Best European Alternatives to Notion

Why people leave Notion

Notion is not really a note-taking app, which is why leaving it is harder than leaving one. Underneath every page sits a database, and the relations, rollups, filtered views and linked mentions that make a workspace useful are the part that has no equivalent anywhere else. People rarely leave because the writing experience got worse. They leave because they noticed how much of the company now only exists inside one vendor.

The obvious complaint has already been answered, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Notion now offers data residency in Frankfurt as well as Oregon, Tokyo and Seoul, so European pages can sit on European disks. It is an Enterprise feature, it covers data at rest, and the help page lists what stays outside your chosen region: account and usage data, anything handled by subprocessors, beta services, and Notion Calendar and Notion Mail.

What has not been answered is encryption. Notion has no mode in which the company cannot read your workspace, and the one encrypted product line it owned is gone: Notion Labs bought Skiff — end-to-end encrypted documents, mail, calendar and drive — on 9 February 2024 and closed all of it by 9 August 2024. If you were waiting for an encrypted Notion, the company bought one and switched it off.

• It bought the encrypted one and closed it Skiff was a small Californian product doing exactly what privacy-minded Notion users kept asking for: pages and mail the provider could not read. Notion acquired it on 9 February 2024 and Skiff announced a six-month sunset; the services were shut down on 9 August 2024, and what the complaints bought was not a reprieve but email forwarding, extended to twelve months and running to 9 February 2025. The Skiff team went on to build Notion Mail. The encryption did not come with them.
• Residency lives on one plan, with a list of exceptions The Frankfurt region is real and it works, but it is an Enterprise arrangement, and Notion publishes the carve-outs rather than hiding them: usage data, account information, subprocessor processing, beta features, Calendar and Mail. For a twelve-person startup on Plus, there is no European region to select at any price, which is a different situation from the one the marketing implies.
• The export is a conversion of the interesting part Notion exports Markdown and CSV, HTML, or PDF. Ordinary pages survive that intact. Databases come out as a table of text, so relations become names, rollups become numbers with nothing behind them, and filtered views cease to exist. Including subpages in an export requires Business or Enterprise, a workspace export can take up to thirty hours to process, and the download link expires after seven days.
• Everyone in the workspace is a seat On Notion's European pricing, Plus is €9.50 per member per month and Business €19.50. Most organisations have a handful of people who build databases and a long tail who open two pages a week, and both cost the same. The free plan handles individuals well — unlimited pages, ten guests — and starts counting blocks the moment a second member joins, which is when the bill arrives.

What you have to replace, not just match

Notion is four products stacked on one canvas, and you are almost never replacing all four. Write down which of them your workspace actually is before you compare anything, because the answers diverge completely.

There is the wiki: handbooks, runbooks, meeting notes, the things a new joiner reads. There is the database: a projects table with a relation to clients and a rollup of hours. There are the documents that ended up as pages because the editor was there. And there is the light project management, boards and timelines that grew out of a table.

Nextcloud with Collectives, Deck and Tables answers the first, second and fourth on infrastructure you control. Zenkit answers the second and fourth with the least retraining. CryptPad answers the third for anything confidential. OnlyOffice answers the third when what matters is that the file opens correctly for someone outside your company. Nothing here reproduces Notion's relations and rollups at the same depth, and a page that told you otherwise would be wrong.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to Notion

What actually breaks when you switch

Export before you downgrade, not after. Including subpages requires Business or Enterprise, a big workspace can take up to thirty hours to process and the link expires after seven days, so a team that cancels first ends up paying for a month it had not planned in order to get its own content out.

The second problem is the links. Notion URLs are pasted into tickets, calendar invites, Slack messages and email signatures across years, and none of them redirect anywhere after the workspace closes. Decide which pages are load-bearing, give them a new home first, and accept that the rest will break quietly.

The third is the part nobody costs. Somebody in your company built those databases, and they enjoyed it. Rebuilding a filtered view as a folder structure or a Deck board feels like a demotion, and migrations that ignore that stall halfway with two systems running and nobody willing to turn the first one off.

Notion now hosts in Frankfurt. Is that not enough?

It depends entirely on which question your organisation is answering. If a procurement form asks where customer data is stored at rest, the Frankfurt region answers it, and it answers it for Docs-like content rather than only for backups.

If the question is who can read the workspace, residency does not touch it. Notion Labs is a Californian company that holds the keys to your pages, which it must in order to offer search, permissions and AI features. A European region moves the disks, not the ability to read what is on them.

And check the plan you are on. Data residency is an Enterprise feature, so a team on Plus or Business is discussing something it cannot buy.

Does Notion train AI models on my pages?

Not according to its own security documentation, and this is worth saying plainly because the opposite is repeated constantly. Notion states that its AI subprocessors are contractually prohibited from using customer data to train models, and Enterprise workspaces are covered by zero data retention arrangements with the model providers.

That is a contractual guarantee rather than a technical one, which is exactly the distinction that matters. Nobody is stopped by mathematics from reading your pages; they are stopped by an agreement, and agreements are enforced after the fact.

If you want the technical version instead of the contractual one, that is CryptPad on this page, or a self-hosted install where no third party is involved at all. If the contractual version is enough for you, AI training is not a good reason to leave.

What actually survives an export, and what does not?

Text survives. Headings, paragraphs, lists, toggles, images and file attachments come across in Markdown or HTML without much drama, and for a wiki-shaped workspace that is most of the value.

Structure does not. A database becomes a CSV: the relation to another table becomes a column of names, the rollup becomes a number with nothing to recalculate it, formulas become their last result, and every saved view, filter and grouping is gone. Form views cannot be exported at all.

The practical order is to export first and cancel later. Include subpages needs a Business or Enterprise plan, large workspaces can take up to thirty hours to process, and the download link expires after a week — which is a bad thing to discover while the subscription is running out.

Is there anything here that does relations and rollups?

Partly. Zenkit is the closest: it treats a collection as a database and lets the same records appear as a board, a table, a calendar, a list or a mind map, which covers the reason most people built a Notion database in the first place.

Nextcloud Tables covers structured lists beside the files and the wiki, and the point of it is that everything sits in one installation you control rather than that it matches Notion feature for feature.

Neither has Notion's depth of linked databases, and if your workspace runs on three tables pointing at each other with formulas across them, the honest advice is to rebuild that in something purpose-built rather than to look for a Notion-shaped replacement that does not exist in Europe.

Which one to pick

If the reason for leaving is that an American company can read the whole company handbook, Nextcloud is the answer that actually ends the argument, and a managed European host is the sane way to run it.

If the reason is that Notion never offered encryption and then bought a company that did and closed it, CryptPad is the direct replacement for that guarantee, and you should be clear that you are trading database structure for it.

If you liked how Notion worked and simply want it under EU law with an EU supplier, Zenkit is the least painful move, and it is honest about being smaller.

And if your workspace has quietly turned into three hundred long documents that keep being pasted into Word, OnlyOffice is the unglamorous right answer, whatever the ranking above suggests.