Disclosure: this article contains affiliate links to Infomaniak. If you sign up for a paid service through them, I earn a small commission. It costs you nothing extra, and the full note is at the bottom.
I think most of us have felt it: that quiet sense that something is not quite right. The tools we use every day are meant to make life easier, and mostly they do. But we now know rather more about what happens behind the polished front, and it has taken the shine off.
I am not going to spend this article listing what Google and Microsoft have been up to, or the risks of entrusting your data to a US-based corporation. I want to do something more useful and show you what you can use instead.
Because the alternatives exist, they are good, and most people never find them. Not because they are hidden, but because the big platforms exert enough gravitational pull that it’s hard for others to get a look in.
Email, Contacts, Calendar and Cloud Storage
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace dominate because they are easy to start with and awkward to leave. That is the business model, not an accident. They are convenient and cheap at first, and the price of both convenience and cheapness goes up once your business depends on them.
Proton is the name most people reach for, and you have probably seen it thrown around on social media a fair bit. It is Swiss, it is built around end-to-end encryption, and its suite covers mail, calendar, contacts and drive. It is a solid choice with a long track record.
Infomaniak is the one I would point you at though. It is a Swiss certified B Corp, it runs its own data centres, it is employee-owned, and its kSuite gives you as much as Microsoft 365, if not more, for less. Its real strength is making open source software feel consistent and finished, which is the part most open source suites get wrong.
If all you need is email, Tuta is hard to beat. It is German, it does mail, contacts and calendar, and it does them reliably. A drive service is in closed beta as I write this, so check their site for where that has got to.
Switching groupware sounds daunting and mostly is not. Mail, contacts and calendars all move on open standards, and every provider here has migration tooling that makes the move a doddle.
Office Suites
Microsoft Office is what most of us grew up with, and it is still the default in most offices. You do not have to use it, and you certainly do not have to pay for it. The alternatives below all read and write Microsoft formats, so you can carry on with the files you already have and can share files with your colleagues.
LibreOffice is the established option, maintained by the Document Foundation in Berlin, and it runs on nearly everything. It has no first-party mobile app, though a good number of the mobile office apps you will find in the app stores are built on its code.
Collabora Office is the LibreOffice-based mobile app, built by Collabora Productivity, one of the largest contributors to LibreOffice itself. OnlyOffice is the other one I keep coming back to on mobile, and its Microsoft format handling is the best of the three. However, be aware that OnlyOffice has its roots in Russia while the company responsible for its development is based in Latvia.
If you go with Proton, it has Docs and Sheets but nothing for presentations yet. Infomaniak’s kSuite covers all three, with mobile apps for each and the editors built straight into kDrive.
All of them are free to use, with paid tiers adding storage and features for personal and business users.
AI On Your Terms
You can opt out of having AI pushed into everything you touch, and you can also have AI that does not treat your documents as training data. Both options are available and the choice is yours.
Proton has Lumo and Infomaniak has Euria. Both are private assistants that keep your data inside the same jurisdiction as the rest of your account, rather than shipping it to OpenAI or Anthropic. Tuta has no AI at all, which for a lot of people is the feature rather than the gap.
LibreOffice and Collabora have no AI either and are simply office software. OnlyOffice went the other way and added an assistant plus agent connectivity, so pick accordingly.
I use Euria and find it useful. Like Lumo, it is limited by design: do not expect deep integration with everything you own. That is the trade, and it is a deliberate one rather than an oversight. Where these assistants do appear inside the web mail apps, they are tightly scoped and private, which is not something you can say about their better known equivalents.
If you want the longer argument for why this matters, I have written about why Microsoft’s Copilot is becoming a security liability.
The Bottom Line
If you want one recommendation to replace Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, it is Infomaniak. It covers the most ground for the least money, and the experience holds together.
If you want reliable basics with no faff, go with Tuta.
None of the services here are based in the United States, all of them build on open source, and all of them make their money from customers rather than from data. That last point is the one that actually changes how a company treats you.
What’s Your Experience?
What have you switched to, and what made you do it? Or are you still weighing it up and wondering whether the migration is worth the disruption? Tell me on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn or through social media.
If you would like help working out which of these fits your business, or you want someone to handle the migration so it does not land on your desk, book a call and we will talk it through.
Disclosure
I moved from Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 to Infomaniak’s kSuite, and I have been happy enough with it to become an affiliate. Links to Infomaniak in this article carry a reference to me, and if you sign up for one of their paid services, including web hosting and cloud compute, I earn a small amount. It makes no difference to what you pay, and it is not why they are my recommendation. I switched first and signed up as an affiliate afterwards.
