Best European Google Drive Alternatives: What You Get, What You Pay

Google Drive is the easiest Google product to replace on paper and the most annoying in practice, because Drive is three products at once: storage, sync, and sharing. A replacement has to handle all three or you drift back — and almost none of them replace the fourth thing Drive quietly does, which is edit documents with other people.

This guide is part of a series on moving off American software. Every price below was read from the provider's own pricing page in October 2026, in the currency the provider quotes, and noted with its tax and term caveats. Prices move; check before you buy.

Quick picks

• Best free tier — Koofr (Slovenia). 10 GB free, and it can mount your existing Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive accounts so you can migrate gradually instead of switching cold.
• Best price per terabyte — Hetzner Storage Share (Germany). A managed Nextcloud instance: 1 TB for €4.29 a month excluding VAT, three users included.
• Best encrypted consumer plan — Filen (Germany). 2 TiB for €8.99 a month, end-to-end encrypted.
• Best all-round ecosystem — Proton Drive (Switzerland). 200 GB for $4.99 a month; the 500 GB tier at $12.99 also bundles VPN, Mail, Calendar and Pass.
• Best for a household — Jottacloud (Norway). 1 TB for NOK 79 a month, shared by five users.
• Best for organisations with secrets — Tresorit (Switzerland). Zero-knowledge encryption, business-grade sharing controls, priced per seat.

What each actually costs

• Proton Drive — Free: 5 GB. Drive Plus: 200 GB at $4.99/month. Proton Unlimited: 500 GB plus VPN and the rest of Proton at $12.99/month. Duo: 2 TB for two users at $19.99/month. All end-to-end encrypted, Swiss jurisdiction.
• Filen — a free tier to start; 200 GiB at €1.99/month, 500 GiB at €3.99, 2 TiB at €8.99, 10 TiB at €39.99. Plans stack on one account, so capacity is not capped.
• Koofr — 10 GB free; 25 GB at €1/month, 100 GB at €2/month. Entry plans include up to nine connections to other clouds (three each for Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive), file versioning and 30 days of deleted-file retention.
• Jottacloud — 5 GB free. Home 1 TB at NOK 79/month for five users with no bandwidth limit; Unlimited at NOK 129/month, where upload speed is gradually reduced after 5 TB.
• Hetzner Storage Share — Nextcloud, managed by Hetzner: 1 TB at €4.29/month, 5 TB at €14.19, 10 TB at €27.39, all excluding VAT, with three, seven and ten users respectively. No minimum term.
• Internxt (Spain) — 1 GB free, then 1 TB, 2 TB and 5 TB tiers; the site quotes prices dynamically, so read them at checkout rather than trusting a comparison table.
• Tresorit (Switzerland) — paid only, with a free trial rather than a free tier; per-seat pricing, and client-side encryption that Tresorit itself cannot read. The cheapest tier is aimed at individuals, the rest at teams.

Where the trade-offs are

Documents are the real gap. Drive's killer feature is not storage, it is that a link to a Google Doc opens an editor. European storage providers mostly hand you files: Proton Drive has a basic online document and spreadsheet editor, and a Nextcloud host like Hetzner pairs with Collabora or OnlyOffice for real co-editing — but nobody reproduces the Doc-in-a-browser reflex on day one. If your work lives in shared documents, budget for a separate tool and test it before you move.

Sharing habits change. Drive's default is "anyone with the link." The European services default to friction: encrypted links with passwords, expiry dates, download limits. For family photos that feels like work; for client contracts it is the point. Decide which camp you are in before you pick.

Sync quality is not equal. Photo backup, selective sync and desktop reliability vary by provider and platform, and the CLI matters if you script backups — Jottacloud ships one, Nextcloud has mature clients, and consumer services often do not.

Currency and VAT bite. Proton quotes US dollars, Jottacloud quotes Norwegian kroner, Hetzner quotes euros excluding VAT. A plan that looks cheapest in a blog table may not be cheapest on your invoice.

Migration is the part nobody advertises. The gentle path is Koofr: connect your Drive as an external cloud, copy at your own pace, and only cancel Google once the new account has proven itself for a month. The thorough path is Nextcloud on Hetzner, where you control the instance and can federate shares between servers — more work, more control, and no per-seat surprises.

The verdict

For most people replacing a personal Drive, Proton Drive or Filen is the honest answer: real encryption, sane prices, apps everywhere, and the main cost is losing the built-in document editor. For a family with years of photos, Jottacloud's shared 1 TB is the cheapest calm option, with the caveat that "unlimited" throttles after 5 TB. For a small team that wants its own Nextcloud without running a server, Hetzner Storage Share is the value outlier at €4.29 a month for a terabyte. And if the files are genuinely sensitive — legal, medical, financial — Tresorit is the one to pay for.

What none of them will do is make you forget Drive in a week. Plan for a month of parallel running, and the switch is boring, which is exactly what a storage migration should be.