Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site––what trends are we seeing?
☝️That’s a screenshot from the publicly open Plausible Analytics dashboard of the European Alternatives website, featuring independent, privacy-friendly digital tools.
With almost 2M visitors, 2.3M total visits, and 8.5M pageviews, this library is no longer a niche project—it’s the go-to destination for users looking for independent, privacy-friendly tools. Over 1 million of the ~2 million all-time visitors came in 2025 alone—and we’re only in March.
Let’s use the analytics dashboard to see what trends are emerging and what is the demand looking like for EU-built, privacy-friendly tech.
- 1100% surge in 2025 traffic
- Reddit surpasses Google, while privacy-friendly search engines gain traction
- Top 5 categories: What are people looking for?
- Not just a European trend—demand goes beyond the EU borders
- European countries leading (and lagging) in the shift to privacy-friendly tools
- Which European tools are winning?
- Need a hand in deciding which tools to go with?
- Privacy-friendly web analytics is on the rise
1100% surge in 2025 traffic
If we filter the dashboard by “Year to date” period, i.e. 2025 so far, we see there have been 1.3 million visitors to the website, with a surge of 1.1K%.
Another interesting number is the “time on page,” which is 2m47s spent on average. This goes on to show that people are interested and engaging well with the library.
Reddit surpasses Google, while privacy-friendly search engines gain traction
Look at the Top Sources report for 2025 so far:
Google is typically the dominant search driver for most websites—but not here. Reddit ranks as the second-largest traffic source, bringing in 311K visitors—significantly more than Google (193K). This isn’t a regular thing we see with sites.
This suggests that people aren’t just searching for alternatives but are actively discussing and recommending them in forums, subreddits, and privacy-conscious communities.
But here’s another interesting insight: Privacy-friendly search engines are also key traffic sources:
- DuckDuckGo: 33.8K visitors
- Ecosia: 13.5K visitors
- Qwant: 10.8K visitors
This says something about the increasing preference for privacy-friendly tools, i.e., more people are actively using privacy-friendly search engines to discover other privacy-friendly alternatives.
Top 5 categories: What are people looking for?
A quick look at the “Top Pages” report tells us about the most popular top 5 categories:
- Email providers
- Search Engines
- Cloud Computing Platforms
- Navigation Apps
- Web Analytics Services
Upon expanding the report, we can take a deeper look at the most popular categories in terms of unique visitors, while comparing the engagement metrics.
B2B categories win?
While categories like email providers, search engines, and navigation apps attract a large B2C audience, B2B categories are more diverse and consistently rank high.
Businesses are actively seeking privacy-friendly analytics, hosting, and infrastructure alternatives, driving growth in EU-built tools.
Not just a European trend—demand goes beyond the EU borders
Looking at the all-time Countries report: European countries make up the bulk of visitors (as expected), but the United States ranks fourth, sending over 100K visitors to the site!
Even Canada and India make an appearance in the top 25, contributing decent amounts of visitors to the site.
If you scroll all the way down, or simply look at the “Map view,” there’s hardly any part of the globe that’s not participating in the shift towards privacy-focused digital tools.
Privacy-conscious users are everywhere.
European countries leading (and lagging) in the shift to privacy-friendly tools
Germany leads in visitor numbers, with 379K, and contributing 20.5% of the total traffic all-time! This is followed by the Netherlands (141K) and France (135K). These countries show significant engagement with European digital alternatives.
On the lower end, Guernsey recorded 130 visitors, while regions like Vatican City State and Saint Martin (French part) had 3 each. The variation in engagement levels may reflect differences in population size, internet adoption rates, etc.
Which European tools are winning?
The dashboard has an Outbound link click goal configured, which is useful in understanding which listed tools eventually attract real visitors. Once we filter the dashboard by this goal (see it here), we can see which URLs were clicked.
From these results, these are the top 10 tools receiving traffic from the EU alternatives website:
- Mailbox.org (email provider)
- ProtonMail (email provider)
- Soverin (email provider)
- Startpage (search engine)
- Qwant (search engine)
- Posteo (email provider)
- Ecosia (search engine)
- Scaleway (cloud provider)
- Startmail (email provider)
- Good search (search engine)
And if we look at the all-time data, there’s a whopping 1.2M total outbound clicks from the website to such tools, that’s more than half of the total all-time visits to the library.
And conversions aren’t just from Europe—the U.S. audience alone has a 16.8% conversion rate (check here)!
Need a hand in deciding which tools to go with?
We recently vetted many EU-built B2B tools and picked out a few of our favourites. They’re all:
- Built in the EU – Companies headquartered in a European country.
- Hosted in the EU – Ensuring your data doesn’t leave the European borders and stays compliant with European privacy laws.
- GDPR-compliant – Tools that align with European data protection laws.
- High quality – Competitive with mainstream solutions.
- Privacy-focused – Respecting user data and following GDPR regulations.
Check out our handpicked list of 16 privacy-focused European tools.
Privacy-friendly web analytics is on the rise
We started Plausible Analytics six years ago as a privacy-first, GDPR-compliant, cookieless and muuuch easier-to-use alternative to Google Analytics.
So, we took a look at how our category is doing:
- 5th most popular category in the library
- 9th most visited page overall
- More than a 2,700% increase in unique visitors in 2025
The demand for privacy-friendly web analytics is booming. If you’re looking for an alternative, check out our privacy-first approach.
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