European alternatives to Google Meet

Google Meet is Google’s video meeting service, and its defining property is that it runs in a browser tab with no download. A meeting is a link; anyone with a Google account joins in a click, and anyone without one joins as a guest. Paid Workspace tiers add recording to Drive, live captions and translation, breakout rooms and attendance reports.

The lock-in comes almost entirely through Calendar. A Meet link is generated automatically on every Workspace calendar invitation, so the organisation’s whole meeting schedule quietly becomes Meet-shaped without anyone choosing it. Recordings land in Drive under Workspace retention policy, meeting-room hardware is certified against Meet, and admin controls live in the Workspace console. Replacing Meet alone, while keeping Google Calendar, means fighting that default on every invitation.

Google Meet is part of Google Workspace, from Google LLC in Mountain View. The European alternatives below keep the browser-first, no-download property and compete on EU hosting and, in one case, on being self-hostable.