5 European alternatives to Salesforce
Time for CRM that fits your business — not U.S. legislation.
Published on November 27, 2025
Merien co-founded E52 in 2015 and envisioned AI in journalism, leading to Laio. He writes bold columns on hydrogen and mobility—often with a sharp edge.
Your CRM is the beating heart of your commercial operation. It contains your most fundamental business data: who your customers are, what they buy, and where your revenue comes from. Yet when it comes to managing this essential data, we often blindly opt for “easy” American cloud solutions, with all the risks to data sovereignty that entails. This is completely unnecessary, because Europe offers a growing ecosystem of flexible, secure, and powerful alternatives.
It's time to take a critical look at dependency. Whether you're looking for the speed of modern tech or the robustness of an enterprise solution, there are European alternatives.
Salesforce: The Established Order
Salesforce is the undisputed giant in this domain. Not only is it the most popular CRM platform, but it is also increasingly entering the domain of ERP through countless extensions. Its philosophy is a gigantic, all-encompassing platform. In practice, however, this often feels rigid: everything is predefined in fixed structures such as “Leads,” “Accounts,” and “Opportunities.” Want something different? That often requires expensive implementation partners and complicated training programs.
In addition, the ecosystem creates a strong lock-in. Because many other tools are built on top of Salesforce, switching—once Salesforce is integrated into your organization—is difficult and costly. But perhaps the biggest pain point is the data itself. At its core, Salesforce is a huge data collector of your vital business information. That data is subject to US legislation (such as the Cloud Act).
Here are five European alternatives that prove there is another way.
1. Attio (United Kingdom)
Attio is the answer for the “Notion generation.” Where traditional CRMs are rigid and pre-packaged, Attio offers an extremely flexible data model that adapts to your business, rather than the other way around. It focuses specifically on startups, scale-ups, and modern tech companies that want to move quickly and have absolutely no interest in six-month-long consultancy processes to set up a tool. With their recent investment round (Series B), they have the clout to completely revamp the CRM landscape with a powerful, modern UI.
2. SAP (Germany)
When talking about the ‘established order’, we cannot overlook its European counterpart. SAP is an absolute behemoth in the software world and now does much more than just ERP. With their Customer Experience (CX) portfolio (which includes the former Hybris), they offer an enterprise-worthy alternative to Salesforce. This is not a tool for small freelancers, but for large organizations that want to streamline complex processes within a fully European ecosystem. SAP proves that you don't have to cross the Atlantic to find heavyweight power.
3. Efficy (Belgium)
Our southern neighbors are working hard to become the European market leader in CRM. Efficy pursues an aggressive growth strategy and has acquired several local players, including PerfectView, which is well known in the Netherlands. This allows Efficy to combine international ambitions with strong local roots and support. Their focus is on far-reaching adaptability and data sovereignty, profiling themselves as the “European CRM Champion” that understands and respects the market.
4. SuperOffice (Norway)
SuperOffice has been a fixture in the CRM landscape for years and is known for its Scandinavian reliability and user-friendliness. Where American tools often focus onmanagement control, SuperOffice focuses strongly on the end user and strengthening the customer relationship itself. The company is currently accelerating its European growth and innovation, with a strong focus on cloud-first working without the complexity seen with the American giants.
5. Brevo (France)
You may remember them as Sendinblue. Brevo is the French ‘unicorn’ that started as an email marketing tool but has grown into a full-fledged CRM platform. It is an excellent alternative for companies that want to seamlessly integrate marketing and sales without spending thousands of euros per month. Brevo is deeply rooted in the European tech scene and complies with the strictest European privacy standards, making it a favorite for SMEs that want to combine marketing automation and sales pipelines.