Best European Alternatives to Microsoft 365
Looking for a European alternative to Microsoft 365? While dominant in business, Microsoft 365 processes your documents on US servers and is subject to American surveillance laws.
European office suites offer compatible document editing with data stored exclusively in Europe.
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 Microsoft 365
OnlyOffice
Full Microsoft Office compatibility with privacy
Collabora Online
LibreOffice-based suite for enterprise
SoftMaker Office
German office suite with MS Office compatibility
Key takeaways
- The EU Data Boundary is real: for EU and EFTA customers, Microsoft 365 Customer Data and pseudonymised personal data are stored and processed across thirty-one countries, so the claim that European data automatically sits in America is out of date.
- Microsoft's own transfers document lists the exceptions, including security operations data consolidated primarily in the United States and consulting engagement data held in US datacentres.
- Multi-Geo customers are outside the boundary even when the tenant is listed in an EU or EFTA country.
- Allowing Anthropic models with Microsoft's generative AI services means Customer Data is processed in the United States, while storage remains inside the boundary.
- Customer Lockbox requires your approval before Microsoft staff reach your data, which is a real control and also proof that the access it governs exists.
Why people leave Microsoft 365
Microsoft has done more about European data than any other American provider, and a page that ignores that is not worth reading. The EU Data Boundary is a real commitment: for Microsoft 365 customers whose sign-up location is in the EU or EFTA, Customer Data and pseudonymised personal data are stored and processed inside a boundary of thirty-one countries, and professional services data is stored at rest there too.
The reason to keep reading is the second document. Microsoft publishes, in some detail, the circumstances under which data still leaves that boundary, and the list is longer than the commitment implies.
Security operations move pseudonymised personal data to any Azure region worldwide and consolidate it primarily in the United States. Consulting engagement data sits in American datacentres and is out of scope entirely.
Preview services and free trials are not included. Directory data, including usernames and email addresses, may be replicated outside. Support case titles and voicemails may sit outside. And if you allow Anthropic models with Microsoft's generative AI services, Customer Data is processed by Anthropic in the United States.
None of that is hidden and none of it is scandalous. It is simply the shape of the arrangement: the boundary is a set of promises made by a company in Redmond, with a published list of the times they do not apply, and Microsoft decides what goes on that list. If you want the boundary to be a property of your architecture rather than of someone's policy document, that is what this page is for.
- The exception list is where the decision actually lives Read the transfers document rather than the announcement. Multi-Geo customers are outside the boundary even with an EU tenant. Object identifiers leave for usage counting and licence validation. Network routing may carry traffic outside for resilience. In rare cases limited Customer Data is transferred for security investigations. Every one of those is defensible on its own, and together they mean the boundary is a policy with carve-outs rather than a wall.
- The controls exist because the access exists Microsoft offers Customer Lockbox, which requires your explicit approval before Microsoft personnel can reach Customer Data during a service operation. That is a genuinely good control and it is also the clearest statement of the underlying situation: it is needed because the provider can otherwise reach the data. A system where the operator holds no readable copy needs no such approval workflow.
- A boundary is geography, and the order follows the company The EU Data Boundary answers where. It cannot answer who, because Microsoft Corporation is established in Redmond and a valid US order reaches the company regardless of which of the thirty-one countries the disks are in. For a procurement questionnaire about storage location the boundary is a complete answer. For a risk assessment about foreign disclosure orders it is not the right instrument, and no configuration makes it one.
- You are renting a moving target The consumer ladder alone now runs Personal at £8.49 a month or £84.99 a year, Family at £10.49 or £104.99, and Premium at £18.99 or £189.99, with AI features the main difference between the rungs. Subscription pricing is not a complaint in itself, but it does mean the thing you evaluated is not the thing you will be paying for in three years, and the exceptions document is revised on the same schedule.
What you have to replace, not just match
Microsoft 365 is a tenant before it is a set of applications, and that is the order to think in.
The tenant is identity: accounts, groups, conditional access, the thing every other system authenticates against. Then there are the services — Exchange for mail, SharePoint and OneDrive for files, Teams for chat and meetings — and only then the applications people talk about, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The suites on this page replace the third layer well, the second layer partially, and the first layer not at all.
