If we face facts, we can see that Google runs our lives. Whenever you try to break up with search giant, it turns out pretty soon that something is missing, since it owns our emails, calendars, and even voicemails. If you want to move away from Google, we have prepared a list of the best alternatives to Google's most popular services.
No matter if you are tired of things like tax-avoidance tactics or privacy related rumour, here’s a list with alternatives to Google applications and services.
From Mountain View to Redmond
You may scoff at the idea of using Microsoft or less popular competitors, since they're quite good—sometimes even better—than Google. By creating Microsoft (Live) account, you get access to Outlook.com email, SkyDrive along with Calendar and Contacts in one fell swoop. All the services easily synchronize with other services and Facebook. In this way, we get four complementary services that we can manage from one place. Switching to Bing search engine may be a complacement.
Other alternatives
GMail
Besides Outlook, the best remaining alternative is an oldie: Yahoo mail. Those who want to try something new without having to part with their old account may also register on GMX service. It allows to connect GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo in one place, and sync with Facebook.
Ad-free Zoho Mail is also worth attention since it has a more desktop client-like interface and boasts good options for business. It provides an option to create a free personal account, namely Zoho Personal.
Google Calendar
Zoho Calendar is probably the only calendar tool that can really stack up to Google Calendar. It features everything we need, like an intuitive interface and group calendars, reminders, invitations, the ability to organize events, etc.. Noteworthy is also 1Calendar, which lets you create your own schedules, tasks and organize school activities in one place. Another interesting solution is coolendar - an application that combines a list of calendar tasks and displays the schedule in the form of bookmarks and lists.
GoogleDocs
The Mountain View company isn’t the only one that lets you create and edit documents within the browsers. Zoho Docs offers a bunch of similar features to Google Docs along with other business collaboration tools, which allows you to create documents, spreadsheets, task lists, and edit them with others.
YouTube
YouTube is a top dog in its category offering the widest collection of various videos -no question about it- but it is not the only fish in the video sea. The best Youtube alternative is DailyMotion, a service with tons of various videos. Those who are keen on games can take advantage of Twitch.tv, where you will find ready-made materials as well as live broadcasts. If you are looking for new films, web series, and trailers, then we recommend Blip, Vimeo and Veoh.
Google Drive
Google Drive is very strong cloud store, however Dropbox is a worthy counterpart. Dropbox offers several gigabytes of disk space, but it does offer more free storage if you complete a few simple tasks, such as fill in your profile. You should also look at Box.com service, which offers 5GB for free, but they sometimes organize promotions, so you can grab access to larger accounts.
Search
Is there any good alternative to Google? By no means, it is the most difficult service to replace. Shortly speaking, it is the most powerful search engine. The best alternatives to Google, by a long shot, are the aforementioned Microsoft's Bing and the DuckDuckGo, which does not collect information about users and protects our privacy.
