European alternatives to Google Calendar

Google Calendar is the scheduling half of Google Workspace: shared calendars, free/busy lookup across an organisation, room and resource booking, and invitations that resolve attendee availability before anyone replies. For most people it is also the default calendar on an Android phone and in Gmail.

What makes it awkward to leave is that a calendar is a shared object, not a private one. Exporting your events as an .ics file is trivial; keeping the subscriptions, the delegated access an assistant has, the shared team calendars, the room resources and the recurring invitations that live in other people’s calendars is not. Every meeting link already circulated points at a Google event ID, and free/busy only works across people on the same system — so a partial migration leaves the organisation unable to see its own availability.

Google Calendar is part of Google Workspace, from Google LLC in Mountain View. The European alternatives below are end-to-end encrypted calendars from privacy-focused mail providers, which is also the source of their main trade-off: encryption limits cross-provider free/busy lookup.