The Swiss alternative to Splashtop

• Splashtop Inc. is a US company. The CLOUD Act allows US authorities access to data of US-incorporated providers, even when servers are in the EU.
• Data-protection agreements with Swiss principals often explicitly require providers without US ties.
• Compliance audits in regulated sectors (finance, healthcare) require proof of data location + jurisdiction — Switzerland/EU preferred.

If those points matter to you, WinDesk is the clean choice. If not, Splashtop is a solid option with long market maturity.

Splashtop is inexpensive for one technician and one handful of machines. That is not a criticism — it is the reason it is recommended so often. The friction appears later, and it appears in the shape of the licence rather than in the size of the bill.

• Editions rather than one product. Attended support, unattended access and enterprise administration sit in different products. Which one you need is a decision you make before you know how you will work, and moving between them is a purchase, not a setting.
• Bundles rather than units. Users and devices come in blocks. Adding one technician or one branch office can move you to the next block, so the cost per person jumps rather than rises.
• Annual billing on the business tiers. A team that shrinks in March pays for it until the term ends. WinDesk bills monthly and can be cancelled monthly.

WinDesk is one product with one price line: Pro at CHF 29.90 a month, CHF 7.90 for each additional user, CHF 12.90 for each additional hundred hosts. Everything is in Pro; there is nothing to upgrade into. For work that comes in bursts there is prepaid credit at CHF 0.20 per started connection minute and no subscription at all. All of it on the pricing page.

Splashtop operates data centres in several regions, and choosing a European one is straightforward. That answers the question of where the data sits. It does not answer the question a Swiss compliance review actually asks, which is who can be compelled to hand it over.

The US CLOUD Act reaches providers incorporated in the United States regardless of where their servers stand. A European data centre operated by a US corporation is therefore a different thing from a European provider, and the distinction is the one that appears in procurement questionnaires for finance, healthcare and legal work.

WinDesk is built and operated by Lightnet Multimedia GmbH in Graben in the canton of Bern, with no US parent company. The contract, the invoice and the support conversation are all Swiss, and screen data is peer-to-peer and never passes through our servers at all.

There are cases where switching would cost you something, and they are worth naming before you spend a day on a trial.

• You work from a phone or tablet. Splashtop has mature mobile apps. WinDesk has none and will not before 2027. If support happens on the move, this decides it on its own.
• Picture quality is the product. For colour work on high-resolution displays — design, video, CAD — Splashtop's streaming has years of tuning behind it and is hard to match.
• You need it on premises, air-gapped. Splashtop sells a self-hosted edition. WinDesk does not offer one; for segregated networks the open-source route via RustDesk is the better answer.
• Market maturity is a requirement. Splashtop has been established far longer, with the reference customers and the third-party documentation that come with it. WinDesk is younger, and we say so on the reviews page.

Nothing has to be migrated in one go. The two run side by side without interfering, which makes the switch a comparison rather than a leap.

• Run both for a week. Install the WinDesk host next to the Splashtop streamer and take the next support case on whichever you prefer. Both are signed and neither touches the other's configuration.
• Start with the machines you visit most. Pairing for unattended access takes one confirmation per host. Twenty machines are an afternoon, not a project.
• Mind the renewal date. Business tiers are billed annually, so the sensible moment to decide is a few weeks before the term ends, with the comparison already behind you.
• Uninstall last. Remove the Splashtop streamer only once the WinDesk pairing is confirmed on that same machine — not the other way round, or you will be standing in front of a device you can no longer reach.

We do not perform migrations as a service, and we do not charge for onboarding. The instructions are here, and technical questions get an answer at info@windesk.ch.