This is a read only archive of pad.okfn.org. See the shutdown announcement for details.

google_alternatives gAn earlier version of this list was used to kick-start a section in the then new Ind.ie forum <https://forum.ind.ie/t/stopgaps-andf-alternatives/153> – please consider updating both places.


Alternatives to Google services

There are several reasons why you probably do not want to share too many aspects of your life with Google: It has a near monopoly in several aspects of the Internet, and has its hands in many others: search, advertisement, calendaring, cloud storage, social media, news, e-mail, maps, online office … This stifles competition. And by using several of these, you give Google the chance to gain new insights about you by combining data from several services. Update: According to estimates made in 2015, Google tracks 78% of all websites visits globally. Source: https://timlibert.me/pdf/Libert-2015-Health_Privacy_on_Web.pdf

Related sites:


Android

Android is a Linux derivative developed by Google. You can reduce the number of Google apps and services (if you read German: https://digitalcourage.de/digitale-selbstverteidigung/befreien-sie-ihr-smartphone), but this is not a complete solution. Luckily, there are other ways to bring Linux to mobile devices:
  1. Sailfish OS: can be installed on many Android phones; comes pre-installed on Jolla phones, the Intex Aqua Fish (made in India http://gadgets.ndtv.com/intex-aqua-fish-3345; imported devices available on Ebay, e.g. http://www.ebay.ch/itm/253087925713). For other hardware options, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS#Hardware_overview
  2. Ubuntu Touch is no longer maintained as a core product by Canonical, but there is still https://ubports.com/ which is available for OnePlus One, FairPhone 2 and Nexus 5.
  3. FirefoxOS is no longer maintained by Mozilla


AMP

Google's AMP stands for "Accelerated Mobile Pages", but it's much more than that. Its main idea is that Google's search engine does not just show you a (hopefully well-chosen) snippet of a news article, but the entire article is hosted on Google's servers. In fact, most of it is pre-loaded before you even click or tap on it in the results list.
Publishers have to maintain a special, stripped down version of their website especially for Google AMP. Why do they make the effort if it means that visitors do not even reach their own website any more? As usual, it's a combined stick and carrot approach. The stick is that Google threatens to downrank sites that load "slowly". The carrot is that AMP supports a range of analytics, ad networks, subscription services and paywalls – stuff that publishers try to make money with. They don't seem to mind that all user data goes straight to Google even though visitors never expect or notice this. Even if you don't use Google's search engine, your mobile device is increasingly served by a Google AMP server when you try to visit a news site these days.
More in German / mehr auf deutsch: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Kommentar-zu-Google-AMP-Der-goldene-Kaefig-3657037.html
More in English: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/


Analytics

  1. http://piwik.org Piwik directly competes with Google Analytics but is self-hosted and free software
  2. http://www.awstats.org AWStats is a logfile analyzer, so it does not require trackers or web bugs. It looks slightly dated but does its job quickly and reliably
  3. https://www.elastic.co ElasticSearch + LogStash + Kibana


Blogger/Blogspot

Self-hosted:
  1. Jekyll (and other static site generators such as Pelican)
  2. Drupal
  3. Wordpress
  4. ZeroNet

Cloud-hosted:
  1. Wordpress
  2. GitHub Pages (uses Jekyll but does not support plugins, using other static site generators is possible but cumbersome) 
  3. GitLab Pages (works with*any* static site generator https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/07/gitlab-pages-setup/, for many templates are available) 


Calendar

Self-hosted:
  1. http://baikal-server.com
  2. https://owncloud.org
  3. see http://caldav.calconnect.org/implementations.html for other software
  4. http://sogo.nu/ (GPL webmailer + calendar server (CalDAV) + contacts server (CardDAV))
  5. Odoo https://www.odoo.com/ - "All-in-one management software" is a complete CRM and ERP system
  6. Tine2.0 https://www.tine20.com/ - "Die günstige Alternative zu Microsoft Exchange© oder Mac OS X Server©"
  7. Radicale http://radicale.org/ - "A Free and Open-Source CalDAV and CardDAV Server"

Cloud-hosted:
  1. https://www.zoho.com/calendar/
  2. http://www.teamup.com/
  3. http://doodle.com/online-calendar


Captcha
see reCaptcha


Code (Version Control)
(Google Code is being discontinued anway) (version control is not necessarily limited to software development projects, it can also be beneficial to track changes to collaboratively developed documents or data)

  1. GitLab (self-hosted or hosted: https://gitlab.com) or Gogs (self-hosted: https://gogs.io/)
  2. Atlassian Dev Tools https://www.atlassian.com/software/dev-tools (including Git or Mercurial on BitBucket)
  3. Git on GitHub https://github.com/ (free public hosting) or GitLab https://gitlab.com/ (free public or private hosting; software freely available)
  4. Subversion SVN https://subversion.apache.org/


Collaboration/Project Management
(Which Google service does this address?)

