hyggecloud / alternatives
European cloud alternatives, compared honestly
Almost every AWS or Azure service has a European counterpart — but not every provider fits every workload. Here is our vendor-neutral overview. We are not a reseller and receive no commission: recommendations follow your requirements, nothing else.
Independence
Why you can trust our recommendation
No partner contracts with influence
We earn from consulting and delivery — not from the provider choice. If IONOS fits better than Hetzner, the report says IONOS. Full stop.
Multi-provider is often the answer
Compute here, object storage there, backups with a third provider: distribution reduces risk and cost — and prevents the next lock-in.
Sometimes the answer is: stay
If your setup is deep in proprietary services and the business case doesn't hold, we say so. A partial migration beats a forced full one.
The providers
Six providers, six profiles
As of July 2026 — prices and portfolios change; the detailed assessment for your setup comes out of the Hygge Check.
Hetzner
🇩🇪 Germany · DCs: DE, FI, (US*)The price-performance champion
Unbeatable compute-per-euro, excellent dedicated servers, S3-compatible object storage, a lean fast cloud API. No frills, but honesty: few managed services — you run more yourself (or we do it for you).
IONOS
🇩🇪 Germany · DCs: DE, EUThe mid-market classic
Enterprise features with German support and a strong compliance focus: Data Center Designer, managed Kubernetes, dedicated resources, SLAs. Pricier than Hetzner, but more managed offerings and the contractual comfort procurement departments love.
STACKIT
🇩🇪 Germany · DCs: DE, ATThe sovereign enterprise cloud
The cloud of the Schwarz Group (Lidl/Kaufland) — built for their own operations, opened to the market. Strong where regulation and sovereignty come first. Portfolio growing fast, but younger than the competition's.
OVHcloud
🇫🇷 France · DCs: Europe + globalThe broadest EU portfolio
Europe's cloud pioneer with the widest service range under an EU flag: public & private cloud, managed K8s, databases, AI instances, bare metal. Functionally closest to the hyperscalers — under European jurisdiction.
Scaleway
🇫🇷 France · DCs: FR, NL, PLThe developer favourite
The most modern developer experience among EU providers: serverless, containers, managed databases, GPU instances (up to H100) and solid Terraform providers. First choice if your team expects AWS-style managed services.
Exoscale
🇨🇭 Switzerland · DCs: CH, AT, DE, BGThe solid Swiss option
A tidy IaaS portfolio with managed Kubernetes (SKS), object storage and databases. Swiss data-protection tradition, data centres also in DE and AT. Popular with teams that value simplicity and stability.
Service mapping
The big translation table
From compute to identity: the most common US services and their European or open-source counterparts from our project practice.
| US service | EU / open-source equivalent | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC2 / Azure VMs | → | Hetzner Cloud, IONOS Compute, OVH Instances | The easy part — often far more performance per euro. |
| EKS / AKS / GKE | → | Managed K8s (IONOS, OVH, Scaleway, Exoscale SKS) or k3s/Talos | Kubernetes workloads are portable — that's the whole point. |
| RDS / Aurora | → | Managed PostgreSQL (Scaleway, OVH, Exoscale) or Patroni HA | Dump & replication, cutover via connection strings. |
| DynamoDB | → | ScyllaDB, MongoDB (self-hosted), PostgreSQL JSONB | Needs a data-model review — Postgres often suffices. |
| S3 | → | S3-compatible object storage (Hetzner, OVH, Exoscale) or MinIO/Garage | Same API — usually just a new endpoint. |
| EFS / Azure Files | → | NFS on a dedicated server, Longhorn, Ceph | Depends on performance requirements — assessed in the check. |
| CloudFront | → | Bunny CDN (SI), OVH CDN | Often faster and cheaper than expected. |
| Route 53 | → | deSEC (DE), IONOS DNS, OVH DNS | Uncritical, moves last — at cutover. |
| SES / SendGrid | → | Scaleway TEM, Mailjet (EU), Brevo (DE/FR) | GDPR-friendly sending with EU data residency. |
| SQS / SNS / EventBridge | → | RabbitMQ, NATS, Redpanda/Kafka (self-hosted) | Robust standards instead of proprietary APIs. |
| Lambda / Azure Functions | → | Scaleway Serverless, Knative, or plain containers + cron | Honest answer: the hardest path. Assessed case by case. |
| Cognito / Auth0 | → | Keycloak, Zitadel (CH), Authentik — self-hosted | Full control over user data; migration with a password-rehash strategy. |
| CloudWatch / Datadog | → | Grafana + Prometheus + Loki (self-hosted) | More insight, no per-metric fees. Part of every migration. |
| Secrets Manager | → | OpenBao (Vault fork), Infisical, sops + age | Secrets belong versioned and encrypted — not in a US API. |
| ECR / Docker Hub | → | Harbor (self-hosted), GitLab Container Registry | Registry next to CI — short paths, no pull limits. |
| Bedrock / OpenAI API | → | Self-hosted open-weight models (vLLM), Mistral (FR) | Details on our AI page — incl. EU AI Act. |
// as of July 2026 · no claim to completeness · full mapping of your setup in the Hygge Check
Decision helper
Which provider for whom?
"We want maximum performance per euro"
→ Hetzner, possibly with dedicated servers for databases. We close the managed-service gaps with clean self-hosting — or Hygge Care.
"Our auditor wants to see certificates"
→ IONOS or STACKIT (BSI C5, German contracts and support). The premium buys you shorter compliance discussions.
"We need managed services like AWS"
→ Scaleway or OVHcloud — the broadest managed offering under an EU flag, from serverless to GPU.
Not sure which path is yours?
The Hygge Check answers exactly that: a full mapping of your setup, a provider recommendation with reasoning, and a business case that survives your board meeting.
→ Request a Hygge CheckFixed price from €2,500 · results in 2 weeks