Degoogle: Switch from Google to European alternatives

Honestly, this is one of the gentler ones to get over with. These mailboxes do everything Gmail does — folders, filters, search, aliases, the lot — and most of them give you a button that pulls your old inbox across while you go and make a coffee. The one thing you’ll actually feel is handing out a new address and nudging a few people to update it. Give it a week and you won’t think about it again.

You’ll barely notice this one. Switching is really just picking a new default in your browser settings, and from then on it happens automatically every time you search for something. The European engines either run their own index or lean on Bing’s results, minus all the tracking, so for everyday stuff the answers feel the same. Every now and then you might pop back to Google for something really obscure, and that’s completely fine — no need to be a purist about it.

Day to day, storing and syncing your files feels exactly the same, and a few of these actually encrypt everything end to end — something Drive never bothered to do. The slightly annoying part is the move itself: you download your files from Google and upload them to their new home, and any links you’d shared need setting up again. If you’re sitting on a mountain of shared folders, put an afternoon aside for it. After that it just quietly works in the background like Drive always did.

Vivaldi is built on the same engine as Chrome, so all your extensions still work and everything sits pretty much where your fingers already expect it. When you first open it, it offers to bring your bookmarks, passwords and history across in one go, so there’s almost nothing to set up by hand. If anything it does a bit more than Chrome — the amount you can tweak and customise is a lovely rabbit hole once you start poking around. Most people feel at home within an hour.

For actually getting somewhere — turn-by-turn directions, offline maps, public transport — these hold their own really nicely, and HERE even powers the navigation built into a lot of cars. Where Google is still ahead is all the extra stuff wrapped around a place: the reviews, the photos, whether the café is open right this minute. So you might genuinely love these for the drive and still peek at Google when you’re deciding where to eat. Nothing wrong with using both for a while.

There isn’t one app that copies Photos exactly, so instead you back your library up into encrypted storage, and Nextcloud’s Memories view gets you closest to that familiar scrolling timeline. What you’ll miss is Google quietly recognising faces and letting you type “beach 2019” to find a photo, which is genuinely clever and handy. The trick is to pull everything out of Google with Takeout first — it can be a chunky download — and then you’re free of it. Once it’s moved, your memories are yours and nobody’s scanning them.

Writing together in real time works across all of these, and CryptPad even scrambles the document so the server hosting it can’t read a single word of what you’re typing. Most of the friction shows up at the edges — a gnarly spreadsheet stuffed with formulas, or a doc that leans on some Google add-on, might need a little tidying when it lands. For everyday notes, letters and shared drafts, though, you’ll get on with it just fine. Power spreadsheet users are the ones who’ll notice the difference most.

This might be the easiest swap on the whole page. You send someone a link, they click it, and they’re in — no app to download, no account to make, nothing to explain to your less techy relatives. The picture quality and screen sharing are every bit as good as Meet for a normal call. Jitsi is great if you fancy running your own, though it’s American-owned these days, so Whereby or Wire are the tidier European choices to start with.

Here’s a rare one where you’re genuinely trading up rather than settling. DeepL reads European languages better than Google does — the translations come out sounding like a person actually wrote them, not a machine having a go. The only things it won’t do are point your camera at a menu or live-translate a conversation out loud, so keep Google tucked away for those odd travel moments. The rest of the time, just enjoy the fact that the better tool is the European one.

These are proper encrypted calendars that sync the normal way, so once you’re set up it feels just like before — your events, your reminders, all sitting where you left them. Moving over is really just exporting your calendar out of Google and importing it here, which takes a couple of minutes. The one bit that’s fiddlier is sharing a calendar or peeking at someone’s free time when they’re still living inside Google’s world. For your own schedule, though, you’ll settle in quickly.

Let’s be honest with each other — this is the tough one. PeerTube is lovely in principle: open, no ads, no algorithm quietly steering what you watch next. But it simply doesn’t have the sheer mountain of stuff that YouTube does, so it can’t really be the place you go to actually watch things. A nice halfway house is a front-end like Invidious, which lets you watch the real YouTube videos you want without Google tracking you or shoving ads in your face. Think of it as loosening Google’s grip rather than cutting the cord overnight.

About as painless as switching gets. You export your saved passwords out of Google as a single file, import them into the new manager, and you’re fully moved in within a few minutes. In return you get real end-to-end encryption and a proper app that follows you everywhere, instead of only working when you’re sat inside Chrome. Passbolt leans towards teams, while Proton Pass and NordPass are lovely for just looking after yourself.

These are the calm, privacy-friendly cousins of Google Analytics — no cookies, which happily means you can wave goodbye to that annoying consent banner nobody enjoys. The trade-off is that you won’t get quite the same forensic level of detail, and you’re starting your numbers fresh rather than dragging years of history along. For the vast majority of sites that’s a perfectly fair swap. And honestly, the simpler dashboards are such a relief to actually read that you may not look back.

A DNS resolver is one of those things you set once and then completely forget about — nothing looks any different, but Google stops quietly collecting a list of every single site you visit. The catch is the setup: you have to go into your router or your device’s network settings to change it, which is a touch more hands-on than everything else here. If that sounds like a faff, this is a perfectly good one to leave until you’re feeling a bit braver. When you do get to it, it’s a nice quiet win that keeps paying off in the background.