Airalo vs Saily 2026: 6 Countries, Real eSIM Results

Doha was supposed to be a 90-minute layover. Instead the aircraft went north over Turkey, we landed in Istanbul, and I spent eleven hours in a terminal I had not planned to see.

My Airalo Japan eSIM was useless there. 

My Saily Europe plan picked up Turkcell within about forty seconds of the wheels touching down, because Türkiye sits inside Saily’s Europe bundle. That was the moment this comparison stopped being about price.

Saily vs Airalo: the short version

Airalo and Saily cost almost exactly the same. In Japan the difference across every 30-day tier is one cent.

Run the Airalo vs Saily price comparison yourself and you get the same result. So price is not how you choose between them. Coverage model, support and refund policy are.

Choose Airalo if you want the widest country list, you occasionally need calls and texts, and you want the bigger discount — our code takes 15% off versus Saily’s 10%.

Choose Saily if you value support that answers in a minute rather than a day, you want one eSIM you top up rather than a new install per country, and you are travelling across a region rather than to a single destination.

If you are flying anywhere near the Gulf this year, read the coverage section before you buy either.

At a glance

Category	Airalo	Saily	Winner
Destinations	200+	150+	Airalo
Japan 5GB / 30 days	$11.00	$10.99	Tie
Best discount available	15% (ESIMADVICE15)	10% (ESIMDUDE)	Airalo
Underlying network transparency	Poor	Poor	Neither
Support response	Bot first, hours to days	~1 minute to a human	Saily
Refunds	Cash, if unused	Store credit in most cases	Airalo
Calls and texts	On some plans	Data only, no number	Airalo
One eSIM for multiple trips	New install per country	Single eSIM, top up	Saily
Trustpilot	3.9 / 5 (20,979 reviews)	4.7 / 5	Saily
iOS App Store	4.6 / 5 (98,000 ratings)	4.7 / 5 (11,000 ratings)	Saily
Bundled extras	None	Ad block, malware filter, parental controls	Saily

Discount codes for both 🎟️

Provider	Code	Discount	Who
Airalo	ESIMADVICE15	15% off	New customers · Apply →
Airalo	ESIMADVICE10	10% off	Everyone · Apply →
Saily	ESIMDUDE	10% off	New and existing · Apply →

How we tested?

Six countries, one device pair, everything bought with our own cards.

Countries	Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Türkiye, UAE, Portugal
Primary device	iPhone 16 Pro, iOS 26.1, both eSIMs installed simultaneously
Android control	Samsung Galaxy S24, One UI 7
Test protocol	Three runs per country — arrivals hall, city centre, one rural or island point
Logged each time	Date, time of day, attached carrier, download, upload, latency
Home SIM	Kept active for iMessage and bank OTP codes throughout

Both eSIMs were installed at home over Wi-Fi before departure.

I learned that lesson the hard way in Marrakech arrivals once, trying to scan an activation QR code with no data and no Wi-Fi. It does not work.

Round 1 — Price: a one-cent race

This is the finding that surprised me. On paper these two are supposed to be competing on price. They are not. They are shadowing each other to the cent.

Japan, fixed-data plans, prices checked 16 August 2026:

Plan	Airalo (Moshi Moshi)	Saily	Difference
1GB entry tier	$4.00	$3.99	$0.01
5GB / 30 days	$11.00	$10.99	$0.01
10GB / 30 days	$18.00	$17.99	$0.01
20GB / 30 days	$25.00	$24.99	$0.01
Unlimited / 15 days	$48.00	$48.99	$0.99 to Airalo

One cent. Across four tiers. Saily is undercutting Airalo by a penny at every level, which is a pricing decision, not a coincidence.

So on list price this is a dead heat. The discount is what actually breaks the tie.

Japan 5GB / 30 days	List	With code	Effective cost per GB
Airalo with ESIMADVICE15	$11.00	$9.35	$1.87
Saily with ESIMDUDE	$10.99	$9.89	$1.98

Airalo comes out $0.54 cheaper on a 5GB plan, purely because the code is 15% rather than 10%. On a 30-day unlimited plan that gap widens to several dollars.

Check plan validity before you compare anything — a $9 plan lasting 7 days is not cheaper than an $11 plan lasting 30. Both sell prepaid data plans for mobile data abroad, and both exist to replace international roaming

For context: Juniper Research puts the travel eSIM market average at $5.50 per GB and traditional roaming at $8.57 per GB.

AT&T’s international pay-per-use rate is $2.05 per megabyte — roughly $2,100 per gigabyte. Both of these providers are cheap.

The argument between them is about everything except money.

