Best European Alternatives to OneDrive

Why people leave OneDrive

Nobody buys OneDrive. It arrives inside a Microsoft 365 licence, it is already the default save location in Word, and the sync client was installed by whoever set up the laptop. That is why the decision to leave is so rarely made on the merits: there is no invoice to cancel and no line item to question.

The bytes are not the problem either, and it is worth killing that claim before building anything on it. A Microsoft 365 tenant whose sign-up location is in the EU or EFTA is inside the EU Data Boundary, and files in OneDrive are stored and processed there. Anyone telling you your European organisation keeps its documents in Virginia has not read the documentation.

What that same documentation says is where the boundary still opens. Microsoft engineers outside Europe can reach into data held inside it — Microsoft describes that access as a transfer under European privacy law in its own words.

Security operations consolidate pseudonymised log data worldwide and store it primarily in the United States. Preview features and free trials are excluded entirely. None of that is hidden; all of it is published, per category, and it is a more useful picture than any general argument about American law.

• Microsoft publishes the gaps, and they are specific The article on continuing transfers, last revised on 30 March 2026, lists them one by one. Personnel outside the boundary may access data inside it, which Microsoft itself calls a transfer under European privacy law. Security threat hunting sends pseudonymised log data to any Azure region worldwide and stores it primarily in the United States, and in rare situations limited Customer Data goes with it. Consulting engagement data sits in US datacentres and is out of scope altogether. Support case titles may be stored outside. Directory data including usernames and email addresses may be replicated outside. Read the list before you decide whether residency answers your question.
• Two configurations put you outside it without warning Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo customers are not in scope for the EU Data Boundary even when the tenant is listed as being in an EU or EFTA country — the capability that exists to control where data lives is the one that removes the commitment. Separately, services in preview or offered as free trials are excluded, and only paid, generally available services are covered. An organisation that bought Multi-Geo for a Swiss subsidiary, or that has a department piloting a preview feature on its OneDrive content, is not where its compliance register says it is.
• The storage belongs to a licence, not to your organisation Microsoft's own service description is blunt about what OneDrive is for: storage provisioned per user, for an individual's work files. It states that storage of data other than that — system back-ups and departmental or organisational level data — is not supported, and that a per-user licence must not be assigned to a bot or a department. Most organisations use it for exactly those unsupported things. The 1 TB per user is not a guarantee either, because pooled storage limits still apply at the tenant level, and Microsoft 365 F3 gets 2 GB rather than a terabyte.
• Sharing a file writes into your directory External collaboration in OneDrive runs through Microsoft Entra B2B: when content is shared with somebody outside the organisation, a guest account is automatically created in the sharing tenant's directory. Send a contract to a supplier and you have not only sent a file, you have added an identity object to your own directory. That is a defensible design and it is also why long-running OneDrive tenants accumulate thousands of guest records that nobody reviews and nobody dares delete.

What you have to replace, not just match

Decide first whether you are replacing the drive or the document, because OneDrive is the storage half of a writing tool and most people only notice the second half when it stops working.

The drive is simple: a folder that syncs, a share link, a version history. Everything on this page does that, and some of them do it better. The document is harder. Two people editing the same spreadsheet in a browser at the same time, with the change history intact and the formulas surviving the round trip, is the thing that keeps departments on OneDrive, and only two of the four options below attempt it at all.

The third thing, and the one most comparisons miss, is the administrative layer: retention, legal hold, eDiscovery and the ability to reach into a former employee's files. That lives in Microsoft Purview rather than in OneDrive, and leaving OneDrive does not automatically mean leaving it. Work out whether your legal team is relying on it before you promise them a replacement.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to OneDrive

What actually breaks when you switch

The share links are the first thing to break, and OneDrive scatters them further than most products do. A link pasted into a Teams channel, an Outlook thread or a Planner task keeps working right up until the file moves, and then it fails without a redirect and without telling the person who sent it. Export the sharing report before you start, and reissue the handful that matter from the new location.

