Best European Alternatives to Google Sheets

Why people leave Google Sheets

Google Sheets won because of two decisions taken twenty years ago: it costs nothing on a personal account, and sharing is a link. No install, no licence, no version conflict, and two people can type in the same cell range while talking on the phone. That combination is still unmatched, and any page claiming a European tool is cheaper has not understood what it is comparing against.

So people do not leave Sheets to save money. They leave at the point where a spreadsheet stopped being a spreadsheet: when the tab called "clients" became the client list, when the sheet with the salaries was shared with one person too many, when someone sorted a column and broke six months of rows.

The uncomfortable part is that this is not a Google failure. Google is explicit that protecting a sheet or a range is not a security measure, and that you should only share spreadsheets with people you trust. That is an accurate description of what a spreadsheet is. The problem is that half the organisations reading this are running payroll, pipeline and inventory in one.

• Protection is not permission, and Google says so The help documentation for protected sheets and ranges states that this should not be used as a security measure, because people can print, copy, paste, import and export copies of a protected spreadsheet. Anyone with view access can duplicate the file and unhide whatever was hidden. There is no row-level access, no column-level access and no way to let someone update their own line without seeing everyone else's. Every tool on this page can do at least one of those.
• The ceiling is real and it arrives sideways A Sheet stops at 10 million cells or 18,278 columns. Long before that, performance falls off a cliff on anything with lookups across tabs. If your answer is Connected Sheets over BigQuery, note the limits there too: an extract holds up to 500,000 rows or 5 million cells, and a pivot table over connected data stops at 200,000 rows. At that size the spreadsheet is a window onto the data, not the place the data lives.
• Nothing enforces what a column contains A date column happily accepts a date, a note, a hyphen and an empty string, and the sheet will not complain until a formula does something silently wrong three weeks later. Data validation is advisory and can be pasted straight through. Typed fields, which every tool here has, are the single biggest quality difference when more than one person maintains the same table.
• The company spreadsheet usually lives in a private account Google LLC in Mountain View is the jurisdictional answer and it is the least interesting one on this page, because the more common exposure is closer to home: the file that runs a process sits in one employee's Drive, shared by a link that works for anyone who has it, with no administrator, no audit trail and no retention rule. When that person leaves, so does the document. That risk is structural, and it is not solved by moving to another spreadsheet.

What you have to replace, not just match

Sheets does three separate jobs and only one of them should move.

The first is the scratchpad: a quick calculation, a list for a meeting, a paste of some numbers to see the shape of them. Keep that in Sheets. Nothing here is better at it and nothing here is free at it in the same way.

The second is the register — the shared table that several people update and something downstream depends on. That is what this page is about, and it is the job a spreadsheet was never designed to hold.

The third is reporting over a real database, where Sheets is the viewer for something living in a warehouse. If that is your case, the tool to change is the viewer, and the tools here that connect straight to an existing database are the ones worth trying.

How each alternative compares to Google Sheets

What actually breaks when you switch

The formulas are the migration. Data lands cleanly through CSV or XLSX, and then you discover how much of the spreadsheet was logic: lookups across tabs, an IMPORTRANGE from a file somebody else owns, an ARRAYFORMULA that fills a column nobody can explain. Rebuild the ones that matter and delete the rest, because roughly half of them are calculating something no one reads.

The second problem is everyone outside the company. A Sheets link works for a client, a contractor and an accountant with no account and no conversation. Every tool here asks that person to sign in, and for externally shared tables that friction is the whole reason the sheet existed. Forms and public views cover some of it; check yours before committing.

And expect the old file to survive. Spreadsheets do not get decommissioned, they get forgotten, so the version that matters is the one still being edited six weeks later. Set a date, make the Sheet read-only on that date, and put a link to the new home in cell A1 — otherwise you will run both for a year.

Will moving off Sheets cost me money?

Yes, and it should be said first. A personal Google account gives you Sheets for nothing, and even inside Workspace the bill covers mail, storage, meetings and the rest — the list prices are €6.80 per user per month for Starter, €13.60 for Standard and €21.10 for Plus, usually with an introductory discount on top, and none of that is a line item for spreadsheets.

The tools here start at zero for small use and then charge per person: €7 to €14 a user at SeaTable, $10 to $18 at Baserow, $8 to $24 at Grist, all billed annually. For a team of ten that is somewhere between €700 and €3,000 a year that you currently do not pay.

The way to justify it is not efficiency, which is unmeasurable, but the specific thing you cannot do today. If nobody can name that thing, stay on Sheets — it is free, everyone knows it, and no migration has ever improved a spreadsheet nobody had a problem with.

Which of these still feels like a spreadsheet?

Grist, and only Grist. Formulas live in cells, a column can be computed from other columns, and the mental model of typing an expression and seeing a number is intact. The difference is that the formula language is Python rather than a spreadsheet dialect, which trades familiarity for the ability to write something longer than one line.

Baserow and SeaTable are databases that look like grids. Fields have types, records have links, and views are saved queries over the same rows. That is more robust and it is not a spreadsheet: if your work is fundamentally arithmetic across a sheet, you will feel the change immediately.

The practical test is whether your Sheet has more formulas than rows of reference data. If it does, you want Grist. If it is mostly a list that people maintain, you want one of the other two.

Can any of them stop one person from seeing a column?

All three, in different ways, and this is the thing Sheets cannot do at all. Grist has access rules that grant or deny by table, by column and by row, including rules that depend on who is logged in, so a salesperson sees their own accounts and nobody else's in the same document.

Baserow offers role-based, field-level and view-level permissions on its higher plans, which covers the common case of hiding a cost column from people who need the rest of the table. SeaTable applies permissions to rows and columns within a base in the same spirit.

None of this exists in a spreadsheet, and no amount of protected ranges gets you there, because a viewer can copy the file. If the reason you are reading this page is a salary column, the shortest honest route is any of the three.

What do I give up that I will actually miss?

Real-time co-editing at Google's standard. Several people typing in one table at once, with cursors, is something Sheets does better than anything else here, and the gap is noticeable.

The formula estate. IMPORTRANGE, QUERY, ARRAYFORMULA and the add-ons built on them have no direct equivalent, and neither does Apps Script. A sheet held together by twenty named ranges and a trigger is a rewrite, not an import.

And the fact that everybody already knows it. Sheets needs no training, no accounts and no explanation to a contractor you hired this morning. Every alternative costs you a conversation at the start of every collaboration with someone outside the company.

Which one to pick

If the sheet you are worried about is full of formulas, Grist is the only one that keeps that way of working, and the access rules are a genuine answer to the thing Google tells you protected ranges do not do. Run it yourself or use a European instance, because the company behind it is in New York.

If the sheet has become a register that several people update, Baserow is the better shape: typed fields, forms, an API, and a Dutch company on the contract.

If the deciding factor is getting a department moved without a budget conversation, SeaTable is the pragmatic choice — free for up to 25 people, German, with Python where Apps Script used to be.

And if none of the problems described here are yours, keep using Sheets. It is free, it is excellent at what it was built for, and the worst outcome on this page is paying per seat for something a spreadsheet was already doing well.