That is why a document suite is the easy decision and the tenant is the project. Decide early whether you are leaving Microsoft 365 or only leaving the editors, because a company that keeps Exchange and Teams while moving documents to OnlyOffice has made a sensible, limited change — and a company that intends to close the tenant has a twelve-month programme involving identity, mail and every application with a Microsoft sign-in button.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | OnlyOffice | Riga, Latvia | Free desktop and self-hosted / cloud from about €4/user/month | EU (Latvia) |
| #2 | Collabora Online | Cambridge, United Kingdom | Free Community Edition / Enterprise on request | Wherever you host it |
| #3 | CryptPad | Paris, France | Free (50MB) / from about €5/month (5GB) | EU (France) |
| #4 | SoftMaker Office | Nuremberg, Germany | Free version (FreeOffice) / from about €29.90/year | EU (Germany) |
How each alternative compares to Microsoft 365
- Which law reaches it. EU (Latvia). Microsoft 365 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. EU, or self-hosted.
- Source code. Open source, where Microsoft 365 is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Organisations that want Office-grade editing with the server under their own control
The argument for OnlyOffice on this page is structural rather than about features. Run the Docs server on your own infrastructure or with a European host, and the entire question this page is about disappears: there is no provider holding Customer Data, no transfers document to read, no exception list revised in February and no Multi-Geo footnote that takes you back out of scope.
It also happens to be the European suite that survives contact with a Microsoft 365 estate. Microsoft formats are what it saves by default rather than what it imports, the interface is close enough to the ribbon that retraining is measured in hours, and the same editor runs as free desktop applications, as a hosted cloud from Ascensio System SIA in Riga, or self-hosted behind your own storage.
What it does not do is the tenant. There is no mail, no Teams equivalent and no identity provider, so this replaces the applications and leaves the harder half of Microsoft 365 in place. The free self-hosted Community Edition also stops at twenty simultaneous connections, which decides the deployment shape for anything larger than a department.
What OnlyOffice does better than Microsoft 365
- Can run entirely on infrastructure you control, so no transfer commitment has to be trusted or interpreted
- A Latvian operating company, so the supplier is not subject to United States legal process
- Microsoft formats are native, so the existing document estate needs no conversion on the way in or out
- Free desktop editors work offline with no account, where Microsoft 365 assumes a signed-in tenant
- No AI service in the document path unless you add one, so there is no separate processing question to assess
Where OnlyOffice is a step down from Microsoft 365
- No mail, calendar, chat, meetings or identity, so the tenant remains
- The free self-hosted edition is capped at twenty simultaneous connections
- Self-hosting means you own patching, backups and uptime that Microsoft performed invisibly
- A far smaller add-in and integration ecosystem than Microsoft 365 has accumulated
Standout against Microsoft 365. It is the only option here that gives you co-authoring on Microsoft formats while leaving no provider in the chain to make commitments about.
- Which law reaches it. Wherever you host it. Microsoft 365 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. Your own infrastructure, or European managed hosting.
- Source code. Open source, where Microsoft 365 is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Organisations already running a file platform who want browser editing on top of it
Collabora Online is the closest structural equivalent to Office for the web, and it speaks the same protocol: WOPI, the interface Microsoft's own browser editors use to talk to a document store. Point it at Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile or an enterprise content system and users get browser-based co-authoring without a Microsoft account existing anywhere in the path.
That matters for the specific organisation this page attracts. If the reason you are reading is that a Microsoft 365 tenant brings a policy document you did not write, Collabora replaces the browser-editing layer without asking you to adopt another one — you decide the country, the host and the retention, and there is no sign-up location determining your scope.
The trade-offs are consistent and worth stating flatly. It is a server product, so offline editing on a laptop is not what it does. Complex Word layouts render well rather than exactly, because the engine descends from LibreOffice. And Collabora Productivity Ltd is registered in Cambridge, outside the EU since Brexit, even though you choose where the software runs.
