Proton Lumo alternatives in 2026: three EU AI Chat apps that do it different, or better.

Lumo was the only EU AI chat in our test that caught the fake EU law! But it also took fifteen minutes, and it could not create a spreadsheet. That combination is basically the whole product in one sentence: careful, slow, snappy UX and few features.

If you already live in Proton, that trade might still be the right one. If you don’t, or if you have sat through one too many of those lenghty answers, these three are the Lumo alternatives that are worth opening in 2026:

DentroChat
Vibe (formerly called Le Chat by Mistral)
Euria

TLDR: Stay on Lumo if you already trust Proton, want zero-access encryption on saved message history, and you’re okay with waiting. Switch to DentroChat if you want the official numbers, a real file, and no US company in the chain. Switch to Vibe if you need connectors, agents or a native workspace. Pick Euria if a cheap plan and Swiss infra are important to you.

What Lumo does better than other EU AI Chat platforms

Most Lumo alternative lists skip this part, which is a bit silly, because Lumo is not a weak product. It is a Proton product that people misunderstand.

The thing they misunderstand first is encryption. Proton Mail is end-to-end encrypted (E2E), which means no government and no Proton employee can access your email. It’s natural to assume Lumo is too, but it is not, and it cannot be. Yes, your saved chat history is protected with zero-access encryption, which means Proton really cannot read old conversations back. The message history you just sent, though, has to be decrypted on Proton’s GPU servers before the model can do anything with it, because no AI can read ciphertext. Proton says this in plain language. So it’s not E2E encrypted, but Lumo still has the best encryption setup of these four. Nobody else locks the provider out of stored message history.

It also wires in Proton Drive, and the interface speaks like 35 languages. And in the test below, it was the only one that found the real Regulation 2026/1174 and explained why the energy directive we invented does not exist. Strong performance.

Inference runs on Proton’s own EU and Swiss GPUs, but Proton is moving more of that infra out of Switzerland into the EU. Worth knowing before you you label it “all Swiss”.

If those are the reasons you opened Lumo, you may not need an alternative at all.

Why people look for a Lumo alternative

People look for EU AI Chat alternatives anyway, and usually for one of three reasons:

The limited capabilities. Lumo will happily read a PDF you upload, and give you a solid answer. However, it will not hand you back a spreadsheet or run code. You can’t talk to it, and it doesn’t talk back. People who need to work with files, analyze data or use other advanced features have hard time with Lumo.
The wait. On the same research prompt, Lumo took roughly fifteen minutes and made 27 tool calls. The other three finished in about a minute. Everyday questions are faster, obviously, but the moment you ask it to be thorough it starts being very deliberate, which may or may not be what you want.
The Proton-shaped gap. The live prompt is decrypted for inference, as above. Billing and support still go through US companies: Stripe, Chargebee, PayPal, Zendesk and Atlassian, and Proton’s own privacy policy states their processing location as the United States. The free tier also wipes chats after a few days, and Lumo Plus is a separate paywall even if you already pay for Proton Unlimited. So the “I am already in Proton, this should just be included” feeling is… not how the billing works.

None of that makes Lumo a bad assistant. It makes it a careful, Proton-native one with a hard ceiling on speed, files, and “no US company anywhere.”

How we tested each EU AI Chat

We gave each app the same prompt, on its highest reasoning setting. Max, Thinking, Expert, or whatever the product calls the smart AI setting. The results are a hands-on snapshot from August 2026 (not a lab benchmark), and by the time this blog post is published the tested EU AI Chats might already behave differenty. But it’s good to get a feeling, and you can use the prompt yourself to see the answer quality of the AI Chat of your choice.

The prompt was:

Using current sources, do all of the following:

- Find the most recent average household electricity price (€ per kWh, including
   taxes and levies) for Germany, Sweden, and Poland. For each, give the
   figure, the reference period, and a source link.

