Best European Alternatives to Netlify

Why people leave Netlify

Start by correcting the thing that brought most people here. Netlify is widely described as charging per team member, and it no longer does: the pricing page lists Pro at $20 a month with unlimited members, Personal at $9, and a free tier capped by a credit limit rather than a head count. If you were leaving because adding a fifth developer would cost another twenty dollars, that reason expired.

The cost that is real is the meter underneath. Netlify prices in credits: 20 credits per gigabyte of bandwidth, 15 credits for each production deploy, 10 credits per GB-hour of compute, 2 credits per 10,000 requests. Free gets 300 credits, Personal 1,000, Pro 3,000. A site that gets popular does not cost more because the team grew; it costs more because the meter runs, and the line that runs fastest is almost always bandwidth.

The other reason is the ordinary one. Netlify, Inc. is a San Francisco company and lists AWS among its subprocessors, so the request logs, the form submissions and the build artefacts sit with an American provider under an American company. Unlike the pricing objection, that one has not changed.

• Bandwidth is the line that actually bites Twenty credits buys one gigabyte of delivery. On the Pro credit rate that works out at roughly thirteen cents a gigabyte, which is fine for a brochure site and painful for anything serving images or video. Bunny.net sells the same gigabyte from about one cent. That is not a rounding difference, it is an order of magnitude, and it is the single number that decides whether leaving Netlify saves money.
• One bundle, three products, one bill Netlify sells builds, edge delivery and serverless functions as one thing and meters them together. That is genuinely convenient and it means you cannot shop any of the three separately. In Europe those three are sold by different companies at commodity prices, and assembling them is a day of work that permanently changes the shape of the bill.
• The free tier has a ceiling you cannot see coming Three hundred credits is a limit rather than an allowance you top up by accident, which is better than a surprise invoice. It also means a modest traffic spike stops the site rather than billing you for it. Neither behaviour is wrong; both are worth knowing before you build something that matters on it.
• A US company holds the request logs Netlify is established in San Francisco and names AWS among its subprocessors. Every page request your visitors make, and every form they submit, is processed under that arrangement. For a marketing site that is a footnote. For a site with an account area, a contact form collecting health or legal details, or a public body's audience, it is the whole question.

What you have to replace, not just match

Netlify bundles four jobs, and the reason this migration feels harder than it is comes from treating them as one.

The first is the build: detect the framework, install, compile, publish atomically, keep the previous deploy for rollback. The second is delivery: a global cache, custom domains, certificates, redirects and headers. The third is the small backend that keeps a static site from needing a real one — Netlify Forms, Functions, Identity, Blobs. The fourth is the review workflow: a deploy preview URL per pull request.

Split those and the shopping list is short. deploybase covers the first, second and fourth in one product and has forms. Bunny.net does the second at commodity prices and nothing else.

Scaleway supplies the third with Serverless Functions and Object Storage. OVHcloud can hold all four under one French contract if you are willing to build more of it yourself. What no European option gives you is Netlify Identity, and that is the gap to plan around rather than argue with.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to Netlify

What actually breaks when you switch

Redirects and headers are the first thing to break and the last thing anyone checks. A Netlify configuration file carries redirect rules, proxy rewrites, custom headers and role-based access, and none of that syntax travels. Export the rules, count them, and reimplement them somewhere specific before the cutover, because a missing proxy rule looks exactly like a working site until someone hits the one path it covered.

Forms fail quietly. If submissions were going into Netlify's dashboard and an email notification, the email keeps arriving right up until the account closes and the stored submissions go with it. Export the submission history first, then decide where new ones land, then switch the DNS — in that order, because the reverse order loses data nobody notices for a month.

And keep the old site reachable for a while. Deploy preview URLs pasted into pull requests and design tickets stop resolving when the project is removed, and the team has been reading work through those links for as long as it has used Netlify. Paying for one more month while the links age out is cheaper than reconstructing what a reviewer was looking at.

Is Netlify expensive because of the seats?

No, and this is the most common mistake in the comparison. The pricing page puts Pro at $20 a month with unlimited members. Adding people to the team does not change the invoice.

What changes it is usage. Credits fund deploys at 15 each, compute at 10 per GB-hour, requests at 2 per 10,000 and bandwidth at 20 per gigabyte, against allowances of 300 on Free, 1,000 on Personal and 3,000 on Pro. A busy site consumes its allowance through bandwidth long before it does through anything else.

So do the sum on gigabytes served, not on head count. If you serve very little, Netlify is cheap and you should probably stay for reasons that have nothing to do with money.

What replaces Netlify Forms?

deploybase includes form handling, which is the only like-for-like answer on this page and the main reason it ranks first. A static site with a contact form keeps working with no backend.

Everywhere else you write a function. A Scaleway Serverless Function that validates a payload and sends an email is thirty lines and about as much ongoing maintenance as you would expect, which is to say a little more than none.

Check what your forms actually do first. Spam filtering, file uploads and submission storage are separate features, and teams routinely discover they were relying on all three after the migration rather than before.

Can I just put Bunny in front of what I already have?

Often yes, and it is the cheapest useful move available. Bunny Storage holds the built files and Bunny CDN serves them, which covers the delivery half of Netlify at roughly a tenth of the credit rate for bandwidth.

What Bunny will not do is build anything. You still need something that runs your build on push and uploads the output — a GitHub Actions workflow, a GitLab pipeline, or a small script on a Scaleway instance. That is the work, and it is a day rather than a quarter.

You also lose deploy previews unless you build them, which for a team doing design review through preview links is the real cost of this route.

What about Netlify Identity and the authentication it handled?

Nothing on this page replaces it, and saying so plainly is more useful than pretending otherwise. Netlify Identity gave a static site logins, roles and invitations without a backend, and that combination has no European equivalent in this list.

The realistic routes are a European identity provider wired into your own function, or moving the authenticated part of the site onto an application platform that has sessions. Either is a project with its own design decisions, not a configuration step.

If your Netlify site depends on Identity, sequence the work so authentication moves first and hosting moves second. Doing both at once is how a two-week migration becomes a two-month one.

Which one to pick

If your Netlify account is builds, previews, redirects and a contact form, deploybase is the recommendation without much qualification: same workflow, flat price, no American company left in the chain.

If you already have a CI pipeline and the bill is bandwidth, put Bunny.net in front of your built output and stop there. A gigabyte at about a cent against 20 credits is the whole business case, and you can make that change without touching how the site is built.

If the Netlify features you depend on are Functions rather than hosting, Scaleway is the destination, and you should expect to pair it with something else for delivery rather than asking it to be a platform.

And if your requirement was written by a procurement officer rather than a developer, OVHcloud is the one that answers it, with SecNumCloud on part of the range and a single French contract. Just do not expect it to feel like Netlify, because it is not trying to.