What Collabora Online does better than Microsoft 365
- Browser co-authoring with no tenant, no sign-up location and no scope document governing your data
- You decide the hosting country outright, rather than relying on a commitment about a thirty-one country boundary
- The Community Edition carries no licence cost, against a per-user subscription that changes annually
- ODF is the native format, so the archive survives without any vendor needing to remain in business
Where Collabora Online is a step down from Microsoft 365
- A server product, so it needs storage underneath and is not for offline work on a laptop
- Complicated OOXML documents render slightly less faithfully than Microsoft 365 or OnlyOffice
- Collabora Productivity Ltd is registered in Cambridge, so the supplier itself is not established in the EU
- No mail, calendar, chat or meetings, so the tenant is untouched
Standout against Microsoft 365. It uses the same protocol Microsoft built for its own web editors, which makes it the rare replacement that slots into the architecture rather than asking you to change it.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Microsoft 365 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. France.
- Source code. Open source, where Microsoft 365 is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: The documents where the right answer is that nobody at the provider can read them
Microsoft offers Customer Lockbox so that its own personnel cannot reach your Customer Data during a service operation without your explicit approval. It is a good control, and it is also the cleanest description of the problem: an approval workflow exists because the access exists. CryptPad removes the access instead of governing it.
Built by XWiki SAS in Paris, it encrypts in the browser and stores ciphertext, so several people can edit the same document while the server holds nothing readable. There is no boundary to define, no transfers document to check and no rare-circumstance clause, because the provider has nothing to transfer that anyone could read.
It replaces the least of anything on this page and should be treated accordingly. No mail, no calendar, no shared drive with inherited permissions, small storage allowances on the hosted plans, and no recovery whatsoever if a key is lost. Used for the fraction of a document estate that would genuinely damage the organisation if it leaked, it is the strongest control available; used as a Microsoft 365 replacement, it will disappoint.
What CryptPad does better than Microsoft 365
- The operator cannot read the content at all, so no approval workflow is needed to govern its access
- Open source and self-hostable, so the guarantee can be inspected rather than accepted
- A French company with French hosting on the public instance, and no US parent anywhere in the chain
- Documents, sheets, slides, kanban and forms in one encrypted workspace, with no account required for the person you share with
- Free at a small allowance and free without limit when self-hosted, against a per-user subscription
Where CryptPad is a step down from Microsoft 365
- Replaces a small fraction of Microsoft 365: no mail, calendar, chat or meetings
- Search across your own documents is limited by the encryption that protects them
- Microsoft format fidelity is not what it optimises for
- Lose the key and the document is gone, with no administrator able to recover it
Standout against Microsoft 365. It is the only tool here where the interesting question — who at the provider can read this — has no answer rather than a procedure.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Microsoft 365 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. Local — no cloud required.
- Source code. Closed source, as Microsoft 365 is.
Best for: Teams whose documents never needed to be in a cloud in the first place
SoftMaker Office is the answer for organisations that realise, on reading the transfers document, that most of their documents never had to be in anybody's cloud. TextMaker, PlanMaker and Presentations run on the machine, use DOCX, XLSX and PPTX as their default formats, and involve no processor, no tenant, no region and no boundary, because there is no service.
SoftMaker Software GmbH has been shipping from Nuremberg since 1987, and the practical draws are speed on ordinary hardware and one product covering Windows, Mac and Linux. FreeOffice, the free edition, is free for business as well as personal use, which makes evaluating this a matter of an afternoon rather than a procurement cycle.
Two things to weigh honestly. There is no real-time co-authoring, because local software cannot provide it, so a team that lives in simultaneously edited documents should look at the other three.
And the paid product is now an annual licence — €39.90 for the first year, €49.90 a year afterwards, or €4.99 monthly — covering five computers in a household or a single computer for a company, so it is a subscription of its own rather than an escape from subscriptions.
