The European Commission has been quietly testing a replacement for Microsoft Teams, and the verdict from the people who have to use it every day is blunt. Officials using Element Pro, a self-hosted messaging platform the Commission rolled out over the summer as a “sovereign back-up to Teams,” are reporting frustration — with one dismissing the software in crude terms on an internal message board.
The complaints are a small but revealing snapshot of a much larger push across European institutions to reduce reliance on American software. But they also highlight a practical problem: after nearly a decade of Teams muscle memory, the EU’s chosen Microsoft Teams alternative simply isn’t winning hearts and minds.
The digital sovereignty push
According to Politico Europe, the Commission introduced Element Pro over the summer as a “sovereign back-up to Teams,” in the words of an internal staff memo. Teams remains the Commission’s primary communication tool; Element Pro exists to keep staff connected if Microsoft’s service goes down.
The motivation is clear. A July memo read: “In recent months, digital sovereignty has become increasingly important. In practice, this means having greater control over our data and systems so that we can reduce risk and limit disruption to our work, wherever possible.”
Whether that reflects current geopolitical tensions or an unannounced security concern, the sentiment is spreading across Europe. After the US sanctioned an International Criminal Court official earlier this year, Microsoft disconnected that person from its services — though the company said it did not stop serving the ICC. That episode, in which a user could be cut off from email, chat, and files at the stroke of a pen, is exactly the kind of leverage that drives the sovereignty debate.
Element is a London-based company that builds on Matrix, an open messaging standard, with its Pro app layering proprietary features on top of open-source code. That British origin is a slightly awkward fit for EU “sovereignty,” given the UK left the bloc in 2020. Still, Element Pro has drawn interest beyond the Commission: international bodies such as the UN and NATO are exploring it, and France plans to move civil servants off Teams and Zoom to its homegrown Visio platform by 2027. Austria’s military, meanwhile, swapped Microsoft Office for LibreOffice last year.
The Microsoft Teams alternative that isn’t winning over staff
Element Pro is designed to mimic Teams, offering audio and video calls, file sharing, and project rooms. But users are finding it wanting — and the internal feedback has been candid.
“I don’t understand the added value here,” one official wrote on an internal message board. Another was less diplomatic, calling Element Pro “absolute sh*t.” A third, more measured but equally pointed, warned that if the US ever decided to cut the EU off from its technology, they would “instantly win the war.”
Not everyone is a detractor. One official defended the choice by pointing to where the data actually lives: with Teams, “all we have is a guarantee that Microslop will not peek inside.” Microsoft tried to quash the “Microslop” nickname earlier this year; it’s now appearing in European Commission staff chats.
Element CEO Matthew Hodgson acknowledged the software is still being trialed and is experiencing “teething issues.” He also noted the human side of the transition, describing the “cognitive dissonance” that comes when familiar buttons move. “Change is always painful, particularly if it’s a switch from a much-used program like Teams,” he said.
Teams’ RAM problem
Before Teams engineers start celebrating, the app has its own well-documented headaches. Teams is built on Microsoft Edge’s WebView2 runtime, which renders web content inside a native app window. That combination drives heavy memory use, high CPU load, and fan noise. In our own testing, a fresh copy of Teams used 963MB of RAM with no conversations open, and it can climb to 2GB during calls.
Common causes of Teams lagging include a corrupted local cache that leaves the app stuck in re-render loops, stalled WebView2 runtime processes that cause hangs, and heavy effects like custom backgrounds that tax the CPU and GPU during calls. Microsoft has attempted fixes — moving calling into a separate process and adding an Efficiency mode for low-RAM PCs — but both are patches on an app that is still essentially a browser in a window.
The EU’s backup doesn’t escape the web either. Element’s desktop client is its web app wrapped in Electron, the same framework behind Discord’s memory problems. We’ve watched this pattern spread across Windows 11, with WhatsApp dropping its native app for WebView2 and using up to seven times more RAM in our tests. In other words, the EU’s sovereignty play is running on the same class of technology that critics have long berated Teams for.
What this means for you
The takeaway for everyday Windows users is twofold. First, the collaboration apps you rely on are very likely web apps in disguise — Teams, Discord, WhatsApp, and now Element all share the same underlying architecture, which is why they all tend to eat RAM doing nothing. Second, switching platforms is genuinely difficult, even for well-funded institutions with mandates and budgets behind them.
There is a path forward, and it runs through Microsoft’s own framework. WinUI has picked up basic features and lower memory use, and Microsoft now ships a quick-start guide that uses AI agents to take a developer from an empty folder to a published WinUI 3 app in about 30 minutes. If Microsoft applies that to its flagship collaboration app, the optimization problem could finally be solved at the source rather than patched forever.
The broader lesson is that “digital sovereignty” is as much about user experience as it is about data control. Institutions can mandate a switch, but they can’t force people to like it. Whether Element Pro gets over its “teething issues” or the Commission pivots to an à la carte approach to sovereignty remains to be seen — but the staff feedback suggests that convenience will always be a powerful reason to stay put.
Source: Windows Latest
Over to you: Would you switch away from Teams if your employer mandated it, even if the alternative felt inferior?
