Best European Alternatives to WeTransfer

Why people leave WeTransfer

Start with the thing this page is not going to claim. WeTransfer B.V. is registered in Amsterdam, describes itself in its own compliance material as a Dutch company, and since July 2024 it has belonged to Bending Spoons S.p.A. in Milan. There is no American parent, no Delaware incorporation and no CLOUD Act obligation attached to the company. Anyone selling you a European transfer service on the grounds that WeTransfer is a US firm has not checked.

The reasons to look elsewhere are smaller and more specific. WeTransfer holds the decryption keys for everything you upload, so the service can read what passes through it and runs automated scans over it. The files themselves sit with Amazon: upload from a European IP address and they land in the EU, upload from anywhere else and they land in the United States — which puts an American processor underneath a Dutch controller.

And the free tier that made the product famous has been rationed. WeTransfer's own help centre puts the free plan at ten transfers, or 3 GB in total, in any rolling thirty-day window, and an account has been required to send anything at all since November 2024. The thing people loved — open the page, drag a file, send it to someone, no signup — is no longer what the free plan is.

• The provider can read the transfer Encryption is AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, with WeTransfer holding the keys, and the platform runs automated scanning for malware and illegal content over what you upload. That combination is completely ordinary and it is also the whole gap: a service that scans your uploads is by definition a service that can open them. If you are sending a client's unreleased material or a case file, that is worth one minute of thought before you drag it into the browser.
• Amazon is underneath it WeTransfer stores files on AWS, in Ireland for uploads from European IP addresses and in the United States otherwise. The controller is Dutch and the infrastructure is American. For a GDPR assessment this is answerable — there is a processor chain, a DPA on business plans and ISO 27001 certification behind it — but if the point of moving was to get Amazon out of the picture, WeTransfer does not do that.
• The terms changed under people in July 2025 The terms that took effect on 1 July 2025 granted WeTransfer a licence covering, among other things, the performance of machine learning models. Illustrators and photographers read clause 6.3, concluded their portfolios were training data, and said so loudly. WeTransfer removed every reference to machine learning within days and stated that it does not use uploaded content to train models and does not sell content or data to third parties. Nothing was proven to have been taken. What was proven is that the document can be rewritten while your files are sitting in it.
• Ask what the new owner does with the things it buys Bending Spoons buys mature consumer software and runs it harder. At Evernote, which it bought in 2022, the free plan was cut to fifty editable notes in December 2023 and to a single connected device in August 2024, and Evernote's existing staff were laid off in July 2023. At WeTransfer itself, around 75 per cent of the workforce went in September 2024, two months after the deal. You can think that is a legitimate way to run an ageing product and still notice that the free plan has been narrowed to ten sends a month since the acquisition. Where the rationing goes next is a reasonable question to ask before you build a client workflow on it.

What you have to replace, not just match

Before comparing anything, be clear that a transfer service is not storage, and that WeTransfer sold both without ever making the distinction obvious.

One job is the one-off: a 4 GB video goes to a client who has no account and never will, the link works for a few days, and then it should stop working. That job has excellent free European answers and you do not need to buy anything.

The other job is the shared workspace WeTransfer grew into — a folder your team uploads to, branded download pages, password rules, an expiry policy and an audit of who fetched what. That is a paid product wherever you buy it, and it is worth checking whether your account actually uses any of it, because a great many WeTransfer subscriptions exist purely to lift the free plan's ceiling.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to WeTransfer

What actually breaks when you switch

The links break, and they break in places you cannot search. WeTransfer URLs live in email threads, briefs, project channels and invoices, and they expire on their own schedule regardless of what you do next. Anything still inside its expiry window when you stop paying is gone, so send the outstanding deliveries again from the new service before you cancel rather than after.

Recipients notice, which is a problem no technical migration plan covers. WeTransfer is the page clients recognise, and a link from a Swiss domain they have never heard of occasionally lands in a spam folder or gets queried by an IT department. One sentence in the covering email about who the sender is fixes almost all of it, and nobody ever writes that sentence the first time.

And check whether you were actually buying transfer. Plenty of WeTransfer subscriptions exist because somebody kept hitting the free ceiling, and the 2 TB of storage attached to the plan quietly became where the studio keeps its archive. If that is you, moving the sending to a free tool leaves an archive with no home, and that is a storage decision rather than a transfer one.

If WeTransfer is European already, is there any point in switching?

For a compliance question, often not. WeTransfer B.V. is established in the Netherlands, offers a data processing agreement on business plans, holds ISO 27001, and keeps European uploads in an Irish region. A procurement form asking whether the supplier is established in the EU gets a clean yes, and that is the end of it.

Two things do still move. The first is that Amazon holds the bytes, so if your objection is to US hyperscalers rather than to US vendors, WeTransfer inherits the problem from its supplier. The second is that nobody at WeTransfer is technically prevented from opening your file, and the alternatives on this page mostly are.

If neither of those bothers you, the honest advice is to stay and argue about the free tier instead.

Did WeTransfer actually train AI on uploaded files?

There is no evidence that it did, and the company denies it flatly. WeTransfer's statement was that it does not use machine learning or any form of AI to process content shared through the service, and does not sell content or data to third parties.

What did happen is that the terms effective 1 July 2025 contained a licence broad enough to permit it, phrased around improving the service and the performance of machine learning models. Enough creative professionals read it carefully that WeTransfer stripped the machine-learning language out again within a few days.

The useful conclusion is narrower than the one that went around social media. Your work was almost certainly not taken. The licence you granted was rewritten while your work sat on the server, which is a governance problem rather than a theft, and it is the sort of thing that happens more often after an ownership change.

What do the free European options actually give you?

More than WeTransfer's free plan does, which is the surprising part. SwissTransfer takes 50 GB per transfer, needs no registration, costs nothing, adds password protection and a download-count limit for free, and keeps the files for up to thirty days. Tresorit Send does 5 GB per link with the encryption happening in your browser before the upload starts, again with no account.

pCloud Transfer moves up to 5 GB per send with no registration, though it caps each individual file at 200 MB, so it suits a batch of documents rather than one large video.

Against that, WeTransfer gives away ten sends or 3 GB a month behind a required account. That is the arithmetic that makes most of these switches, not the jurisdiction.

Is a transfer link a backup?

No, and WeTransfer is unusually honest about this compared with storage products that blur the line. A transfer expires. WeTransfer only lets you set or extend that date on a paid plan — custom expiration is an Ultimate feature — while SwissTransfer keeps a transfer for up to thirty days. Every one of these services is designed to forget.

The failure mode is predictable and common: somebody sends the only copy of a shoot, the client downloads it to a laptop, the link lapses, the laptop dies. A transfer service is a delivery mechanism, and delivery mechanisms are not archives.

If you have been using WeTransfer as a filing cabinet because the paid plan came with 2 TB attached, you are buying a transfer product to solve a storage problem, and the storage alternatives on this site are cheaper at it.

Which one to pick

If you are leaving because the free plan stopped being generous, SwissTransfer ends the discussion: 50 GB per send, no account, no monthly allowance, no cost. Most people reading this page need nothing else.

If you are leaving because you send material that should not be readable by the company carrying it, Tresorit Send is the answer and the browser-side encryption is the whole reason it is ranked first here.

If your sends go to a handful of named people and you would rather they were not a public URL, pCloud Transfer is the closest match to that habit.

And if you were leaving because you believed WeTransfer was American, stop and reconsider. It is Dutch, owned in Milan, GDPR-compliant and ISO 27001 certified. There are real reasons to move, and that was not one of them.