  1. Cyn.in Community Edition http://cynapse.com/cyn-in/download/
  2. Liferay Portal Community Edition + Social Office  https://www.liferay.com/en/downloads/liferay-portal/available-releases
  3. Redmine http://www.redmine.org/
  4. Zimbra https://www.zimbra.com/downloads/zimbra-desktop
  5. Strikebase http://www.strikebase.com/
  6. Free version of Planship http://planship.com/
  7. Free version of MyCollab https://www.mycollab.com/


DNS (Google's Public Domain Name System)
(Many ISPs and lazy admins just use Google's name servers, 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. This leaks a lot of data to Google. Use other name servers!)

  1. OpenNIC https://www.opennicproject.org/
  2. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dns+server DDG gives you a pretty list for this query
  3. Digitalcourage https://digitalcourage.de/support/zensurfreier-dns-server
  4. CCC Germany https://www.ccc.de/de/censorship/dns-howto
  5. Ungefiltert Surfen https://www.ungefiltert-surfen.de//nameserver/de.html
  6. https://quad9.net/  9.9.9.9 (filtered, DNSSEC-verified), 9.9.9.10 (unfiltered) – Background: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Quad9-Datenschutzfreundliche-Alternative-zum-Google-DNS-3890741.html


Docs (authoring)

Collaborative authoring:
WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get):
  1. http://etherpad.org for drafts or other text with minimal markup and structuring
  2. https://www.onlyoffice.com
  3. http://www.fengoffice.com
  4. http://www.open-xchange.com
  5. https://owncloud.org with ownCloud Documents

Markup-based:
  1. https://www.sharelatex.com create PDF from LaTeX (if you need professional layout; alternatively available as free software for self-hosting)
  2. https://www.authorea.com create PDF from LaTeX or markdown
  3. https://www.notex.ch create PDF/HTML/EPUB from LaTeX/markdown/reStructuredText (git-versioned but not collaborative?)
  4. any wiki
  5. any online markdown editor (see https://github.com/scholmd/scholmd/wiki/Tools-to-support-your-markdown-authoring#web-based-applications for a list)
  6. https://overleaf.com create PDF from LaTeX (if you need professional layout)

Offline authoring:
  1. https://libreoffice.org/
  2. http://www.openoffice.org
  3. http://www.abiword.org
  4. http://gottcode.org/focuswriter/


Fonts

Download any required fonts from fonts.google.com to your server. When using them in your website, include them from there, not from Google. The same goes for Javascript libraries and other assets. Make your website self-contained!


Forms (Web forms that collect all submitted data in a Google Docs spreadsheet)

  1. Use a plugin for you CMS, and keep it up-to-date!
  2. https://framaforms.org/
  3. see Docs and Sheets


Hangouts

  1. https://meet.jit.si/
  2. https://appear.in/


Mail (e-mail, GMail)

Webmail (includes hosted IMAP server):
  1. https://posteo.de/en
  2. https://mailbox.org
  3. https://www.fastmail.com
  4. https://www.tuffmail.com

Self-hosted:
  1. http://sogo.nu/ for self-hosted webmail incl. calendar + contacts
  2. https://www.zimbra.com/downloads/zimbra-collaboration-open-source Zimbra
  3. Dovecot (or other IMAP server) + Roundcube (or other webmailer or client software)

Client software:
  1. https://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ Thunderbird + Enigmail add-on
  2. https://www.mailpile.is Mailpile
  3. https://www.neomutt.org/ NeoMutt - created as "mutt" in 1996 with support for GnuPG in mind


Maps

  1. http://www.openstreetmap.org OpenStreetMap - the wiki of maps!
    1. Client-Apps are available for mobile devices, e.g. OSMand for Android
  2. https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/ (create your own maps with OpenStreetMap layers in a minute and embed them in your site)