The second problem is the guest accounts. Every external share created an Entra B2B guest object in your directory, and a tenant that has been running for years holds thousands of them, most belonging to people who left the supplier that hired them. Leaving OneDrive does not clean those up. Decide deliberately whether you are auditing and removing them as part of the move or leaving a directory full of identities nobody can account for.

And find the orphaned personal sites first. Departmental files sitting in one employee's OneDrive are the single most common discovery in these migrations, and they surface at the worst moment: when the licence has already been removed and the deletion schedule has already started. Run the report on personal sites without an active licence before anybody announces a date.

If my files already stay in Europe, what am I actually moving?

The obligation, not the location. A Microsoft 365 tenant with an EU or EFTA sign-up location keeps OneDrive content inside the boundary, and that satisfies a procurement question phrased as "where is the data stored". It does not change that the company holding it is incorporated in the United States and answerable to US process.

It also does not cover the categories Microsoft has written down as continuing to move: security telemetry consolidated worldwide, support case titles, directory data such as usernames and email addresses, network paths that occasionally route traffic outside, and any service you are using in preview or on a free trial.

If your risk assessment is about foreign disclosure orders, none of that is fixed by a setting. If it is about the storage location of ordinary documents, OneDrive already gives you what you asked for and the honest advice is to stop here.

What happens to a leaver's OneDrive?

It depends on a retention timer rather than on your filing system. OneDrive storage is allocated to a licensed user, so when the licence is removed the personal site enters a deletion schedule, and access for colleagues depends on somebody having been delegated to it in advance or on a Purview hold being in place.

This is where the gap between how OneDrive is designed and how it is used becomes expensive. Microsoft says plainly that departmental and organisational data does not belong in OneDrive; in practice a team's working files are usually in one person's OneDrive because that is where the sync client pointed.

On every alternative on this page, files belong to a folder, a group or a library rather than to a person with a licence. That is the structural difference worth moving for, and it is a quieter argument than jurisdiction but it costs organisations more money.

Can I keep Office and still leave OneDrive?

Yes, and for a lot of organisations that is the realistic plan. The desktop Office applications will open and save files from any local folder, including a folder synced by Tresorit, kDrive, Nextcloud or pCloud, and a Nextcloud or kDrive server will happily hold .docx and .xlsx files.

What you lose is browser co-authoring on those files. Two people editing the same workbook simultaneously in a browser tab is a service Microsoft runs, and moving the file out of OneDrive and SharePoint ends it. Nextcloud Office and kDrive both offer their own real-time editing instead, which works well on ordinary documents and less well on anything with macros, pivot tables or heavy conditional formatting.

Test the five worst documents you own before you commit. Not the average ones — the quarterly model that finance built in 2019, the template with the embedded macro. That test decides this migration more often than any privacy argument does.

Will this save money?

Almost certainly not, and this is the point at which several comparison pages stop being useful. OneDrive is bundled into a Microsoft 365 licence you are already paying for, and 1 TB per user carries no separate charge. Adding a European provider adds a second bill on top of a first one you are not cancelling.

The arithmetic only works if leaving OneDrive is part of leaving Microsoft 365 altogether — swapping Office for Nextcloud Office or kDrive's suite, and the mailbox for something else. That is a much larger project than a storage migration, and it is the honest description of what a real saving requires.

If cost is genuinely the driver, the cheapest correct answer is usually to right-size Microsoft 365 licences rather than to buy a second storage product. Move for control, or do not move.

Which one to pick

If the objection is that too many people — Microsoft engineers, your own administrators, anyone running an eDiscovery search — can read a document, Tresorit answers it directly and accepts the loss of co-authoring as the price.

If the objection is ownership rather than reading, Nextcloud is the answer that removes the question instead of relocating it, and it is the only one here that can genuinely reduce what you pay, because it replaces the editor too.

If you want the documents to keep working and have nobody to run a server, kDrive is the practical choice, provided you are comfortable that Switzerland sits outside the EEA rather than inside it.

And if the real problem is that a per-user terabyte is full of archive, pCloud converts that into one payment — but it replaces storage only, so do not let it become the answer to a compliance question it cannot touch.