10 Ways to De-Google Your Life with a Raspberry Pi

I’m one of those people who have enthusiastically jumped into self-hosting to take back control of their data. But if you’re used to getting free stuff from Google, it’s not so easy to switch away. That’s why I want to share with you how you can use a Raspberry Pi to set yourself free.

Many free Google services that spy on and collect user data can be replaced by self-hosted versions running on a Raspberry Pi. These services keep user data private and can be accessed from personal devices over the network.

I’ll go through the most popular Google apps and, for each one, propose a Raspberry Pi project you can try as a replacement.

If you’re looking for inspiration for your next Raspberry Pi project, I’ve put together a list of 75+ ideas with full descriptions, difficulty ratings, and links to tutorials. Whether you’re a beginner or more advanced, there’s something here for you. Grab the list for free here!

Google Docs

Google Docs was the first multiplayer version of Microsoft Office, letting you edit documents with others. And who could resist free? Maybe you, when you find out that it scans all of your documents for information.

The alternative: ONLYOFFICE Docs.
ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite. You can host it on your Raspberry Pi, and then access it from any other PC or mobile device on your network.

With ONLYOFFICE Docs, you can create and share:

• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations
• Fillable forms
• PDFs

Besides the fact that your documents stay on your machines only, the best part of ONLYOFFICE Docs is its high compatibility with MS Office formats. It handles .docx and .xlsx files well without mangling them, and you can edit documents with others online.

The main downside is how sprawling the ONLYOFFICE ecosystem is. There are way too many confusing product names. In short, you’ll want to install the self-hosted version, which is called ONLYOFFICE Community, but they’re changing that name soon for some reason.

To help you get started, here are the installation instructions for the Pi’s architecture (ARM64).

Google Meet

Google Meet is an online video-conferencing app, and like Zoom, it loves to record everything you say for “quality assurance purposes.” Surprisingly, these apps say they don’t store facial recognition data… at least not yet.

The alternative: Jitsi Meet.
Jitsi Meet is a free and open-source video conferencing app. We covered Jitsi previously in our Top 15 “Privacy-First” Projects You Can Host on Raspberry Pi. By self-hosting it on your Raspberry Pi, you can say goodbye to yearly fees and snooping.

All of your guests can join a Jitsi meeting with a web link, meaning no extra software is needed. Client apps do exist, though if you decide you prefer using one:

• Mobile: Jitsi Meet app.
• Windows / Linux / Mac: Jitsi Meet Electron.

The main obstacles to overcome with self-hosting Jitsi Meet are hardware-related. You’ll need one of the more powerful boards, so a Raspberry Pi 5 or Pi 4 with a minimum of 4 GB RAM, along with a strong internet connection. It’s also probably not going to scale well for large calls, like if you need to stream a video presentation for 20+ participants.

If there’s enough interest, I’ll write a full tutorial for you in the future. Until then, check out this installation guide to get started.

Google Photos

Google Photos is a cloud storage service for storing your images and videos. It’s also giving someone else access to your private moments, location metadata, and possibly AI training later.

The alternative: Immich.
Immich is a photo organizer that syncs photos and videos from your smartphone, tablet, and PC to your Raspberry Pi server. Immich makes it easy to back up, manage, and search your collection.

Immich is completely free for unlimited storage and for unlimited users. I was impressed with the speed and accuracy of its context search. Since the machine learning trains locally on your Raspberry Pi, your data (like facial recognition) is never sent to others.

There’s no monthly subscription, but you’ll still need to provide a beefy Raspberry Pi with 4 GB to 8 GB of RAM, and enough storage space to hold all of your media. It’s also not as easy to share albums over the internet as I expected.

To learn more, check out our full guide: Immich on Raspberry Pi: Host Your Own Google Photos Alternative.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar lets you store your contacts and manage calendar events. It’s also quite the perfect way to track who you know and how you spend your day.

The alternative: Radicale.
Radicale is a server to manage contacts, events, to-do lists, and journal entries. By self-hosting Radicale on your Raspberry Pi, your whereabouts are only kept on your devices.

Radicale uses the standard CalDAV/CardDAV formats, so there’s a compatible client for any device you want to sync to. Here’s a short list for each platform:

• Mobile: DAVx⁵ (Android) | Mail + Calendar (iOS).
• PC: Mozilla Thunderbird.
• Linux: Mozilla Thunderbird.
• Mac: Contacts + Calendar.

My main complaint is that the setup instructions are unnecessarily complicated. I recommend installing it from the default repo and running Radicale as a service to simplify things. After that, you’ll want to connect via a client app to get a proper calendar UI.

Want even more ideas? I put together a free resource with over 75 Raspberry Pi project ideas, each with a quick description, tutorial link, and hardware requirements. Whether you’re just starting out or looking for something to do this weekend, this list will keep you busy for a while. Just click here to get instant access.

Google Gemini

Gemini is Google’s AI assistant meant to compete with the likes of ChatGPT and Claude. It can answer your questions and even go through your emails and files for you.

The alternative: Ollama.
Ollama is an application that lets you run open source AI models locally. By hosting it on your Raspberry Pi, you can chat with AI bots through a web interface.

