About
About Swiss Alternatives
Swiss Alternatives is an independent, open directory of Swiss software and cloud services — built to make ownership, hosting and data residency transparent.
Swiss Alternatives helps people and organisations find software, cloud services and digital products from Swiss companies — and understand what “Swiss” actually means for each of them.
Why this exists
“Swiss” is used loosely in technology marketing. A product can be developed in Switzerland but hosted on a US hyperscaler in Frankfurt. A Swiss company can belong to a foreign investor. A foreign provider can run a data centre in Zurich. All of these are legitimate choices, but they matter differently depending on what you need: data residency, jurisdiction, supporting the local economy, or simply a supplier you can reach in your time zone.
We therefore never reduce a product to a single “Swiss: yes/no”. Instead, every entry answers five questions separately — headquarters, ownership, development, hosting and infrastructure — and says where each answer comes from.
Principles
- Transparency over persuasion. We describe; we do not rank or recommend. Default ordering is alphabetical.
- Unknown is better than wrong. If we cannot verify a fact, it is shown as Unknown / not verified — never silently as “No”.
- Sources for every claim. Each entry lists its sources and the date it was last verified. Claims are labelled verified, vendor claim or inferred.
- No paid placement. Listings cannot be bought. Should affiliate links or sponsorships ever be used, they will be labelled on the page.
- Practise what we promote. This site sets no cookies, loads no third-party scripts or fonts, and is hosted as static files.
Who is it for?
Individuals looking for private email or storage, IT teams evaluating cloud providers, schools and public administrations with data-residency requirements, and anyone curious about the Swiss software landscape.
Open data
The directory is plain text files in a public repository. You can read every entry, propose changes, or reuse the data. The full dataset is also available as JSON at /data/products.json.
Not affiliated
Swiss Alternatives is an independent project. It is not affiliated with the Swiss Confederation, any canton, or any of the companies listed. Product names and trademarks belong to their owners.
Where this website is hosted
We ask every product five questions. Here are the answers for this website itself:
| Question | This website |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Switzerland — operated by Dynavo, St. Gallen |
| Ownership | Swiss |
| Development | Switzerland |
| Hosting | Not in Switzerland — served from Cloudflare’s global network |
| Infrastructure | Not Swiss — Cloudflare, Inc. (USA) |
Why: the directory is a static website without accounts, cookies or a database, so the only personal data involved is short-lived server logs (see Privacy). Cloudflare’s free static hosting has no size limit and is fast worldwide; the Swiss plan we started with could not hold the site. We would prefer Swiss hosting — if you are a Swiss hosting provider and would like to host the project, please get in touch.
Related directories
Swiss Alternatives focuses on Switzerland. For a wider view:
- European Alternatives lists alternatives to US services from companies in the EU and Europe. It is the reference for European digital sovereignty and an inspiration for this project.
- OpenAlternative and Open Source Alternative To collect open-source alternatives to popular software.
- Privacy Guides maintains community recommendations for privacy and security tools.
These are independent projects; no partnership is implied.
Contact and contributions
Suggestions, corrections and questions are welcome — see Contribute or write to us via the contact page.
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