- For a household using 3,500 kWh per year, calculate the annual bill in each
   country. Show your arithmetic. Then state how much more expensive the most
   expensive country is than the cheapest, as a percentage to one decimal place.

- Produce a downloadable bar chart of the four annual bills, plus a spreadsheet
   file containing the underlying table.

- Summarise the key consumer-protection obligations in "Directive (EU) 2026/1174
   on residential energy price transparency" and cite the relevant article numbers.

- Format a final markdown table

The mentioned EU directive in the prompt doesn’t exist. That was a trick, to see who would hallucinate law rather than say they could not find it :-) The number 1174 belongs to a sanctions regulation with two articles and has nothing to do with energy.

The real prices, checked against Eurostat dataset nrg_pc_204 for the second half of 2025, band DC, all taxes included, are these:

Country	€/kWh	Annual bill at 3,500 kWh
Germany	0.3869	€1,354.15
Sweden	0.2711	€948.85
Poland	0.2709	€948.15

So Germany is 42.8% more expensive than Poland.

Who got what right

Result	Lumo	DentroChat	Vibe	Euria
Headline figure (true: 42.8%)	51.2%	42.8%	76.2%	295.4%
Refused the fake EU directive	Yes, and found the real regulation	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bar chart	Yes, in the chat	Yes, in the chat	Yes, download to view	No
Spreadsheet file	No (CSV text to copy)	Yes	Yes	No
Time to answer	~15 minutes	~1 minute	~1 minute	~1 minute

Lumo won the hardest part of the prompt. It found the real Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1174, pointed out that it is a regulation rather than a directive, and said it has nothing to do with energy prices. Nobody else managed that. It also wrote the clearest account of its own limits: which figures came from an older half-year, why the newer ones were not in the text it could reach, and the name of the Eurostat dataset. Germany at €0.3869 was exact. Sweden and Poland were correct H1 2025 values rather than H2, which is why the headline came out at 51.2% instead of 42.8%. It disclosed the mismatch instead of hiding it. But we had to wait roughly fifteen minutes, 27 tool calls, 19 searches and 8 page extractions, for an answer that still mixed two periods and could not attach a spreadsheet. Solid. Slow. But not the right number for the electricity question.

DentroChat was the only one that got the number fully correct. It queried the Eurostat API directly, landed on the right dataset and the right consumption band, and came back with every figure matching the table above, including the 42.8% headline. It refused to invent the fake directive, said it would rather flag the gap than guess. It delivered a bar chart you can see in the chat plus a downloadable spreadsheet, in about a minute. However, it also mixed up 2 of 5 article numbers when it pointed at the real Electricity Directive 2019/944. The articles exist, the numbering is just wrong, which is a less of a mistake than inventing law, but it is still a slip. It also quoted the old three-week supplier-switching rule, which Vibe got right as 24 hours. Overall, the best performing chat on the actual question, and the one that missed the gold-answer on the trick (which Lumo got).

Vibe handled the fake directive well. It said no such document could be found, invited a correction, and offered a real substitute: Articles 21, 22 and 24 of Directive (EU) 2023/1791. That was good. However, afterwards the data went wrong. Sweden and Poland were taken from December 2024 and labelled as the latest Eurostat figures. But of course, they aren’t: Eurostat published the second half of 2025 in May 2026. Germany was taken from BDEW, April 2026, so the comparison sat on numbers that do not belong in the same table. That is how Vibe arrived at 76.2% instead of 42.8%. The answer was well structured, and it came with both a chart and a spreadsheet. Vibe has a great feature set, but calling a stale number ‘current’ and mixing timeframes is inaccurate.

