if your manifests are ordinary and in months if they lean on Google-specific controllers, Workload Identity and the Anthos-shaped parts. BigQuery, Pub/Sub and Dataflow are not a migration but a redesign of how your data moves, and a team that budgets for the first two and discovers the third halfway through will stall in exactly the wrong place.
Who worked on this review
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