The best international travel eSIM depends on where you are going

What "best" can honestly mean here

There is no best eSIM. There is a best eSIM for a given country, at a given size, over a given number of days, and changing any one of those three moves the answer to a different company.

We hold 2,699 plan rows across 94 countries and six providers. Sorted by cost per gigabyte, the cheapest plan anyone has verified is in Thailand: Nomad's 50 GB over 10 days at $12, which is $0.24 a gigabyte. The median country floor across all 94 is $0.98.

The top of the range needs a caveat rather than a headline. Lebanon is nominally the dearest country we hold at $27.00 a gigabyte, but that is one 1 GB plan over 7 days at $27 — a single product, not a market, with no ladder to compare it against. The dearest genuine ladders are Nigeria and Fiji at $4.70, then Kenya at $4.60, all three on a 10 GB plan with nothing larger sold. Below those sit the Dominican Republic at $3.43 and Chile at $3.28.

So the useful question is not "who is best" but "what does this country cost, and can anyone show me the receipt".

What has actually been read off a checkout

Of those 2,699 prices, 2,475 were read from the provider's own site — 92%.

Airalo accounts for 1,686, every row we hold from it, in all 94 countries, captured in two passes on 13 and 17 August 2026. Nomad accounts for 436, every row we hold from it, across all 47 of its countries, read off nomadesim.com in USD on 18 August. Saily accounts for 185, read on 13, 16 and 18 August across 37 of its 48 countries, and Holafly for 168, read on 18 August across 28 of its 45.

Everything else is indicative. Holafly (240 rows) and eSIM Go (34) have not been checked against their own checkouts — eSIM Go because it publishes no consumer price to check, Holafly because we have not finished. Parts of Saily's list are in the same position: Saily 185 verified and 40 not, Holafly 168 and 72. eSIMCard is a different case from all of them. We read its own pages on 18 August 2026, found the 78 rows we held were wrong, and could not store the real ones — it prices the same size and duration at two or three different amounts depending on a Standard/Universal toggle and a per-plan speed limit our records cannot express. All 78 rows have been withdrawn. See our eSIMCard page.

A correction: the Thai plan we refused to rank

This page used to say that Nomad's cheapest listed Thai plan was 50 GB over 30 days at $12, that it would be $0.24 a gigabyte if real, that it was less than half the best price we could prove existed anywhere, and that we would not call it the best buy in Asia on the strength of a number nobody had checked.

Somebody has now checked it. The plan is real, and it is now the cheapest verified rate on this site. What was wrong was our record of it: we had the duration as 30 days, and it is 10. At 30 days the price looked impossible, which is what drove the scepticism. At 10 days it is simply a short, large, cheap plan.

Two things follow. The plan is worth buying if your trip fits inside ten days, and Airalo's verified 50 GB over 30 days at $27.50 is the one to buy if it does not. And the reason we could not tell you which was true had nothing to do with Nomad — it was a duration we had recorded wrongly and never re-read. How we test sets out where the line sits.

The question no eSIM can answer

Every buyer eventually asks which network they will be on. For a travel eSIM, that question has no answer.

Airalo, Saily and Nomad each publish no host network in any country we cover — not one of the 94, from any of the three. Airalo instead sells under invented retail names: Chido in Mexico, Belganet in Belgium, Uki Mobile in the UK, Chimba in Colombia. Those are product names, not carriers, and reading them as carriers is exactly the mistake that put wrong recommendations on this site once already.

Holafly does not list one either: the operators our data once held against its rows came from our own older text rather than from Holafly, whose country pages name no carrier. eSIM Go has no consumer page on which it could publish one. eSIMCard is the exception in this market — its Japan page names three Japanese operators against its plans, and it is the only one of the six that publishes this at all.

If you need a specific carrier — because you are going somewhere rural, or because one operator genuinely has the coverage where you are headed — no eSIM purchase can guarantee it. A local prepaid SIM can, and it usually costs less: about $7 at the airport in Vietnam or India, $8 in Poland or Mexico, $10 in Thailand. Nobody pays us when you do that.

The size trap, in one country

Providers advertise their cheapest plan. It is almost always their worst value. Airalo's verified ladder in Spain:

Five-fold spread, one seller, one country, same day. The plan on the landing page costs five times the rate of the plan four scrolls down. Nomad's Spanish ladder runs the same shape a little lower — $4 for 1 GB, $35 for 50 GB, $0.70 a gigabyte at the bottom — so in Spain the size you pick still matters more than the seller.

This is why the ceiling matters more than the country. Sixty-two of our 94 countries sell a plan of 50 GB or larger, and in almost all of them it is the cheapest per gigabyte on offer. Thirty-two stop lower — twenty-seven at 20 GB, one at 25 GB, three at 10 GB, and Lebanon at 1 GB — and those are where the expensive floors come from.

The cheapest eSIM plans ranks everything we hold on this basis.

The rungs repeat, and that is the tell

There is a temptation to read a country's floor as a fact about that country's networks. The wider dataset argues otherwise, and it now argues it about two sellers rather than one.

Fifty-six countries carry an Airalo 1 GB, 3-day plan priced at exactly $4.00. Eighteen of the fifty-six countries where Airalo sells 50 GB over 30 days price it at exactly $49 — Colombia, Iceland, Indonesia, New Zealand, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine. Eight price 20 GB over 15 days at exactly $48: Canada, Ecuador, Jordan, Ghana, Laos, Bolivia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Take the five newest East and Central Asian markets. China, Hong Kong, Macau, Mongolia and Kazakhstan all sell 1 GB over 3 days at $4.00 and 50 GB over 30 days at $49, while the 20 GB rung between those two fixed points runs from $22.50 in Macau to $39 in China. Both ends pinned, the middle free.

Nomad does it harder still. Thirteen countries — Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden — share every rung of its ladder to the cent: $4.50, $9, $12.50, $16, $20 and $45 for metered plans, and $11, $18, $25 and $33 for unlimited at three, five, seven and ten days. Not a pinned pair of ends but a whole identical price list, spanning Reykjavík to Bucharest. Austria and Poland share a second such ladder; France and Spain a third.

Figures identical to the cent across countries with nothing in common are not tracking local wholesale cost. They look like a seller's tiering policy. Neither company publishes anything about how it prices, so this is inference — but it fits what is in the data, and it means the rung you buy is often a bigger lever than the country you buy it in.

Where each region lands

Cheapest verified floor we hold, by region:

Four of those six floors moved on 18 August, when Nomad's prices were verified. Africa's moved furthest: it was South Africa at $0.98, and Morocco — where Airalo's own floor is $2.10 — now sits well below it.

The regional pages break these down country by country: Asia, Europe and Latin America.

The tier nobody explains

In thirteen countries Airalo sells two products side by side under similar names, at different prices, for identical data. In Belgium, 10 GB over 7 days is $11 as Belganet and $18 as Belganet+ — 64% more for the same allowance. In the United States, 10 GB over 7 days is $21.50 or $28. Airalo does not publish what the dearer one buys you, and since it publishes no host network either, there is nothing to compare.

Buy the cheaper one unless you find out what the difference is. In Panama that is the one marked Plus.

So what should you buy

Work in this order. Decide how much data and how many days you need, because the per-gigabyte answer swings five-fold on that alone. Open the country's page here and read the ladder rather than the landing page. Check the window as well as the size — the cheapest rate on this entire site runs ten days. Prefer a price someone has read off a checkout over one that only exists in prose. And if the network matters more than the money, buy locally.

If you want the provider-level picture instead, eSIM providers compared sets out what each of the six sells and how much of it we can stand behind.