How we compare

The rule

Every provider's row answers the same question: what does it cost to cover a one-week trip? Concretely, each row is the cheapest plan that provider sells for that country lasting at least 7 days and giving at least 5 GB — or unlimited data.

Both halves matter. A 7-day plan with 1 GB is cheaper than a 10 GB one and useless for the same trip, so a rule that only checks duration produces a ranking that looks right and is wrong. Our own first version made exactly that mistake; it is in the corrections log.

Two figures, two jobs

The map and the comparison table publish different numbers, on purpose.

• The map colour uses a fixed 10 GB / 30-day basis. Countries can only be shaded against each other if every country is measured the same way, so this figure never varies its specification.
• The comparison table uses the one-week rule above — the same rule applied to all four providers. This is the number a buyer acts on.

These two often differ, and the country card says so whenever they do. A site that quietly showed one and cited the other would look more consistent and tell you less.

Single-country plans and regional packs

Most countries have no single-country plan on sale anywhere — Italy, Spain and Germany included. What covers them is a regional pack: one eSIM good across 35 European countries, say. Those count here, because they are what you would actually buy for that trip, and the card always names the pack and how many countries it spans.

We take the cheapest of the two, single-country or regional. An earlier version preferred single-country plans even when a regional pack was cheaper, which overstated the price in 12 countries — also in the corrections log.

One exception: a plan covering a country plus its own territories is not a regional pack. A plan sold as "USA" that lists the United States, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands is one market on one set of networks, and calling it "3 countries" on the United States page would be misleading. On Puerto Rico's own page the same plan does say three, because there it is useful.

Where the numbers come from

Someone opens the provider's own page, reads the price, and records it with the URL and the date. Every competitor figure on this site carries the link it came from — click any of them and check. There is no affiliate feed, no price API, and no model estimating anything.

Prices are read in US dollars. Providers that vary currency by visitor location are forced to USD before reading.

Prices go stale, and we drop them

Anything not re-checked within 45 days is removed from this site rather than shown with an old date. A missing row is better than a confident wrong one. Every card carries the date its numbers were last verified.

What this does not tell you

• Speed, network partner and throttling policy are not compared. "Unlimited" plans differ enormously in what happens after a daily threshold; we do not yet measure that.
• Not every country is compared against all four providers. The map hatches the countries where only EasyTravelData has been checked, and their cards say plainly that the figure is not a market low.
• Lowest price is not best value. The specifications sit under every price because they differ between rows. Read them.

Commercial relationships

World eSIM Map is operated by EasyTravelData, which is one of the four providers listed. Rows are ordered by price alone — never by who owns them, and never by commission. EasyTravelData loses on some routes and the site says so.

Links to EasyTravelData are marked Operated by this site and carry rel="sponsored", because they point to the operator's own shop. Links to the other three providers are citations to the page a price was read from: they are not affiliate links and earn us nothing today. If that ever changes, the label on those rows changes with it, before the link does.

Found something wrong?

Tell us. Corrections are published with dates in the corrections log.