How to break up with Google

Tuta: Based in Germany, Tuta offers an end-to-end encrypted email service (with encrypted calendar!). Tuta Mail recently shipped an email importer, making it easier to migrate away from your current provider. The free plan offers encryption, 1 GB of storage, and one calendar, and paid plans start at €3 per month. The company has taken a strong stance against incorporating AI in its email client.

Fastmail: Based in Australia, Fastmail has been operating since 1999. While it doesn’t offer end–to-end encryption, it’s no slouch when it comes to security. It doesn’t offer a free option, but plans start at a reasonable €6 per month.

Proton: Based in Switzerland, Proton has long been synonymous with privacy. What started as an end-to-end encrypted email service has expanded to offer a calendar, wallet, VPN, password manager, and cloud storage, making it a pretty compelling Google competitor. (That being said, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out their CEO’s recent praise of Trump.)

DuckDuckGo: Since 2010, DuckDuckGo has been offering a privacy-focused alternative to Google. Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your browsing history, so you won’t be inundated with suspiciously personalized ads while you search. We’re big fans of their refreshingly straightforward privacy policy.

Ecosia: Based in Germany (starting to notice a pattern?), Ecosia bills itself as “the greenest browser on Earth.” Any profits go toward climate action. It’s built off of Bing’s search index but eschews the extreme personalization used by major search engines. Last Earth Day, it launched a cross-platform web browser.

Startpage: Based in the Netherlands, Startpage fetches results via Google, but removes all tracking to offer high-quality search results without all the icky surveillance stuff. The company explicitly states that its data is never used to train AI models.

Vivaldi: Headquartered in Norway, Vivaldi is a Chromium-based browser that’s privacy-forward and extremely customizable, showing that privacy and aesthetics can coexist. The company has also made a conscious decision about keeping AI out its offering. Now that’s music to our ears.

DuckDuckGo: In 2018, DuckDuckGo expanded its offering to include a private browser. Without all the background trackers, the browser is lighter than Google Chrome and uses less RAM. There’s one important limitation to note: DuckDuckGo currently doesn’t support extensions.

Brave: Founded in San Francisco, Brave is a faster and privacy-centric alternative to Google Chrome. By default, it blocks all ads, trackers, and fingerprinting. Plus, it comes with its own search engine. There is a bit of crypto and AI weirdness, but fortunately, both are easy to disable.

If you’re looking for maps that recognize the Gulf of Mexico, look no further.

OpenStreetMap: Part of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, OSM is a global, community-driven project that aims to make geospatial data available to anyone to use and share.

Magic Earth: Magic Earth puts OSM crowd-sourced location data onto your phone, so you can take transit and traffic maps with you, online and offline.

HERE WeGo: HERE Technologies is a Dutch-based company that specializes in mapping. Its journey-mapping app is available on iOS and Android.

Libreoffice: Based in Germany, LibreOffice is a free and open-source alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. It offers a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, database, and more. It doesn’t offer real-time collaboration but is great if you prefer to work solo or if file sharing meets your needs.

Cryptpad: Based in France, Cryptpad combines end-to-end encryption and real-time collaboration. Its free offering is fairly robust if you need less than 1GB for your work, and the paid plan starts at €5 per month.

Writing alternatives to Google Docs

Obsidian: Based in Canada, Obsidian is a Markdown-based note-taking app that puts users in full control of its data. Their ecosystem of community-built plugins gives users the flexibility to create a workflow that works for them. However, it does have a steep learning curve, limited collaboration, and minimal formatting.

Cryptpad: Cryptpad’s online editor is dead simple and highly secure. From a purely functional standpoint, Cryptpad will have what most writers need. But if setting the right environment for your writing sessions is important, you might want to consider other options.

Ellipsus: Based in Germany, Ellipsus (that’s us!) is building a better way to collaborate on long-form writing. During our beta, we’re totally free (and will continue to offer a generous free plan after we launch). We’re pro creative freedom and have taken a hard-line stance against incorporating generative AI in our app. While we’re missing some of the creature comforts of more established word processors, we’re getting better and better every month.

To see an even more exhaustive list of options, you can see what’s happening over on /r/degoogle. If you think there are any specific products that belong on our list, get in touch at dotdotdot [at] ellipsus.com.

Before you look up our DNS records, we’ll spill the beans: We use Google Workspace and various other Google products to power parts of our product and company: Gmail, Google Sheets, Search Console (but not Analytics!). But what was once the easy default choice now feels a little more insidious. And we don’t want to tacitly support a company that casually renames inlets due to the whims of a madman; erases Holocaust Remembrance Day, Black History Month, and Pride Month from its calendar; and is preparing to put AI-enabled weapons on the battlefield.

So we’re going to de-google ourselves (kinky!) by the end of 2025. We'll go into more detail in a future post.