Best European Alternatives to Google Workspace

Why people leave Google Workspace

Nobody stays on Google Workspace because Docs is the best word processor. They stay because mail, calendar, files, documents, video calls, chat and a single sign-on all come from one supplier, share one identity, and bill on one invoice. That bundle is the product, and it is also the thing that makes leaving feel impossible.

The two reasons organisations start looking are unglamorous. The first is the ceiling: Business Starter, Business Standard and Business Plus can each be bought for a maximum of 300 users, so growth past that number is not an upgrade but a negotiation. The second is the per-seat maths, which at €13.60 a head for Business Standard turns a hundred-person organisation into a €16,000 annual line item that grows every time you hire.

What is not a good reason, and gets repeated anyway, is that Workspace keeps European data in America. It does not have to. Google's data regions policy is included with Business Standard and Business Plus, not held back for Enterprise, and it covers the core services at rest. If storage location is your objection, the fix costs one plan change, and the interesting argument lies elsewhere.

• Three hundred users is a wall, not a step Google states the limit plainly: the Business plans can be purchased for at most 300 users, and only Enterprise has no upper bound. A growing company therefore hits a discontinuity rather than a price rise, moving from a published price list to a sales conversation at exactly the moment it has least time for one. None of the European options here has a headcount at which the pricing model changes shape.
• You are buying storage you cannot move between people Business Starter gives 30GB per user, Standard 2TB and Plus 5TB. Storage is pooled at the organisation level on the higher plans but the plan itself is bought per seat, so the finance team with three shared drives and the intern with an empty account cost the same. Self-hosted suites invert this completely: capacity is a disk you buy once and headcount costs nothing.
• The identity is the lock, not the documents Google accounts are the login for the intranet, the HR system, the expense tool and half the SaaS the company uses. That is why suite migrations stall where document migrations do not: moving Docs is a weekend, moving the identity provider touches every system anybody signed into with a Google button. Price the SSO work before you price the seats, because it is usually the larger number.
• Regions are included from Business Standard, and jurisdiction is not sold at all Credit where it is due: data regions arrives at €13.60 per user per month rather than being reserved for the largest customers, and it covers the responses, files and documents at rest. What no plan sells is the thing behind it. Google LLC is established in Mountain View, so a valid US order reaches the company whichever region the dropdown says. Logs and cached content also sit outside the policy on every tier.

What you have to replace, not just match

Count the products before you compare anything, because Workspace is seven and the tools on this page are between one and five of them.

Mail. Calendar. Contacts. File storage and sharing. Document editing. Video meetings. Chat. Add single sign-on if your Google accounts log people into anything else, which they almost certainly do. A replacement that covers documents brilliantly and nothing else has not replaced Workspace; it has replaced one seventh of it and left you with six subscriptions to arrange.

Only Nextcloud on this page attempts the whole thing in one installation. OnlyOffice and Collabora Online replace the editing layer and expect storage underneath, which may be Nextcloud or may be something you already run. CryptPad replaces the smallest slice of all and gives the strongest guarantee in exchange. Mail is the one nobody here covers: whichever route you take, a European mail provider is a separate decision and a separate invoice.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to Google Workspace

What actually breaks when you switch

Identity is the migration everyone underestimates. Google accounts are not just a login to Gmail; they are the Sign in with Google button on the expense system, the HR portal, the analytics dashboard and the six SaaS tools nobody in IT provisioned. Inventory those first by exporting the list of third-party apps with account access, because every one of them needs a new login path before the Google accounts close.

Calendar invitations are the second surprise and they fail quietly. Every recurring meeting with a Meet link in the body keeps that link after you migrate, and external attendees keep clicking it. Recreate recurring series in the new calendar rather than importing them, and send a single message to external contacts with the new joining details instead of waiting for someone to sit alone in an abandoned meeting room.

The third is the shared drives that outsiders depend on. Clients, auditors, agencies and freelancers have bookmarked folders they access weekly, and the moment permissions move they lose them without a message. Ask each department for the list of external parties with standing access before you start, and hand that list new addresses on the first day rather than the last.

Workspace has European regions on a mid-tier plan. So what is left to fix?

Two things, and they are different sizes. The smaller one is coverage: data regions governs the core services at rest, and Google says explicitly that logs and cached content fall outside it regardless of plan. That is a narrow gap and most organisations can live with it.

The larger one is that a region is a storage instruction given to a company in Mountain View. Google LLC remains subject to United States legal process for data it controls, and no dropdown in the admin console changes which country can compel the company. An organisation whose risk assessment names foreign disclosure orders is not helped by a region; an organisation answering a procurement question about storage location is helped completely.

Work out which of those two you are, because the answer determines whether this page is useful to you at all. If it is the second, the cheapest correct action is to enable data regions and stop reading.

What does a suite migration actually cost, as opposed to a document migration?

The documents are the cheap part and everyone budgets for them anyway. Google Takeout exports mail as MBOX, calendars as ICS, contacts as vCard and Drive contents as files, and every destination here ingests those formats. A few hundred gigabytes is a week of transfers and some waiting.

The expensive parts are identity and habit. Every service that offered a Sign in with Google button has to be repointed, every shared calendar invitation with a Meet link in it stops working, and every external party who has been sharing a Drive folder with you for three years needs telling. None of that appears in a per-seat comparison, and all of it lands on the same two people.

The realistic sequence is to move one layer at a time: storage and documents first, then calendar and contacts, then mail, then identity. Organisations that try to switch everything on one weekend are the ones that switch back.

Can a self-hosted suite really run mail as well?

It can, and for most organisations it should not. Nextcloud has a mail client and will connect to any IMAP account, but running the mail server itself means owning deliverability: reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, reputation monitoring and the day your invoices land in a customer's spam folder.

The pragmatic European arrangement separates the two. Take a European mail provider for the mailbox and a self-hosted or European-hosted suite for everything else, and accept two invoices instead of one. That is less elegant than Google's single bill and considerably less fragile than a mail server nobody has patched since it was installed.

It also means the hardest part of leaving Workspace is a decision you can make independently and early, rather than the thing that blocks the whole project.

Which of these can an organisation of fifteen people actually run?

All of them, but not all of them unaided. Nextcloud is the most capable and the most demanding: a managed Nextcloud instance from a European hosting provider gives a small organisation the whole suite with somebody else holding the pager, and that is the version most fifteen-person companies should buy rather than a server in a cupboard.

OnlyOffice sells a hosted cloud at roughly €4 per user per month, which is the least operational work on this page and still a third of Business Standard. Collabora Online without a platform underneath it is not a product a small team should be assembling from parts.

CryptPad is the easiest of all, because the hosted instance needs nothing from you and a self-hosted one is a single Docker deployment. It is also the narrowest, so it tends to sit beside a suite rather than instead of one.

Which one to pick

If you want to leave the bundle rather than trim it, Nextcloud is the answer on this page and managed European hosting is the version of that answer most organisations should buy. It is the only option where headcount stops appearing in the price and the 300-user ceiling stops existing.

If you want the saving without the project, OnlyOffice cuts the per-seat number to roughly a third and plugs into whatever you decide about storage later. It is the least disruptive move here and it leaves mail, calendar and meetings exactly where they are.

If you already operate a file platform, Collabora Online is a configuration rather than a migration, provided a UK-registered supplier passes your procurement rules.

And if your objection was only ever about where the data sits, turn data regions on at Business Standard, write down that logs and cached content fall outside it, and spend the migration budget on something that buys more. That is a real answer and this page would be dishonest not to give it.