Finding European software alternatives to standard non European software is flavour of the month this side of the Altlantic. With geopolitical certainties dissolving faster than annual licence renewals, B2B firms are waking up to a question they had conveniently parked for years: just how dependent are they on their current software stack? Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, HubSpot — tools so deeply embedded in daily operations that their vulnerability tends to get overlooked. This article doesn’t pretend to hand you a ready-made list of the best European software alternatives; that would be both arrogant and futile. What it does offer is a framework — rational, professional, free of any ideological baggage — to help decision-makers take an honest look at their exposure and find credible ways forward. Keep calm and select new software vendors sort of thing.

I put these ideas together ahead of a webinar I’m running on LinkedIn on 12 March, as a way of getting my thoughts in order.

None of this is meant as a final word on the subject — more the opening of a conversation that matters to a growing number of professionals who, like the rest of us, are navigating a period of upheaval in which nothing can be taken for granted, software choices included.

I’ve made a lot of software choices over the years, and the one thing that has always struck me is just how much methodology matters if you want choices that actually hold up over time. Easier said than done, mind you — there are a great many criteria to weigh up, and some of them are genuinely tricky to pin down. Long-term viability is a good example: normally near the top of any procurement checklist, it takes on a whole different meaning when the possibility of having your access switched off overnight is no longer hypothetical.

Picking a software suite is never straightforward at the best of times. In the current climate — where the ground can shift completely without a moment’s notice — it demands even more careful thought.

Let me be clear from the outset: my take here is professional and rational, not political. Politics doesn’t interest me in this context. I have no intention of evaluating software alternatives through any ideological prism — what I’m after is the kind of clear-headed thinking you’d apply to a crisis management scenario. The goal, to borrow the term favoured by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is to bring an antifragile lens to the question.

My focus has been on MarTech, SalesTech and office productivity tools in the broadest sense — cloud storage and archiving included. The webinar title calls out Salesforce and HubSpot specifically, but as far as I’m concerned the issue runs much deeper than that.

The same methodology can easily stretch into more industry-specific territory too, given how thoroughly technology now underpins B2B operations — from the till at your local baker’s or restaurant through to the most complex design and production platforms imaginable.

Thinking it through, I also realised you can’t really ignore operating systems. What use is an application that won’t run on your users’ machines — or worse, one that runs perfectly but quietly leaves the door open to security vulnerabilities?

The starting point, in my view, is to get a clear picture of how exposed you actually are — both in terms of dependency and of what cybersecurity people would call the “threat level.” Are you locked in, or not? Can you get your data out if you need to? Those are the questions to tackle first. Then comes the threat itself: are you facing something urgent, or is this more a matter of sensible contingency planning?

Committing to a software suite is a serious business. Jumping ship to something purely because it comes from a country you currently trust is not a strategy. Take Switzerland — long held up across Western Europe as the gold standard for data privacy. A legislative change currently working its way through the Swiss system has rattled enough cages for several companies, Proton among them, to start exploring moving their hosting elsewhere. Which only goes to show why knee-jerk decisions are so dangerous. Even a country with an impeccable track record — Germany, France, take your pick — can turn into a risk overnight following a change of government, a constitutional shift, or simply a new piece of legislation.

As I said above, ideology needs to stay out of it. Keep it rational.

Which means not falling for the trap of rushing towards any vendor simply because it sounds German — or any other nationality — when a closer look at its foreign operations or its parent group reveals that its much-vaunted independence is largely theoretical.

One of the first things I learnt when I started out as an IT project owner was to keep data and software firmly separate in my thinking. At the end of the day, what matters more — Salesforce the tool, or your customer database? As with most IT projects, the real priority is sorting out your data archiving and portability strategy first.

Timing matters enormously. There’s a palpable sense of urgency in the air right now, and understandably so — but it mustn’t blind us to the longer view. Technology has its own history, and that history tends to play out over years, not weeks. Which is precisely why a medium-to-long-term approach makes sense: getting users to change their habits takes time and energy at the best of times.

The roadmap, as I see it, is fairly straightforward: start by archiving, securing and preparing your data for portability. Then find alternatives that are genuinely credible and built to last. And crucially, take your users with you — because if you don’t, the classic BYOD shadow IT problem will rear its head. When people can’t find what they need inside the company, they go and find it on the internet, quietly, without telling anyone.

I’m reminded of a story from a major European aerospace company, where the CEO — right in the middle of a high-security defence messaging rollout — demanded that his own emails be redirected to… Yahoo!

I put together a comparison table with a little help from claude.ai. And I’ll say it again: this is not a finished product. Think of it as a working matrix — something to make your own, adapt, keep updated, and cross-check carefully. The exercise turned up a few surprises: mapp.com, for instance, gets labelled as a German solution, when in reality it was a German company bought by an American one — Mapp Digital emerged from the merger of Teradata’s and BlueHornet Networks’ marketing businesses through a US investment fund.

There are also plenty of criteria missing from this table — ones that will depend entirely on your project, your context and, of course, your budget.

Disclaimer: the table below is a working matrix, not a final verdict. It scores the main B2B software tools across productivity, MarTech and SalesTech on two dimensions: a dependency score (technical lock-in, data portability, migration cost) and a risk score (CLOUD Act exposure, data sensitivity, GDPR compliance, geopolitical risk). For each category, European alternatives are flagged — with no illusions: some vendors that bill themselves as “European” turn out, on closer inspection, to be owned by non-EU groups, which rather undermines their claims to independence.

The approach is deliberately rational and professional — no axes to grind. The point isn’t to tell you what to choose, but to give you a framework to think it through — one you can combine with your own criteria around context, budget and use case — as a starting point for an honest review of your software ecosystem’s resilience.

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