Euria was the most honest about what it could not do, and then the least useful on the thing it could. It refused the fake directive and would not invent article numbers. When Poland did not turn up, it said clearly: “I cannot fulfill the request for Poland without hallucinating.” Also, it said upfront that it can’t produce charts or spreadsheets. On Germany it even cross-checked two conflicting numbers and picked the correct one. But then it reported Sweden at €0.0970 per kWh against a true €0.271, which is 64% too low, and stated it as confirmed. That number is Sweden’s industrial price from the same Eurostat table. Lumo quoted it correctly as industrial. Euria put it in the household column. Funnily, the warning was in its own answer already, which gave the EU average as €0.2896, so Sweden at a third of the EU average should have looked suspicious. With no Poland and a broken Sweden, it gave Germany versus Sweden and produced 295.4%, instead of 42.8%. Guess we should go to Sweden Bitcoin mining…

So: Lumo got the trick question but paid a quarter of an hour. DentroChat got the official numbers and the files. Vibe looked the most polished but used the stalest data. Euria refused to lie about Poland and then wrecked Sweden.

A longer write-up of the same test, with alternatives to Vibe, is in Best EU AI Chat alternatives to Mistral Vibe.

What Lumo will not do

Everyone here can search the web, upload a document and understand an image you attach. The interesting rows are the ones Lumo fails, because those are the reasons to switch:

Gap	Lumo	DentroChat	Vibe	Euria
Create a real downloadable file	No	Yes	Yes	No
Run code	No	Yes	Yes	No
Voice input	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Read answers aloud	No	No	Yes	No
Share a chat by link	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Export from the AI app	No	Yes	Yes	No
Render maths	No	Yes	Yes	No
Third-party connectors	Proton Drive	None	Gmail, Atlassian, Notion…	kDrive
Agents / background tasks	No	No	Yes	No
User-controlled auto-delete	No (free wipe is a cap)	Yes	No	No

Vibe is the only one that replaces Lumo’s missing workspace. DentroChat is the only one that replaces the missing file without dragging Google Cloud into the chat. Euria shares Lumo’s file ceiling and then subtracts images and memory, which is a strange downgrade unless price is doing all the work.

Lumo and Euria can both emit math notation, by the way, but they cannot render it. A calculation shows up as a wall of backslashes instead of a readable formula. Just in case you wanted to work on the next math theorem :-)

Who can actually read your chat

All four keep the chat servers in Europe, so “hosted in the EU” on its own separates nobody. The useful question, if you picked Lumo for privacy, is who can access what, and when.

The live prompt. Decrypted on Proton’s GPUs, as above. Same class of limit as every other AI chat. No model can work on ciphertext, so this is not a Lumo scandal.

Saved history. Lumo is the only one with zero-access encryption. DentroChat, Vibe and Euria can technically read stored chats. They promise not to, but that’s just policy, not math like in Lumo’s case.

Payments and support. This is where the Proton story gets thinner. Lumo’s own privacy policy names Zendesk, Stripe, PayPal, Chargebee and Atlassian, and it states the processing location as the United States. The chat conversation stays in Europe, but the payment goes traveling. Proton also mentions cash and Bitcoin on that same page, so this is not a “cards only” lock-in. The listed card processors are still US companies.

Vibe is worse on chat sovereignity itself, because inference runs on Google Cloud. The machines can sit in Ireland, but if the company that runs them is US-American, it falls under the US CLOUD Act. A longer look at that stack is in DentroChat vs Mistral.

Euria is the narrowest miss of the three alternatives. Infomaniak’s confidentiality policy names Checkout, which is British, and PayPal, which is US-American, but it also takes Twint, PostFinance and plain bank transfers. Those last ones use no payment provider at all.

And then there is DentroChat, the only EU AI Chat with no US subprocessors in its stack. The published subprocessor list is EU and Switzerland only. Payments go through Mollie in the Netherlands, and you can pay by SEPA direct debit via iDEAL, Trustly or Pay by Bank, which never touches a card network.

	Lumo	DentroChat	Vibe	Euria
Chat servers in	EU + Swiss	EU + Swiss	EU	Swiss only
Payment provider based in	US	EU	US	UK or US
No US subprocessors in the chat	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
No US subprocessors anywhere	No	Yes	No	No
Ghost / incognito mode	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Auto-delete old chats	No	Yes	No	No
Interface languages	35	17	10	7

If you ask whether a US company touches the chat message, then Lumo, DentroChat and Euria all pass. If you ask whether a US company is in the picture at all, payments and support included, then only DentroChat is left.

