Summary of Mobile Travel eSIMs for Cheap Data Roaming Outside UK

The current market is chocked full of eSIM providers for travel and general roaming purposes, which makes it a bit of a nightmare to figure out which ones to include in our summary. In the end, we decided to pick a fairly random cross-section of providers, which should hopefully be diverse enough to represent the sort of choices available.

In each case we opted to extract a sample of three packages from each provider, spread across two different countries (popular ones for tourism) to test the bounds of price – Spain and the USA. In terms of the package choices, we’ve attempted to select plans that conform as closely as possible to one of three different tiers:

Package Classes for Comparison

➤ Basic: The cheapest eSIM plan for c.1GB of data.

➤ Standard: The cheapest eSIM plan for 20GB of data with at least a c.7-10 day expiry period (approximating a typical week of holiday).

➤ Premium: The cheapest eSIM plan for closest amount of data to “unlimited” usage with at least a c.7-10 day expiry period (approximating a typical week of holiday).

Take note that we’ve only looked at fairly regular data-only travel eSIMs and providers below. But some operators, like Sim Local and World Sim, do offer additional plans with calls and texts included too (included allowances for those are usually fairly limited); sometimes these can even be used across multiple countries, which is handy for frequent travellers.

Speaking of which, there’s another twist in the above approach – Anywhere eSIM will give you a single plan that can work across all of the UK’s major mobile operators (not listed below as they aren’t a global travel eSIM provider). This is akin to a sort of national roaming service, which acts as a backup to your main SIM and picks the network with the best signal, but data usage is very limited.

In addition, FlexiPhone does something very similar to Anywhere eSIM, except they have a wider choice of monthly plans and also support inclusive roaming across over 55 other countries. But if domestic coverage isn’t a problem for you then this could be seen as quite expensive. Finally, you could alternatively try picking up a cheap pre-paid data SIM at the airport when you arrive, but availability and choice will vary between locations.

The following table of example eSIM travel providers and plans is unordered due to the wide variation in product selection, which makes it hard to organise by price. Smartphone users may want to view this table in landscape mode, as we couldn’t fit everything in for the normal portrait view.

Comparison of Travel eSIMs (Dec 2025 Data)

* Sim Local: Unlimited plan goes at full speed for first 10GB used per day, plus unrestricted hotspot and tethering.

* WorldSIM: Also offers eSIMs with calls and texts included. Can also buy eSIM for multiple countries at extra cost. Unclear if any limits apply to their “unlimited” plans, but we believe there is a Fair Usage Policy (FUP).

* Breeze eSIM: You get full speed with up to 5G mobile support for 1GB of usage in any 24 hour period, “thereafter your data speed will be reduced and will reset on the next 24h period“.

* Saily: Unlimited plan includes 5GB/day of usage without a speed limit, then unlimited data at speeds of up to 1Mbps. All plans also have a 30-day activation period, so if you get a plan today and don’t activate it until a month has passed, then it will be activated automatically.

* Holafly: As mentioned earlier, Holafly’s Fair Usage Policy (FUP) states: “If the operator estimates the usage of more than 90GB of data in a month, they may temporarily reduce the speed to between 256-1024KB to avoid affecting other users.” We think they mean Kbps rather than KBps, thus the speed cap would be between 0.25Mbps and 1Mbps.

* Nomad: Unlimited data speeds will be throttled to 1Mbps after 2GB of data is used. eSIMs will automatically be activated after 60 days if you don’t activate them sooner.

* Airalo: Unlimited data plans will reduce your connection speed to 1Mbps after using 3GB of data on one day — this would only apply until the next day of your validity period.

Overall, there’s quite a lot of variation between the different providers, countries and plans, although World SIM did seem to come out as one of the cheapest in our limited sampling. On the other hand, we struggled to find any details to clarify what sort of restrictions, if any, applied to their “unlimited data” plans.