Round 2 — Speed and the carrier nobody names

Here is the thing neither company will tell you plainly: the underlying carrier you actually attach to. Both are MVNOs in practice — they resell capacity on somebody else’s radio network rather than owning towers.

That matters more than any spec sheet, because a travel eSIM is only ever as good as the local tower it lands on. And there is now peer-reviewed measurement work on this.

A study published on arXiv (2408.14923) mapped Airalo across 24 countries and found it running on just six base mobile networks — Singtel, Play Poland, Telna Mobile US, Telecom Italia, Orange France and Polkomtel — with genuinely local profiles in only three markets: South Korea (LG U+), the Maldives (Ooredoo) and Thailand (dtac).

Everywhere else, you are roaming on someone else’s agreement. The same study measured 78.8% of roaming eSIM connections at 15 Mbps or below, only 4.5% at 30 Mbps or above, and a 621% latency increase where traffic was home-routed back through the host network before reaching the internet.

That single statistic explains most of the “my Airalo is slow” complaints on the internet.

Saily is not exempt. Independent testing has found Saily traffic routed through Romania via the 1Global aggregator on some plans, with the latency penalty you would expect.

And Saily’s own carrier partners are disputed — some sources say its Japan plans run on NTT Docomo, others say SoftBank only, with rural Hokkaido gaps. Saily has not clarified it.

Winner: neither, honestly. Both are roaming products wearing local branding. Airalo is more transparent by accident, because researchers have already mapped it.

Round 3 — Coverage, and why 2026 changed the maths

Normally coverage is boring. This year it is the whole argument.

Following the strikes on Iran in early 2026, airspace across Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Bahrain and Lebanon closed entirely, with the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Jordan restricted.

Qatar Airways cancelled 4,929 flights between 28 February and 24 March — around 89% of its schedule. Emirates cancelled over 12,000 in the first week alone.

Airlines rerouted north over Türkiye and Central Asia or south via Egypt and East Africa, adding two to five hours to long-haul journeys.

What that means for a traveller buying data: your itinerary is no longer reliable. Diversions, unplanned technical stops and overnight rebookings in countries you never intended to visit have been routine this year.

A single-country eSIM is worthless the moment you are diverted. This is where the two providers genuinely differ.

Scenario	Airalo	Saily
One country, planned trip	200+ destinations. Buy the local plan	150+ destinations. Buy the local plan
Multi-country region	Regional plans available (Asialink, Eurolink)	Regional plans available, generally broader per bundle
Unexpected diversion	New install required for the new country	Top up the same eSIM if the country is in your bundle
Reinstall friction	One eSIM per country	One eSIM, region-wide

That Istanbul layover is the concrete example. Saily’s Europe bundle includes Türkiye, so it connected without me doing anything.

My Airalo Japan plan could not help, and buying an Airalo Türkiye eSIM in an airport terminal means finding Wi-Fi first.

If you are flying through the Gulf in 2026, buy a regional plan, not a country plan. That advice applies to both providers, and it is worth more than the few dollars either code saves you.

Round 4 — App experience

Both apps are good. They are good in different ways.

Airalo is a catalogue. Browse by country, buy, and each purchase installs its own profile. After six trips you have six profiles cluttering your settings.

Top-ups at least apply to an existing eSIM without a reinstall.

Saily is an account. One eSIM, one balance, top up per destination. Cleaner by the third trip, and zero crashes across six months of testing.

It also bundles ad blocking, a malware filter and parental controls, claiming around 30% data saving — a manufacturer claim I did not measure, though the ad blocker demonstrably works.

Round 5 — Customer support

Not close.

Saily has the best support response time in the category: in-app chat answers in roughly one minute, to a human. That is the fastest in this category by a wide margin, and it is the single most consistent piece of praise in its reviews.

Airalo routes you through automation first. Users report bot replies, multiple rounds before reaching a person, and waits measured in hours or days.

Support quality here has demonstrably declined as the company scaled past 30 million customers.

When your data fails in a foreign airport at 23:00, this is the category that matters.

Round 6 — Refunds, and the thing Saily buries

This one reverses.

Airalo will refund an unused eSIM to your original payment method. Refund disputes do happen — several users report denials or silence, and support has been known to blame carrier partners without resolving anything — but the mechanism is a cash refund.

Saily mostly refunds in store credit, not money. Full cash refunds apply only if you never installed the eSIM or used under 1% of the data.

Round 7 — Payment methods and account setup

	Airalo	Saily
Cards	Visa, Mastercard, Amex	Visa, Mastercard, Amex
Apple Pay / Google Pay	Yes	Yes
PayPal	Yes	Yes
Crypto	No	No
Account required	Yes	Yes
ID / KYC verification	Not required	Not required
Loyalty	Airmoney — 5% to 10% back by tier	Saily credits
Referral	$3 each way	Credit-based
Phone number included	On some plans	No — data only

That last row is the one people get caught by. Saily gives you no phone number at all. If your bank sends one-time passcodes by SMS, and your home SIM is out of the phone, you cannot receive them.

