Self-hosted alternatives to Google Workspace: a practical guide for small organisations

Google Workspace is genuinely good software. That's worth acknowledging up front, because the case for moving away from it isn't that it's bad. It's that it comes with strings attached that most organisations don't think about until something goes wrong.

When you use Google Workspace, your email, documents, calendar, and contacts live on servers controlled by a US company subject to US law. That includes FISA Section 702, which allows US intelligence agencies to compel Google to hand over data without notifying the subject. It also includes Google's own terms of service, which reserve the right to scan content for policy violations and to use data for product improvement. Especially in the age of pervesive AI, this gives smaller organisations plenty of reasons to migrate to a service that is better aligned with their goals and objectives.

Especially organisations handling sensitive personal data, such as medical records, legal files, financial information, or data concerning vulnerable people have to think deeply about whether having their data scanned by a US mega corporation is aligned with their values.

So what are the realistic alternatives?

The core stack you need to replace

Google Workspace bundles several things: email, calendar, contacts, document editing (Docs, Sheets, Slides), file storage (Drive), and video calls (Meet). A self-hosted replacement needs to cover all of these, or you end up with a patchwork that's harder to manage than what you've left behind.

The good news is that Nextcloud handles most of it.

Nextcloud: the closest thing to a drop-in replacement

Nextcloud is an open-source platform that combines file sync and sharing, calendar, contacts, document editing (via Collabora Online or OnlyOffice), video calls, and a growing ecosystem of integrations. It runs on a Linux server, can be self-hosted or hosted by a European provider, and keeps your data entirely under your control.

The document editing isn't quite as slick as Google Docs, but it's genuinely usable for day-to-day work. The mobile apps are solid. Calendar and contacts sync works with any standards-compliant client.

What Nextcloud doesn't replace well is Gmail. For email, you need something separate.

Email: the honest answer

Self-hosting email is possible but hard to do well. Spam filtering, deliverability, keeping up with security patches, managing bounce handling is a significant ongoing commitment. For most small organisations, it's not worth it.

The better path is a European email provider that hosts your domain's email on infrastructure you control contractually, even if not physically. Good options include:

• Migadu — excellent deliverability, reasonable pricing, no tracking, Swiss-based
• Posteo — German, privacy-focused, very affordable
• Fastmail — Australian, not EU, but a significant step up from Google in terms of privacy
• Fastmail — Swiss based, the gold standard when it comes to privacy and data protection

For organisations that need more control, Stalwart is a modern self-hosted mail server worth considering if you have technical capacity. We cover the full trade-offs in the case for running your own email server.

The migration in practice

A realistic migration for a small organisation (10–30 people) looks something like this:

Week 1–2: Set up Nextcloud on a VPS with a European provider (Hetzner, Netcup, or a managed Nextcloud host like Hetzner-based providers). Get file sync working. Get the mobile apps installed. Do not move everyone across yet.

Week 3–4: Migrate email. Export from Gmail using Google Takeout. Import into your new mail host. Update MX records. Run both in parallel for two weeks to catch anything missed.

Month 2: Document migration. Move files from Drive to Nextcloud. This is the tedious part — Google Docs format doesn't import perfectly into Collabora. Budget time for this.

Month 3: Decommission Google. Cancel the Workspace subscription once you're confident nothing important is still there.

What to expect

Calendar and contacts work transparently and users will barely notice the change. File sync is slightly different but functional. Document editing is the biggest adjustment: if your team relies heavily on real-time collaborative editing in complex documents, expect a period of friction.

Email is the smoothest transition if you use a managed provider. The main user-facing change is a new webmail interface.

Video calls are honestly still an area where Google Meet has an edge. Nextcloud Talk works for small calls; for larger meetings, a self-hosted Jitsi instance or a European-hosted Jitsi service is more reliable.

Is it worth it?

That depends on what you're protecting and how seriously you take it. If you handle data that genuinely shouldn't be accessible to US intelligence agencies, or if you want to make a credible commitment to data sovereignty to your clients or beneficiaries, then yes, the migration effort is worth it.

If you're a five-person team whose most sensitive data is a spreadsheet of client email addresses, you might conclude that a strong password policy and MFA on your existing Google account is a more proportionate response.

The goal isn't self-hosting for its own sake. It's having data infrastructure that matches the sensitivity of the data you're holding. For a lot of organisations, that bar is higher than Google Workspace clears.

We help organisations work through this decision and manage the migration if they decide to proceed. If you're ready to move, our step-by-step migration guide covers the practical sequence. Or if you're still weighing it up, get in touch, we're happy to talk it through without any obligation.