What SoftMaker Office does better than Microsoft 365
- Nothing is processed by a provider, so there is no boundary, no exception list and no transfers document to read
- A German company answerable under EU law, with no US parent in the ownership chain
- Microsoft formats are the defaults, so the existing archive opens and saves unchanged
- One product covers Windows, Mac and Linux, so a mixed estate does not need a second supplier
- FreeOffice is free for business use, so the evaluation costs nothing
Where SoftMaker Office is a step down from Microsoft 365
- No real-time co-authoring at all, which is the feature Microsoft 365 is bought for
- No mail, calendar, chat or meetings, and no cloud storage of any kind
- The paid edition is an annual licence, and one computer per company licence rather than five
- Closed source, so the local behaviour is a promise rather than something inspectable
Standout against Microsoft 365. It is the only entry here where the correct answer to every data-residency question is that there is no data leaving the device to ask about.
What actually breaks when you switch
Co-authoring is the habit that breaks first and the one nobody costs. In a Microsoft 365 organisation people stop attaching documents to email and start sending links, and every one of these alternatives changes what that link is and who can open it. Pick the replacement for that specific behaviour before you pick a word processor, because a team that loses shared editing quietly reverts to attachments and version numbers in filenames within a month.
The second is the estate nobody documented. Power Automate flows triggered by a file landing in a SharePoint library, Excel workbooks pulling from Power Query, a Teams tab pinned to a shared document, a Power BI report built on a sheet: none of that appears in an application inventory and all of it stops. Ask each department what breaks if a specific library becomes read-only for a week, and run that as an experiment rather than as a question.
The third is the tenant itself. Closing a Microsoft 365 tenant touches mail routing, MFA enrolment, device management and every application with a Microsoft sign-in button, and it is a programme rather than a migration. Replacing the editors first is the honest way to start: it is reversible, it produces a real saving, and it tells you within a quarter whether the larger project is worth running.
If the EU Data Boundary is genuine, what is actually left to worry about?
Three things, in descending order of size. The largest is that a boundary is a commitment about location made by a company that is not located inside it. Microsoft Corporation remains subject to United States legal process, and the thirty-one-country boundary does not alter which state can compel the company holding the keys.
The second is the exceptions, which are published rather than hidden and are still exceptions. Security operations transfer pseudonymised personal data and professional services data to any Azure region worldwide, consolidated primarily in the United States, and in rare situations limited Customer Data goes with it. Preview services and free trials are outside the boundary. Directory data, support case titles and support voicemails may be held outside.
The third is that the list belongs to Microsoft. Every page of it carries its own last-updated date, it has already been revised more than once since it was published, and it will be revised again — reasonably, and without being negotiated with you. If your requirement is that the arrangement cannot change without your consent, only running the software yourself satisfies it.
Does using Copilot change the answer?
It changes which document you have to read. Microsoft states that when customers allow the use of Anthropic models with Microsoft Generative AI Services, Customer Data is processed by Anthropic in the United States, while the storage of that data stays inside the boundary. Processing and storage are separate commitments and the difference is easy to miss.
That is not an accusation; it is the ordinary consequence of buying an AI feature that calls a model built somewhere else. But it means an organisation that satisfied its data protection officer with the boundary and then switched on an AI feature has changed its own answer without generating any paperwork.
The alternatives on this page have a blunt advantage here: three of the four have no AI service in the path at all, and the fourth encrypts so the question cannot arise.
What can I actually leave without leaving the tenant?
The editors, easily, and it is the migration most organisations should do first because it is reversible. Word, Excel and PowerPoint can be replaced on the desktop or in the browser while Exchange, Teams and the identity stay exactly where they are, and the file formats do not even change if you pick a suite that uses DOCX natively.
File storage is the next layer and it is harder but not dramatic: OneDrive and SharePoint document libraries export, and a European file platform with one of these editors attached covers most of what a document library was doing.
Mail, Teams and identity are the tenant proper, and none of them are solved on this page. Be explicit with yourself about which project you are running, because a half-migration framed as a full one produces a year of disappointment and two sets of licences.
Is self-hosting really a better answer than a boundary?
It is a different answer, and only better if you can staff it. A server you operate has no exception list, no transfers document and no provider with access — the questions this page is about simply do not arise, because there is nobody to ask them of.
It replaces them with questions of your own: patching, backups, disaster recovery, and the person who is on call when document editing stops on a Friday. An unpatched self-hosted server is a worse outcome than a managed cloud with a published exception list, and pretending otherwise is how organisations end up back on Microsoft after eighteen months.