News
Google News is a popular news aggregator. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator


Picasa (“organize, edit, and share your photos”)

  1. Darktable (for advanced users) http://www.darktable.org/
  2. digiKam https://www.digikam.org/
  3. Shotwell (for beginners; Linux only)
  4. gThumb, a lightweight image organizer for Gnome/Linux


Plus (social networking)

  1. https://twitter.com Twitter (just because what is public cannot be hacked, leaked or confiscated)
  2. Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/ ) – an OStatus compatible federation
  3. https://identi.ca/ Identica
  4. https://diasporafoundation.org/ Diaspora
  5. http://friendica.com/ join one of these Friendica sites: http://dir.friendica.com/siteinfo
  6. no, Facebook is not recommended, and here is why: https://bigbrotherawards.de/en/2011/communication-facebook
  7. https://gnu.io/ GNUSocial, microblogging – an OStatus compatible federation
  8. http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ P2P, full encripted
  9. http://twister.net.co/ P2P, microblogging
  10. https://zeronet.io/ ZeroMe, microblogging, P2P


Sheets

  1. EtherCalc
  2. FramaCalc
  3. FramaFoms


Sites

Cloud-hosted:
https://www.pbworks.com/
https://www.zoho.eu/wiki/

Reader (RSS)

Self-hosted:
  1. http://tt-rss.org Tiny Tiny RSS
  2. http://selfoss.aditu.de selfoss: even more parsimonious than Tiny Tiny RSS
  3. https://miniflux.net miniflux
  4. Feeder

Cloud-hosted:
  1. https://feedly.com/ Feedly
  2. https://newsblur.com/ NewsBlur
  3. http://flowreader.com/ FlowReader
  4. https://digg.com/reader/ Digg Reader (uh, shows URLs than cannot be clicked)
  5. http://www.inoreader.com/ Inoreader

Android:
  1. spaRSS


reCaptcha

A free service for website designers, reCaptcha is a data leech that nobody should be forced to use. Please choose any other Captcha, or make a simple one for yourself.
To find one, try entering the name of your Web CMS followed by "captcha plugin" into your favourite search engine.
  1. http://textcaptcha.com/


Scholar (academic search)

  1. https://base-search.net BASE search
  2. http://core.ac.uk
  3. http://paperity.org
  4. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu (covered by BASE)
  5. http://arxiv.org (covered by BASE)
6. https://www.openaire.eu (covered by BASE)

Search (general)
  1. https://duckduckgo.com indy search
  2. https://startpage.com proxy search
  3. https://ixquick.com meta search
  4. https://www.metager.net meta search (now also available as open source software)
  5. http://yacy.net/en/ DIY search
  6. http://regain.sourceforge.net DIY search
  7. https://searx.me or any other Searx instance (source: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/, instances: http://stats.searx.oe5tpo.com/)
  8. http://gigablast.com/ a venerable search engine available as web service, binaries, or open source code
  9. http://qwant.org "the European search engine that respects your privacy"


Storage

Self-hosted (buy a Raspberry Pi or similar!):
  1. http://www.seafile.com (like Dropbox)
  2. https://owncloud.org
  3. https://nextcloud.com/

Cloud-hosted:
  1. https://wuala.com
  2. https://spideroak.com
  3. https://tresorit.com
  4. https://www.mein-seafile.de/en/
  5. https://www.wolkesicher.de/


Wifi
(In 2017, Google started to sell a mesh-enabled wireless accesspoint called Google Wifi in Europe. A German review of alternatives: https://www.golem.de/news/mesh-und-bridge-systeme-in-der-praxis-mehr-access-points-mehr-spass-1706-127636.html)
  1. Devolo Gigagate
  2. Linksys Velop
  3. Netgear Orbi
  4. Ubiquiti Amplifi


VirusTotal
(Yes, virustotal.com belongs to Google now.)

  1. https://virusscan.jotti.org/
  2. http://www.virscan.org/
  3. https://www.metadefender.com/ (uses CloudFlare)


PS: Sorry if this list is a little bit Germany-biased at the moment. Please add more to eliminate this bias!
More suggestions for the privacy and security conscious: https://prism-break.org/
License for the contents of this page: CC-0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)