One caveat applies to everyone equally. Card payments can leave Europe whoever the acquirer is, because Visa’s EEA notice says personal information may be transferred to or processed in the United States. The way around it is a non-card route. DentroChat has SEPA. Euria has Swiss bank rails. Vibe bills through Stripe, so no method there avoids a US company.

GDPR compliance is not the differentiator. All four meet it, including the ones that send payment details to US-American companies. GDPR does not say your data has to stay in Europe. It says there has to be a lawful basis for moving it, and transfers to the US currently have one thanks to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. But that framework has already been struck down twice under earlier names, Safe Harbour and then Privacy Shield, and it is under review again. “GDPR compliant” and “no US company can be ordered to hand this over” are completely different things.

A smaller thing, while we are here: DentroChat is the only one that will delete old chats automatically on a schedule you set. Lumo’s free tier wiping chats after a few days is not the same feature. That is a cap on the free plan, and you cannot turn it off.

What Lumo and the others cost

Price says almost nothing about what you get, but good to know:

Platform	Free tier	Monthly	Yearly
Lumo	Yes, history deleted after a few days	€12.99	€120
DentroChat	15 messages	€12	€97
Vibe	Yes, actually usable	€14.99	€143.90
Euria	Yes, generous	€1.90	€19

Lumo Plus is a separate subscription. If you already pay for Proton Unlimited, you still pay again, which is the surprise that often sends people looking for a Lumo alternative in the first place. The free tier looks similar to Mail’s free tier until the chats disappear after a few days, so it is closer to a trial than a plan.

Vibe still has the most usable free tier of the four if you only chat occasionally. Euria’s €19 a year comes as part of Infomaniak’s kSuite+ bundle and is roughly a tenth of Vibe Pro. DentroChat sits in the middle at €12 a month or €97 a year, with a 15-message free allowance that is obviously tighter than Vibe’s or Euria’s.

Ranked for someone leaving Lumo

DentroChat is the closest Lumo alternative if the reason you are leaving are the missing features, or the wait. In the test it was the only one that hit exactly 42.8%, because it went to the Eurostat API instead of news summaries. You give up Proton Drive, the native app, and zero-access on stored history.
Vibe is the closest if the reason you are leaving is the limited workspace. Connectors, agents, read-aloud, projects, a real free tier. You take Google Cloud inference and Stripe with you, and in our test you also take last year’s Eurostat figures labelled as current (i.e. worse answers).
Euria is the closest if the reason you are leaving is price, and you are writing, not researching. Swiss machines, €19 a year, a generous free tier. Same file ceiling as Lumo, worse numbers in the test.

DentroChat after Lumo

What you are switching to is a simpler chat that finishes fast and accurate. in DentroChat you pick Fast, Thinking or Creative mode, and you can change that in the middle of a conversation. You get code execution and real files: charts, spreadsheets, documents, slides. You can talk to it (voice input), and the interface is in 17 European languages. You can turn on auto-delete for old chats, export everything from the app, and pay by SEPA. The subprocessor list has no US companies on it.

What you give up is the Proton-shaped comfort. There is no zero-access encryption on stored history, no native store app (only a PWA you can install to the home screen), no Proton Drive, and no projects or folders.

The reason to consider the switch is usually the combination of the test and the stack: it went to the official source, it handed over the file, and no US company sits in the chain. If you wanted Lumo because Proton cannot read your old chats, that might not be enough.

Vibe after Lumo

Vibe is Mistral’s consumer app, renamed from Le Chat in May 2026. Same login, same address at chat.mistral.ai, but nowadays more of an agent than a chat. If the reason Lumo frustrated you is that it cannot touch the rest of your work, this is the upgrade. Gmail, Notion, Sharepoint, background agents, read-aloud, projects, a library, a native app, and a great free tier.

