European alternatives to Polymarket

Polymarket is the name everyone knows, but for a lot of Europeans it is also the name that greets you with a geo-block. Access is decided country by country and keeps shifting: it is blocked outright in France and Belgium, trading is prohibited in Germany, yet it stays reachable in Czechia and much of the rest of the EU. If you have opened it and hit a wall — or you simply want a platform that is built to work where you live — the reasonable next question is what the alternatives are.

The honest starting point is that "prediction market" covers a few different kinds of product, and the right alternative depends on which part of the idea you care about.

First, sort out what you are actually looking for

Three things often get lumped together. A prediction market in the strict sense lets you trade shares in a real-world outcome, where the price is a live probability. An event-contract platform does the same thing wrapped in regulated financial plumbing. And a betting exchange lets you back or lay outcomes against other users, which looks similar but is licensed and taxed as gambling.

They overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Knowing which one you want saves a lot of wasted sign-ups. If the distinction is fuzzy, our primer on what a prediction market is lays out the mechanics.

The regulated event-contract route

The biggest change for European users in the last year is that Interactive Brokers brought its Forecast Contracts to Europe in 2025. Through the ForecastTrader interface you can trade simple yes-or-no event contracts on things like central-bank rate decisions, inflation prints and other economic indicators, using the same regulated broker account you might already have for stocks.

There are trade-offs. The European version is narrower than the US one — political and pop-culture markets are not offered here — and it is a broker product, so it comes with account verification rather than a quick email sign-up. But for anyone who wants exposure to macro questions inside a licensed, familiar wrapper, it is the closest thing Europe has to a mainstream, regulated prediction market.

Kalshi and the international opening

Kalshi, the fully CFTC-regulated US exchange, spent years as strictly US-only. In late 2025 it began accepting international users with identity and residence checks at sign-up. Coverage is uneven — some markets are excluded and access has been pulled at short notice in individual countries — so it is worth checking your own situation before committing. If you are weighing the two big names, our side-by-side on Polymarket versus Kalshi explains how they differ.

Betting exchanges are a different animal

You will also see Betfair and Smarkets recommended as "alternatives". They are exchanges where you trade outcomes against other users, which is mechanically close to a prediction market, but they are licensed gambling operators concentrated in the UK, Ireland and a handful of other markets. That brings consumer protections and clear tax treatment, but also the framing, limits and account checks of a bookmaker. Whether that counts as an alternative depends on what drew you to prediction markets in the first place.

Play-money and learning platforms

Not every alternative involves risking cash. Manifold, for example, runs on play-money and is popular for testing forecasting skill without a deposit. That matters more than it sounds, because the skill that makes prediction markets worthwhile — reading a price as a probability, thinking in expected value, sizing a position sensibly — is identical whether the stake is real or virtual. You can build all of it before any money is involved, and given how much the access map keeps moving, learning first is simply the practical order to do things in.

Where Outcomer fits

That is exactly what Outcomer is for. It is a European-built platform where you trade the same kinds of markets — elections, sport, macro, culture — with virtual money, no crypto wallet and no country-by-country guessing about whether you are allowed in. It is a place to learn how the odds move and test your own read of an event before any real stake is on the line. If you have been bounced off a geo-block, that is not a bad place to start. Read how trading with virtual money works and try a few markets for yourself.