There's no mention of Google Voice. I've been hooked on it for 12 years, with my primary phone number being a Google Voice number for the last 10 years.

I've started using a lot of the suggested applications and services - Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Flickr - instead of Google's in recent years. I'm still using Gmail because changing my primary email seems like it would be a pain, but at least I can see that there are some strong competitors for email. Voice, on the other hand, seems like a pretty unique offering.

Almost none of those are viable alternatives. They're either not free when Google is, a lot more expensive, or have a lot less features.

And recommending Microsoft products or apps owned by the CCP as an alternative to Google products is simply ridiculous.

I would understand going from Google to open source products, even though I am not an open source fanatic, but going from Google to another privately owned for-profit company makes no sense. Is this written by a guy bitter to have been laid of by Google or something like this?

Maps is the only Google service I am hooked on. I use it to get around (both on foot and via public transport) but also to find places to eat and drink when I am in a new area. I love OSM as a project and have contributed to it but it just doesn't compare.

Other than that, for me it's mailbox.org for Gmail and Nextcloud hosted on a VPS for Drive and Calendar.

A few opinionated differences:

- Mail -> Fastmail

- Search -> Kagi

- Photos -> Google Photos (sorry, but...it's fantastic)

- Docs/Sheets/Slides -> Native/Non-Web Microsoft Office

- Keep/Notes -> Logseq

- Chrome -> Firefox or Orion

- News -> Hackernews

- Sites -> Ghost + Digital Ocean

- Authenticator -> Authy

All easy except:

- Youtube —> can’t get around it

- Maps —> in few cases where apple maps is just not good enough (depends on where you live)

Don’t miss anything else 1sec!

Seen a lot of posts like this over the last couple of years. This is unique in that it recommends several MicroSoft options. That's nuts.

I've been hooked on some Google services since 2010 when I got a Nexus One phone. I liked the calendar and contacts because they were accessible from my other devices. I ported a few of my phone numbers to Google Voice shortly afterward and I liked being able to access voicemail and SMS from my other devices.

Sometime last year I noticed that Google Calendar was acting up with Thunderbird so I decided to migrate my calendar and contacts to Owncloud (https://owncloud.com/). That migration went very smoothly and I've had no trouble accessing my contacts/calendar from desktop, Android, and iOS. Everything works great, and Thunderbird no longer has problems.

To get completely off of Google's tit, I need to migrate my Google Voice to something else. I can migrate them to NumberBarn, but that doesn't take care of the spam filtering. Maybe I can use NoMoRobo...

But why? I'm sure there are reasons, but not mentioned.

I for one love the integration in Google stuff. It's under-appreciated.

- Docs/Slides -> Canva - Sites -> Canva - Photos -> potentially in the future... Canva

- Browser -> Brave or Firefox

I'm curious if people think it is suggested to move away from Chromium completely, or just Google's Chrome?

I think Plausible should also be mentioned as a great analytics alternative. It's open source with a paid saas option.

https://plausible.io/

Any ideas for Calender alternatives?