Asking whether European cloud providers are a real alternative to AWS is like asking whether a van is a real alternative to a car. It depends entirely on what you are moving. The debate usually gets conducted at company level - are we an AWS shop or not - which is the wrong altitude and produces the wrong answer in both directions. The useful version is a scorecard applied one workload at a time, and it turns out the answer flips somewhere in the middle of most people's estates.
Where European cloud providers genuinely win
Price is the obvious one and it is not close. For plain compute, storage and bandwidth, Hetzner, OVHcloud, Scaleway and UpCloud sit at a price point that makes a like-for-like hyperscaler line item look like a typo. Bare metal is the sharpest example: dedicated machines with real disks and real cores, rented monthly, at costs that make CI runners, batch processing and self-hosted databases economically boring again. If a workload is compute-heavy and architecturally dull, this is where the money is.
The shape of the bill matters as much as its size. Hyperscaler pricing is largely a function of behaviour - requests, egress, cross-zone traffic, API calls, the things that move when your product gets popular. European providers more often bill a function of what you rented, with generous or included traffic. That does not make them cheaper in every case, but it makes them forecastable, and a bill you can predict a quarter ahead is a different management problem from a bill you audit after the fact.
There is also a hardware-honesty advantage. You can rent a specific CPU generation, know how many physical cores you have, and get NVMe that is genuinely attached to the machine. For anything latency-sensitive at the storage layer, that removes a whole category of performance mystery. It is a smaller point than price, but it is the one engineers notice first when they move a database off a virtualised, network-attached setup.
Jurisdiction is the argument that keeps working
Everything else on this list can be answered with money or engineering. Jurisdiction cannot. The CLOUD Act (2018) reaches the operating company rather than the datacentre, which is why an EU region operated by a US corporation answers a different question from the one procurement is actually asking. Schrems II (2020) put transfers on shaky ground, and NIS2 - with a transposition deadline of 17 October 2024 - made supply-chain accountability a board-level obligation. A provider headquartered and operated in the EU removes that entire line of questioning instead of mitigating it.
Where they are not an AWS alternative
Managed service breadth is the honest gap, and it is wide. There is no European equivalent of the fifteen-year accretion of managed databases, queues, streaming, search and machine-learning endpoints that a mature AWS architecture is assembled from. If your system is mostly glue between managed services, moving is not a migration - it is a rewrite, with a new operational burden you had previously outsourced. Anyone telling you otherwise has not run the workload.
The second gap is governance depth, and it is the one people underestimate. Identity and access management, organisational policy, service control policies, fine-grained resource permissions: the hyperscalers have spent a decade on this and it shows. European providers generally offer project-level separation and API tokens, which is adequate for a team of ten and thin for a regulated enterprise with forty engineers and separation-of-duties requirements. That is a real reason to leave certain workloads exactly where they are.
Then footprint and ecosystem. If you serve users in São Paulo, Singapore and Seattle, an EU-only provider is a latency constraint you cannot engineer around; the regions simply are not there. And the surrounding ecosystem is thinner - fewer Terraform modules, fewer prebuilt images, fewer engineers who have run it before, fewer vendors listing it as a supported target. None of that is fatal, but it is real work that never shows up in the price comparison.
On reliability, resist the easy story in either direction. The OVHcloud datacentre fire in Strasbourg in March 2021 destroyed a building and a lot of customers' data, and it remains the sharpest available lesson - not that European providers are fragile, but that your backup and recovery posture is yours regardless of whose logo is on the rack. Teams with offsite backups had a bad week; teams who assumed the provider had it covered had a bad year. The same sentence would be true about any provider on earth.
Choose per workload, not per company
A practical split, in the order we would actually move things. CI runners and build agents first: stateless, CPU-hungry, no data gravity, and the savings arrive fast enough to fund the rest. Then batch and scheduled processing. Then development and staging environments, which is where waste concentrates anyway. Then object-storage backups, which want to live somewhere other than your primary provider on principle. What stays put is anything welded to a managed service, and anything where a regional latency requirement makes the decision for you.
The operational tax nobody prices in
Here is why most of those moves never happen, and it has nothing to do with the scorecard. A second provider doubles the consoles, the credential sets, the billing exports, the security quirks to learn and the runbooks to maintain. A team of thirty cannot staff a platform function per cloud, so they consolidate on one, and the European option becomes a thing to look at next year. Every year. The technology comparison was never the blocker. The operations were.
That is the problem we build against. One control plane across eleven providers - Hetzner, OVHcloud, Scaleway, UpCloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Akamai's Linode and Oracle Cloud - plus on-premise servers through an agent, with one inventory, spend and caps per organisation across all of them, networks, firewalls and DNS managed at the provider rather than mirrored in a database, and one exportable audit trail over the lot. Bring your own cloud, so the contracts and invoices stay yours. European cloud providers become a genuine alternative to AWS at the point where running both stops costing you a headcount.