If you choose software by how aesthetically pleasing it is, this blog will probably disappoint you. I love intuitive, well-designed software too, but for me it is a nice-to-have. It makes a good tool better, and it can be a decisive argument when I am lucky enough to be choosing between several. But a tool being a bit dated, or a little clunky, has never been a reason for me to reject it.
Here are the criteria I actually use when I pick software. They are not strict rules. I am not dogmatic, and I still use plenty of tools that fail them. They are a guideline, mostly for the decisions that matter: whether to pay for something, or whether to hand over personal data. They also help me analyse the tools I will be writing about here.
My digital fingerprint
One of the main reasons I started looking for European apps is data protection. Most countries outside the EEA (European Economic Area) take privacy less seriously than the EU does, and I felt uneasy giving away so much of what I do online. I hope European software is at least a little less data-hungry, and that these companies stick to local law.
Does that make me naive? Maybe. European companies often run on US cloud infrastructure underneath, so I cannot be sure if my data is really safe there.
You might ask: if the point is getting away from the big US platforms, why not Chinese or Indian tools? For me, here, the same criteria rule those out too. Weaker data protection in practice, and a greater chance that a government can lean on a company directly.
Ads
I understand why advertising exists. For many small apps it is the developer’s only income, and I do not begrudge anyone that. But in recent years, mobile apps especially have become unusable: pop-ups that block the whole screen, videos you have to sit through before you can do anything.
Think of the small, low-function mobile apps, a weather widget or a unit converter. You open one and cannot do the one thing you came for until you have watched an ad to the end. I delete those immediately. I could not even tell you their names, because they are gone before I have used them.
I love FOSS
The ideas behind free open source software - FOSS - have always thrilled me. A large part of the internet runs on software that a relatively small number of people chose to build and give away for free. Anyone can read the code and adapt it to their own needs.
Paying for free open source software, for extra features or support, seems entirely right to me. It is what lets some developers live off their work. And anyone with the time and the knowledge can still use the software in full, for free. I like that both can be true at once.
Local economy
I have friends all over Europe, many of them working at exciting product companies. And yet, almost all these companies reach for the safe, easy default: Google, Microsoft, Slack, Salesforce, Mailchimp, AWS, Zendesk. It is most common in businesses, but private users do it too. Nobody wants to spend time hunting for software they have never heard of, and I do not blame anyone for that. But the swaps are mostly a search away: Hetzner, Scaleway, Nextcloud, Infomaniak, CleverReach, Matrix/Element, SuiteCRM, Zammad, to name a few. They are just not the default.
But picture a company that sells European software and spends its days convincing other European companies to switch, while running its own work on Google, Slack, and Salesforce. Why would anyone buy the pitch?
And ask yourself: where does the money go? Does it stay in Europe and come back as taxes and local jobs, or does it leave?
I am building a company myself, which is part of why this one matters to me.
Digital sovereignty
My last reason is more political, but it is not unfounded. In February 2025, the US administration signed an executive order sanctioning officials of the International Criminal Court. It began with the chief prosecutor and was extended to judges. Because these were US financial sanctions, the US services those people relied on had to cut them off, from bank accounts and credit cards to their Microsoft email.
I am not important enough to be sanctioned. But one day I might work at an institution that has a dispute with someone in a US government, and the whole organisation could find its tools switched off from the outside. We just saw it happen. It seems worth at least factoring in when I decide what to depend on.
What will this blog be about?
One thing to keep in mind: I live in Berlin. The same criteria, applied from somewhere else, would lead somewhere else. For me they happen to point at European and open-source software. And I myself use software that does not match any of them, take my windows laptop as an example. But conscious decisions are important to me. Be aware what you use and why.
So perhaps that is the more interesting question. Not whether European software is good, but for which jobs it is already the better choice, and when the switch is worth for the sake of data protection and digital sovereignty. Those are the questions I want this blog to answer.