Best European Alternatives to Skype

Why people leave Skype

Nobody left Skype. Skype left. Microsoft retired it on 5 May 2025, and anyone who signed in afterwards with their Skype credentials had their chats and contact list moved into Microsoft Teams Free, which takes under a minute and was never really optional.

That makes this page different from every other comparison on this site. There is no vendor to negotiate with, no plan to downgrade and no setting to change. The account you spent fifteen years building is now a Teams account, and the window for taking your data out of Microsoft has closed — Microsoft first set the export deadline at January 2026 and then, in December 2025, extended it to June 2026.

So the question is not whether to switch. It is what to switch to, given that the thing you are replacing did two jobs — a worldwide directory of people, and a way to dial actual telephone numbers — and Teams Free only inherited the first one.

• The product was retired, not deprecated There is no legacy mode, no extended support tier and no paid escape hatch. 5 May 2025 was the end of consumer Skype as a service. Microsoft kept the Dial Pad alive in Teams Free and on the Skype web portal so remaining Credit could be spent, stopped automatic top-ups, and closed new Credit and calling subscriptions to new users. That is a wind-down, not a transition.
• Teams Free is not the same shape Skype was built around a person: your handle, your contact list, your presence, and the assumption that the people you called were outside your company. Teams is built around a tenant, and the free tier is a doorway to a paid workplace product. Families, tutors, translators and freelancers who used Skype to reach clients found themselves inside collaboration software designed for somebody else's org chart.
• The self-hosted version went too Skype for Business Server 2015 and 2019 left support on 14 October 2025. Microsoft shipped Skype for Business Server Subscription Edition in July 2025 as the only remaining on-premises option, licensed the same way as SharePoint and Exchange Subscription Edition — subscription licences, or licences with active Software Assurance, for both server and users. An organisation that ran its own Skype infrastructure to keep calls off somebody else's network now rents the right to keep doing so.
• Nothing here dials a phone number This is the honest limit of the whole page. Skype Credit and Skype Numbers turned an app into a telephone: cheap international calls, an inbound number in a country you did not live in. Jitsi, Wire, Whereby and Element are all meeting or messaging tools, and not one of them terminates calls on the public telephone network. If that was your Skype, your replacement is a SIP provider, not anything on this list.

What you have to replace, not just match

Write down which Skype you had, because the four options below answer three different versions of the question and none of them answers all of it.

Version one is the video call with someone outside your organisation — a client, a relative, a candidate — where the hard part was always getting them in. Version two is the handle: a name you printed on a business card in 2009 and that still worked in 2024, reaching you regardless of which company you worked for. Version three is telephony: Credit, Numbers, calls to landlines.

Jitsi and Whereby cover the first. Element is the only thing here that rebuilds the second, because a Matrix address belongs to a domain you control rather than to a vendor. Nothing covers the third, and any page that suggests otherwise has not checked.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to Skype

What actually breaks when you switch

The contact list is the loss, and it is not recoverable by tooling. Skype identifiers were Microsoft account references and mean nothing anywhere else, so there is no import for any of these four and there never will be. Go through the list by hand, write down the people you have actually spoken to in the last two years, and invite those. For most people that is fewer than twenty names and takes an evening.

Telephony is the second gap and the one people discover late. If part of your Skype was dialling ordinary numbers or receiving calls on a Skype Number, none of the tools here does that, and a separate SIP or cloud telephony contract is the answer. Sort that out before you cancel anything, because an inbound number that lapses cannot be reclaimed.

Then there is the long tail of other people. Skype links and handles are embedded in old email signatures, CVs, agency profiles and printed cards, and they will keep sending people to a product that no longer exists. Decide on one replacement address, put it everywhere at once, and accept that for the next year somebody will still try the old one.

My chats already moved to Teams. Is anything still recoverable?

Not from Microsoft. The deadline for exporting Skype data was originally January 2026; in December 2025 Microsoft extended it to June 2026. That date has passed, so whatever you did not download then is not retrievable now.

What you do still have is the copy inside Teams Free, because the transfer moved conversation history and contacts rather than referencing them. Before you stop using that account, work through the contact list by hand and record the handful of people you actually need to reach. That list is the part of Skype worth carrying forward, and it is the part that does not export into any of the tools below.

What replaces Skype Credit and a Skype Number?

A telephony provider, not a meeting tool. Skype was unusual in being both an internet calling app and a carrier: you bought Credit to dial ordinary numbers, and you could rent an inbound number in a country you did not live in so relatives or customers dialled a local call.

That function is now bought separately, from a SIP trunk or a cloud telephony provider, and there are European ones. What matters for this page is that Jitsi, Wire, Whereby and Element do not do it, and choosing one of them does not remove the need.

If you still hold a Skype Number, porting it had to be arranged with the receiving carrier rather than with Microsoft, under deadlines that varied by country. If yours has lapsed, it is gone, and a new number from a new provider is the only route.

Is a European tool actually different, given Skype was ending anyway?

The difference is who gets to make this decision next time. Skype was retired by a single company in Redmond because Skype no longer fitted its product strategy, and there was no version of the arrangement in which users had a say.

Two of the four options here remove that possibility structurally rather than promising not to do it. Jitsi is Apache 2.0 and Element is built on an open protocol, so both can be run on a server you control and neither can be switched off for you. Wire and Whereby are ordinary companies, in Zug and Oslo respectively, which is a jurisdiction change rather than a control change.

That is the honest framing: leaving Microsoft for another vendor swaps one retirement risk for another. Only self-hosting actually retires the risk.

What about Skype for Business — is that the same story?

Related, and on a slower timetable. Skype for Business Server 2015 and 2019 reached end of support on 14 October 2025, so those installations no longer receive security updates. Microsoft released Skype for Business Server Subscription Edition in July 2025, and it is now the only supported on-premises version.

The licensing changed with it: Subscription Edition follows the same model as SharePoint and Exchange Subscription Edition, meaning subscription licences or active Software Assurance for both server and user licences. An organisation that bought a perpetual server licence once and ran it for six years is now on a renewal cycle.

For internal meetings that is the point where Element with a self-hosted homeserver, or a Jitsi install, becomes a genuine comparison rather than a hobbyist suggestion. For telephony integration it is not, and that is usually why these deployments existed.

Which one to pick

If what you want back is the ability to call someone who has nothing installed and no intention of installing anything, Jitsi Meet is the answer, and self-host it if the reason you are here is that you would rather not depend on an American company again.

If the calls are work and the people on them are outside your organisation, Wire is the right destination: encrypted by default, Swiss, with Guest Rooms that do what exchanging Skype handles used to do.

If you want somewhere permanent to point people at, Whereby gives you a fixed room address from $10.99 a month, and Element gives you an address on your own domain for the cost of running a server. The first is easier and the second is yours.

And if the part of Skype you actually used was the telephone, none of this replaces it. Buy telephony from a telephony provider, pick one of the four above for the meetings, and stop looking for a single product that does both — since May 2025 there has not been one.