Replaces YouTube
European alternatives to YouTube
European video platforms for publishing and embedding
Browse the category: Video platforms · Video hosting services
YouTube is the video platform owned by Google. It carries everything from music videos and tutorials to lectures and live streams, is funded largely by advertising, and its recommendation feed is how most viewers decide what to watch next. Creators build audiences and businesses on it, and organisations embed its player on their own websites.
Embedding the standard player brings tracking onto your pages, and publishing on the platform means the audience relationship belongs to it rather than to you. Public institutions in Europe have been looking for somewhere to publish that does not place viewers under advertising analytics. A European alternative to YouTube comes in two shapes. PeerTube is federated software an organisation can run itself, and alugha is a hosted platform with multilingual video.
European options
| service | Country | Hosting | Open source | Free plan | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PeerTube |
 Open source |
✓ | — |
PeerTube
Open source federated video platform
PeerTube is an open source video platform that works as a network of independent servers instead of one central site. It is supported by the French non-profit Framasoft. Instances talk to each other through the open ActivityPub protocol, and WebTorrent spreads delivery between viewers to reduce the load on servers.
Open sourceOpen sourceServices without verified European control
Kept here for transparency, but excluded from the European options and totals. How we classify services →
GermanyQuestions
Will I reach as many people?
No platform matches YouTube's audience, so most organisations publish in both places or use PeerTube and alugha for material where reach is not the point. Training, documentation and institutional video are the usual first candidates.
Can we host video ourselves?
PeerTube is designed to be run on your own server and to connect with other instances in the network. That gives you control of the archive and the moderation rules.
What about subtitles and multiple languages?
alugha is built around multilingual audio tracks and subtitles, which suits organisations publishing across several European markets. Check how it handles the languages you need.