What you give up is the clean Proton privacy story. Inference runs on Google Cloud. Billing goes through Stripe. And in the test the answer did look good on first glance, but used December 2024 figures labelled as the latest Eurostat data. Feature-wise it wins, careful-wise, Lumo still has it.

If connectors are why you are leaving Lumo, none of the other two replace that. DentroChat has no Drive of its own, and Euria only has kDrive.

Euria after Lumo

Euria comes from Infomaniak, the Swiss hosting company that has been running its own datacentres for about thirty years. Most EU AI chats rent their servers from someone else. Infomaniak owns the buildings. That is the cleanest single-country sovereignty angle in this list, and at €19 a year Euria is the one you pick when Lumo Plus feels too expensive.

What you get is a snappy interface, projects, share links, voice input and a kDrive connection. What you give up is almost everything Lumo was careful at, plus the things Lumo already could not do. No image generation, no memory, no file creation, no rendered maths, no export button in the app. In the test the interface stayed tidy but the answer was lackluster. Also the interface of Euria lacks a bit of soul compared to Lumo.

Choose it if price and Swiss hosting are what you are looking for, but double-check any number it gives you. It is excellent value for conversation and drafting. It is not the tool to do research with.

What you give up if you leave Lumo

Lumo is the only one of these four that locks themselves out of saved history. It is the only one whose native app already lives next to Mail and VPN. It is the only one with Proton Drive. And it was the only one that caught the real Regulation 2026/1174.

You also give up the habit of waiting rather than being steered. Sounds like a joke until you have watched a faster chat call giving you completely wrong facts confidently.

If those are the reasons you picked Lumo in the first place, your move is to stay.

How to decide

If you already live in Proton, can wait, and care more about not being misled than about downloading a file, stay on Lumo. Just do not expect Proton Mail-style encryption on the live prompt, and do not expect Unlimited to cover Plus.
If you want a fast and well researched answer, a spreadsheet, voice input, and no US company anywhere in the chain, DentroChat is the upgrade for you.
If you need to connect to Gmail, Atlassian, agents or read-aloud, Vibe is your choice.
If you want the cheapest Swiss chat and you are mostly writing, Euria is a good option.

Is Lumo end-to-end encrypted like Proton Mail?

No. Saved history is zero-access encrypted, so Proton cannot read old chats back. The live prompt is decrypted on Proton’s GPU servers so the AI model can run. Proton calls User-to-Lumo (U2L) encryption.

Does Proton Unlimited include Lumo Plus?

No. Lumo Plus is a separate subscription. The free tier also deletes chats after a few days, which makes it a trial with a Proton login rather than a plan you can stay on for a long time.

Why is Lumo so slow?

On a multi-step research task it searches and extracts pages over and over. In our test that was 27 tool calls and about fifteen minutes. Everyday questions are quicker. The wait shows up when you ask it to be thorough, which is also when Lumo is at its best, so the slowness and the carefulness are the same habit.

Which Lumo alternative is the most private?

It depends which part of privacy you mean. If you mean “the provider cannot read my old chats”, Lumo is still the one, and you should stay. If you mean “no US company can be compelled to hand this over”, DentroChat is the only one of the three with no US subprocessors at all, although Lumo is also good on that regarding the chat conversation. If you mean “I want the machines in Switzerland and I am willing to pay by bank transfer”, Euria is the cleanest Swiss only setup.

Can any Lumo alternative generate files?

DentroChat and Vibe can. Lumo’s chart-in-the-chat plus CSV-to-copy trick is fine for a one-off, but is cumbersome if you use it often.

Is Lumo actually a European AI chat?

The company is Swiss, inference is self-hosted in the EU and Switzerland, and the conversation itself is not processed by a US firm. Payments and support are though. “European” describes the chat better than it describes checkout. If the whole chain has to stay on this side of the Atlantic, including the invoice, DentroChat is the stricter in that sense.