Airalo includes calls and texts on some plans. Keep your home SIM installed and switched on for texts regardless of which you choose.

What real users say?

Ratings first, because they diverge more than the products do.

	Airalo	Saily
Trustpilot	3.9 / 5 from 20,979 reviews	4.7 / 5
iOS App Store	4.6 / 5 from ~98,000 ratings	4.7 / 5 from ~11,000 ratings

Airalo has four times the review volume and a materially lower Trustpilot score. Some of that is scale — more customers means more unhappy ones — but the gap is real.

Where they agree: both save an enormous amount against carrier roaming. One Saily user calculated $149 saved on a single European trip.

Search “Airalo vs Saily Reddit” and expect the same split: Airalo threads are about coverage and support, Saily threads are about setup quirks and refunds.

The two questions people ask most often either side of that comparison are simply “is Airalo legit” and “is Saily legit” — and the answer to both is yes.

Airalo vs Saily by destination

Airalo vs Saily for Europe. Saily. Its Europe bundle spans 35 countries including Türkiye and the UK, and with 2026’s reroutings that breadth has repeatedly mattered. Airalo’s Eurolink is competitive on price but you are more likely to need a second eSIM.

Airalo vs Saily for Asia. Airalo, narrowly. More Asian destinations, and one genuinely local profile — dtac in Thailand — rather than a roaming agreement. Its Thailand dtac package at 50GB over 10 days for $9.90 is the cheapest data either provider sells anywhere.

Airalo vs Saily for Japan. A coin flip on price, since they are a cent apart at every tier. Airalo wins on the 15% code. But neither gave us 5G in Tokyo consistently, and if that matters, a Japan-specialist provider will beat both.

Airalo vs Saily for Thailand and Bangkok. Airalo. The dtac local profile is the difference — you are on a Thai network rather than roaming into one. Suvarnabhumi arrivals connected in under a minute on both, but throughput held up better on Airalo through the day.

Airalo vs Saily for the Gulf and Middle East. Regional plan, either provider, and check current airspace status before you fly. Do not buy a single-country plan for this region in 2026.

How much data do you actually need?

Trip style	Suggested data	Cheaper option
Weekend city break, maps and messaging	1–3GB	Either — a cent apart
Two-week holiday, normal social use	5–10GB	Airalo with the 15% code
Heavy maps use in a dense city	3GB per 2 days	Either, but buy more than you think
Multi-country trip or risk of diversion	Regional plan	Saily
Remote work, tethering a laptop	Unlimited	Airalo — $48.00 vs $48.99, and watch both throttles

I burned 3GB in two days in Tokyo purely on Google Maps. Dense cities eat data faster than anywhere else I have tested. Calibrate accordingly.

Things nobody tells you

Both throttle “unlimited”, at different points. Airalo slows to around 1 Mbps after roughly 3GB in a day. Saily does it after 5GB in 24 hours. Saily’s ceiling is higher; neither is truly unlimited.

Saily’s data roaming is off by default. The “full bars, no internet” complaint is almost always this. Settings → Cellular → select the Saily line → turn Data Roaming on for that line only.

Airalo’s auto-renewal ignores your discount. It renews at full list price with no code and no Airmoney applied. Turn it off after activation.

Hotspot data counts against the daily cap on Airalo. Tether a laptop for an afternoon and you will hit the throttle before dinner.

Keep your home SIM in the phone. Neither of these gives you a usable number for bank OTP codes. Saily gives you none at all.

Frequently asked questions

The verdict

After six countries with both running side by side on the same handset, this is closer than the internet suggests — and the deciding factor is not the one people argue about.

Price is a non-issue. They are a cent apart. Anyone telling you one is dramatically cheaper is comparing different plan sizes.

👑 Airalo wins on destination count, on refunds that come back as money, on plans that can send a text, and on the discount — 15% against 10% is the largest real gap between them.

👑 Saily wins on support, on the single-eSIM model, and on not making you reinstall every time your itinerary changes. In a year when itineraries have changed constantly, that is worth more than it sounds.

If I had to carry one: Saily for Europe and any trip with connection risk. Airalo for Asia, for anywhere unusual, and whenever I want the bigger discount. In practice I carry both, which costs about $20 a trip and has never once been the wrong call.

If neither convinces you, our roundups of Airalo alternatives and Saily alternatives cover the rest of the field.