In a world increasingly dependent on technology, Google has established itself as a colossal presence in the digital landscape, offering a vast array of products that range from search engines to cloud services. However, as concerns about privacy, data security, and annoying A.I. related things that nobody asked for, many users are actively seeking alternatives to Google’s offerings.
Within this article, I’ll try and list as many possible alternatives to Google as I can, while avoiding other giants in their respective areas(with exception of ones that haven’t fallen for corporate greed and offer products while respecting users). With it, I hope the internet as a whole can move even a little away from google, since the tech giant has done the same with everyone else.
Chrome
If you dislike google, the best middle finger you can give them is switching off of Chrome. Google’s browser collects your data at all times through it, is about to make adblockers unviable, and it is the biggest resource hog among all browsers. The issue here, sadly, is that majority of browsers are based on Google Chrome’s source code: Chromium. But this has two famous exceptions: Firefox and Safari.
- Mozilla Firefox is my personal favorite. Its available for all operational systems(Windows, Linux, MacOS, iphone and Android), its fast, reliable, stable and, by default, a lot more privacy friendly(although you can tweak it to be even more). You can easily import your information from other browsers in two clicks when installing and just browse the web like you’ve always done. Most if not all extensions that exist on chrome also do on firefox, so you literally won’t miss anything.
- Safari is a little more… restricted. It’s only really available for MacOS and iOS, due to how much apple hates everything else, but it does offer good privacy protection and performance, so if you are stuck to an apple system, you already have a decent alternative by default.
- LibreWolf: A less known alternative, that has possibly the best privacy of all browsers nowadays. It is based on Firefox, but massively tweaked by its developers to offer as much anonymity as possible. It’s code is open source, the default search engine is set to DuckDuckGo, uBlock Origin comes installed by default, amont other things.
Search
The second best way to give google the middle finger is using another search engine. Google’s search has been getting worse and worse over the years and honestly it does not surprise me seeing a lot of people move away from it. Sadly, most people have been moving to Bing, be it because they don’t know any better of because Windows likes to accuse your computer of having issues if you don’t, but that is like replacing 6 with half a dozen.
If you wish to use something better, that respects you and your data, then I’ve a few recommendations:
- Ecosia: My personal favorite, ecosia is a search engine that improves upon google and bing search results, while anonymizing your data, and storing as little as possible, if anything. As a icing on top, the company is a non-profit from Germany which uses any profit to plant trees around the world.
- Brave Search: Although I wouldn’t recommend Brave as a browser, as like many others they use Chromium as a base, I would recommend their search engine, as it was built by them and offers much better privacy and decent results.
- DuckDuckGo: Good alternative that makes use of bing for search, but like ecosia promises to anonymize your data and collect as little as possible.
Drive
With price of storage going down over the years, it has become increasingly easy to find cloud storage options. Not many of them are well known, but some of the old ones people were used to in the past still exist, and have gotten better over time. In my opinion, all worth a try to avoid google looking into all files you upload.
- Mega: It used to be called megaupload, but a couple years back got remade. Got faster upload/download, better safety, looks good and gives you 20GB for free!
- Mediafire: One of the oldest in the market, and one of the best. Free 10GB of storage and pretty cheap prices to upgrade it later on.
- NordLocker: From the same creators of the famous NordVPN, Nordlocker is a great cloud storage option. It offers 3GB free storage and up to 2TB for as little as 5$.
- Dropbox: This one changed the last, at least for the free tiers(1GB to 2GB). For the paid tiers, however, it has the cheapest plans of all listed so far: no transfer limits and 2 TB for 12$/month
Youtube
Finding alternatives for youtube is complicated. If all you wish to do is host videos for your website/application, there are several options, but there are no other places that allow you to make a living out of video making. Streaming is a special case: Youtube is actually a second tier here, and even gave up competing with its biggest competitor directly a couple years ago, getting rid of its “gaming” subdomain.
