Swiss company Proton is further expanding its productivity suite. In addition to an email service, calendar, VPN, password manager, and drive, Proton Sheets is now available. It is an alternative to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, an increasingly important advantage as countries take sovereignty more seriously.
Privacy first, yes, but who are Proton and can they be trusted? The amount of times they have responded with an immature or unprofessional reaction is too many to believe they are not going to sell or fuck with the data.
Privacy first for the authoritarian mindset is a walled garden, like Apple. They want to prevent anything from connecting or working with stuff because “security” and meanwhile harvest data about you.
Your criticism may be valid (I’m not familiar with any controversy), but if they are as bad as you say, do you have a better alternative?
I just moved from Google, so thus far it has felt like a significant improvement for me.
For cloud storage, Nextcloud is the best open source solution (and, I’d argue, the best solution period). I get it from Murena.io - hetzner.com is much cheaper, but I am happy to support Murena as they develop my phone OS. And I still save a lot every month compared to Dropbox. The instance provided by Murena has great OnlyOffice integration (sharing documents and working together with others works great) and an encrypted drive (vault - similar to what Dropbox used to have) enabled by default.
I use it for syncing files, contacts and calendars, passwords, working on documents together with others (collaborative simultaneous online editing works great with word and markdown, my collaborators only need a link), and really anything you’d expect from a cloud provider. I also it for a secondary e-mail account.
Part of what makes it great, of course, is that you can change service providers with relative ease, including self-hosting. Email is an exception of course, unless you come in with your own domain.