The route that works for most mid-sized organisations is a European provider hosting the open-source suite for them: no US parent in the chain, no boundary policy to interpret, and somebody else holding the pager.
Which one to pick
If your objection is where the data sits, the EU Data Boundary is a better answer than most organisations realise and this page will not talk you out of it. Read the transfers document, note the Multi-Geo exclusion and the security operations clause, and decide whether they matter to you.
If your objection is that the exception list belongs to the supplier, OnlyOffice is the strongest answer here: Office-grade editing on Microsoft formats, running on infrastructure you choose, with no commitments to interpret.
If you already run a file platform, Collabora Online replaces Office for the web through the same protocol Microsoft designed for it, provided a UK-registered supplier fits your rules.
And if the honest situation is that a subset of your documents is sensitive and the rest never needed a cloud, run CryptPad for the first group and SoftMaker for the second. That is a less tidy answer than one suite for everything, and for a lot of organisations it is the correct one.
Frequently Asked Questions
OnlyOffice if you want the closest match to the Office applications and the option to run the editing server yourself. Collabora Online if you already operate a file platform and want browser-based editing attached to it. CryptPad if the documents should be unreadable to whoever hosts them. SoftMaker if you want local software on the machines and no tenant at all. None of them replaces Exchange, Teams or your identity provider, which is the part to plan separately.
For the most part, yes. Under the EU Data Boundary, customers whose Microsoft 365 sign-up location is in the EU or EFTA have Customer Data and pseudonymised personal data stored and processed within a boundary covering the EU and EFTA countries, with professional services data stored at rest there. Microsoft publishes the exceptions separately, and they include security operations data consolidated primarily in the United States and consulting engagement data held in US datacentres.
It does not, and the documentation makes no such claim. The boundary is a commitment about where data is stored and processed. The CLOUD Act reaches a US company for data under its control regardless of where that data sits, and Microsoft Corporation is established in Redmond. If your requirement is about storage location the boundary answers it fully; if it is about which state can compel disclosure, a non-US provider is the only thing that changes the answer.
Microsoft's own transfers document lists it. Security operations move pseudonymised personal data and professional services data to any Azure region worldwide, consolidated primarily in the United States, with limited Customer Data in rare investigations. Consulting engagement data sits in US datacentres. Preview services and free trials are excluded. Directory data such as usernames and email addresses may be replicated outside, as may support case titles and voicemails, and network routing can carry traffic outside for resilience.
No. Microsoft states that customers who have purchased Multi-Geo Capabilities are not in scope for the EU Data Boundary, even if the tenant is listed as being in an EU or EFTA country. That is worth checking before anybody relies on the boundary in a compliance document, because Multi-Geo is bought precisely by the international organisations most likely to have made that assumption.
It depends which model is behind it. Microsoft documents that when customers allow the use of Anthropic models with Microsoft Generative AI Services, Customer Data is processed by Anthropic in the United States while storage remains inside the boundary. Processing and storage are separate commitments, so an organisation relying on the boundary should treat enabling an AI feature as a change that needs its own assessment rather than a setting.
Yes, and it is the sensible first step. The editors can be swapped while Exchange, Teams and the identity provider stay in place, and if you pick a suite that uses DOCX and XLSX natively the file formats do not change either. That gets you a reversible change with a visible saving, and it tells you what the organisation actually misses before you commit to a tenant migration.
On the UK consumer price list, Microsoft 365 Personal is £8.49 a month or £84.99 a year, Family is £10.49 or £104.99, and Premium is £18.99 or £189.99, with AI capability the main difference between them. Business plans are priced per user per month and quoted separately. The number worth comparing is not the licence but the licence multiplied by headcount and by the years you expect to renew.
Three things, and they are the reasons migrations stall. Exchange and Outlook together are still the best mail and calendar arrangement in corporate software. Teams puts chat, meetings and telephony in one place that everyone you deal with already has. And the tenant is the identity provider for everything else you run. This page replaces documents; none of it replaces those.
Who worked on this review
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