- Dailymotion: Second largest video platform that exists, allows for monetization and high quality image. Its youtube’s oldest competitor, and has been steadily improving over the years
- Vimeo: Another old alternative, but focused on professionals, Vimeo has a quite limited free plan, but offers interesting paid ones, with much higher bitrate than youtube.
- Twitch: I don’t like recommending something owned by a megacorp like amazon, but twitch is not only a good alternative to youtube for streaming, but also more successful, and easier to monetize and integrate with apps and games, through its API.
- Picarto: Twitch’s competitor, Picarto has been created in 2013 and is the go-to option for a lot of creators due to allowing NSFW content.
Gmail
Google now decided that your e-mails are their e-mails, and read through them for both making targetted ads and A.I. related things nobody asked. There are lots of alternatives to their services out there, but majority of them are not known to me, paid or owned by equally bad companies, the options here will be things I trust and/or are open source and self-hostable.
- ProtonMail: Proton mail promises a lot in regards to privacy, which although half not true(as the e-mail protocol itself was never designed to allow things like end-to-end encryption) doesn’t make it a bad option. Paid plans come with tons of extra features and services, making them well worth it.
- Mail.com: An old contender, it offers pretty good and free e-mail service, 65GB of mailbox storage and overall pretty good design.
- NeoSpace: First paid option here, but with cheap plans and lots of integrated services. It is aimed at business, but I recommend to any user.
- iRedMail: First open-source and self hosted option, and one of the best out there. It is completely free and easy to edit, but requires knowledge on programming and the like.
Authenticator
Authenticators are pretty important nowadays. The only way to ensure an account is safe is by using 2 factor authenticator, however if you use google’s, they will have yet another source of information on what you use and do on the internet(not to mention, have the power to ban you, which would make you lose access to all those codes). Thankfully, there are a couple alternatives here:
- Authy: One of the most popular two-factor authenticators out there, and the default recommendation for many websites, authy is as good if not better than google authenticator, having the same features. Its available on Android and iOS.
- FreeOTP: Lesser known alternative but also available for both phone systems, freeOTP is an open source authenticator published by redhat.
- 2FAS: Available for phones and your browser(although I wouldn’t recommend using 2FA on your PC), 2FAS is a very popular choice with pretty good ratings for both android and iphone
- TOTP Authenticator: Lastly, but yet another great option, TOTP has all the default options plus a sprinkle of extra security and multi-device/account options for people who like separating accounts.
Others
Google has a monopoly in many areas, but not all. However, all their apps and services feed data into one another, and your information always ends up in the hands of advertisers, so the less you use their products the better you avoid that. So, in the case you’re looking for alternatives to more of their stuff, here’s the final list:
- WordPress: Great alternative to blogger, for those who still use it. It is divided in “.com” for a free host and “.org” for the CMS, where you can download, host and customize your blog yourself.
- Cloudflare DNS: Faster, better, more privacy friendly than Google’s DNS and even offers some protection against malware.
- DeepL: Much better than google translate, it uses A.I. to translate between 32 different languages, and overall does a much better job.
- Etherpad: Self hosted, open source alternative to Docs and quite customizable.
- Maritaca.ai: Great alternative to Gemini, although to be fair anything is better than google’s gemini.
- OsmAnd: Open Source and Offline Maps with GPS function for Android, iOS.
- Aptoide: Alternative to Google Play, with thousands of apps and games available.
- LineageOS: Alternative to the default Android, supporting the same apps but being better in a number of ways.
Their other products have probably very small marketshare and so it’s not really worth it listing alternatives, since there are many(like for things such as Calendar and whatnot). In the specific case of cloud, I prefer not to recommend any big company(such as AWS or Azure) but instead would say that the best alternative would be a local or small/medium size host. A lot of web hosts have their own datacenters and offer cloud computing options, which should supply just enough power while also making things safer, as they aren’t likely to be targets to major hacker organizations, due to not being as well known.