Self-hosting Ollama is free for unlimited use, and your chats are kept private on your machine. It also lets you switch between a ton of different models available from its library, so you can chat with Gemma, Deepseek, and many other special-purpose bots.

Unfortunately, the Raspberry Pi isn’t the best platform for local AI. It simply doesn’t have enough RAM or hashing power to respond as fast or as accurately as the commercial models. It also isn’t integrated with your emails and files—at least, not out of the box—like Google Gemini is.

If you’re still curious to see what’s possible, we cover the full installation steps and more in our easy guide to Ollama.

Google News

Google News is an aggregator: it collects news articles from different sources in one place. It also records what you read, like your political interests, health concerns, and financial status.

The alternative: FreshRSS.
FreshRSS is a self-hosted news aggregator. Once installed on your Raspberry Pi, FreshRSS grabs articles from your favorite sites and updates them regularly for you.

FreshRSS is lean, snippy, and doesn’t snoop on you. A common setup is to run FreshRSS via a Docker container and then access it via a web browser or a supported client on your phone.

FreshRSS still has a little more to go to take on Google News. For instance, not every site offers an RSS feed (so you’ll have to set up a scraper to get around that). And FreshRSS doesn’t have any algorithmic curation for trending articles or suggestions for articles you might like.

For a quick-start guide, check out the installation instructions here.

Google Maps

Google Maps lets you discover new points of interest (POI) and provides live navigation by car, train, or even on foot.

The alternatives:

• Organic Maps: 100% offline with live navigation.
• Nextcloud Maps: server-client model with cross-device access.

Both of these map apps can be installed on a Raspberry Pi to provide better privacy protections.

Unfortunately, they still have major limitations. Organic Maps runs directly on the Pi but can’t share access with your other personal devices. Meanwhile, Nextcloud Maps works in server-client mode, but it doesn’t provide live directions, which is a pretty big deal-breaker!

So, I can’t personally recommend either as a true replacement for Google Maps yet, but I wanted to share the progress in this direction.

To get Organic Maps on your Raspberry Pi, install it from Pi-Apps or via Flatpak.
To get Nextcloud Maps on your Raspberry Pi, install it from the Nextcloud app store.

Gmail

Gmail is an online email provider and email reader. The contents of all the messages you send and receive also get scanned and permanently archived by Google.

The alternative: Roundcube.
Roundcube is a self-hosted webmail client. You can install it on a Raspberry Pi to access your email via a web browser from other personal devices.

For this approach to work, you’ll also need to switch to a private email provider. You can self-host your own email address, which is a path for only the masochistic/extremely determined. Or, more realistically, you can obtain a private email address from Proton Mail or Tuta.

There’s still one big problem: when you send an email to anybody with a Gmail address, Google reads and scans your message. I hate to be a downer when it comes to the fight for online privacy, but I’m not sure it’s possible to win on this front at the moment.

But we have to start somewhere. So if you’re still up for this (impractical) challenge, here’s a guide to installing Roundcube.

Google Password Manager

Google’s Password Manager is a password manager integrated into Android phones and the Chrome web browser, so you don’t have to remember all of your site logins.

The alternative: Bitwarden.
Bitwarden is a self-hosted password manager. By installing it on your Raspberry Pi, you can check passwords from all of your personal devices and sync changes to them.

The biggest benefit of Bitwarden is not having your passwords sitting on a corporate server that’s ripe for a data breach. Another plus is that you get multiple backups in the form of local copies on each device.

One point of friction is that Bitwarden won’t sync when you’re away from home, not without extra setup at least. But I don’t recommend opening up your password manager to attack like this anyway; instead, I open the local backup when I’m on the go.

Related: Install Bitwarden on Raspberry Pi: The Ultimate Guide

Google Drive

Google Drive is a cloud storage for accessing your files from anywhere. It will also scan all of your files for content or to comply with requests from legal authorities.

The alternative: Nextcloud.
Nextcloud is a local cloud that you can self-host on your Raspberry Pi. You can then access your files using its officially supported apps on all of your devices (mobile / PC / Mac / Linux).

The value of Nextcloud comes from its privacy for your files and its cross-platform support. The hidden benefit is its huge ecosystem of optional plugins. Here are a few:

• Deck – a Kanban-style project manager.
• Talk – a private video conferencing app.
• Keepass – a self-hosted password manager.
• Music – a personal music streamer.
• ONLYOFFICE – a collaborative document suite.

That’s right, if you wanted to, you could transform Nextcloud from a simple file server into a one-stop shop that replaces everything in this article! Although these extensions aren’t as good as the standalone projects, they might make everything easier to manage.

If you want your own cloud, check out: Installing NextCloud on Your Raspberry Pi (2 Ways).

Ready to try this for real?

Reading is easy. Doing is different.
Once you start your own setup, things don’t always go as planned. That’s where people lose hours.
Get help right away instead of figuring everything out alone.

Start with help →

🔒 Start today. Cancel anytime.

• Avoid the usual beginner mistakes
• Get guidance on your setup
• Access step-by-step videos for most projects