Local German SIM or travel eSIM? The numbers, side by side

The two options, briefly

Germany has four networks — Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone Germany, O2 / Telefonica and the smaller 1&1 — and you can reach them either by buying a local prepaid SIM here or by installing a travel eSIM before you fly.

A local SIM costs around $15 at the airport and requires a passport for registration. Travel eSIMs start at $4.00, need no ID at purchase, and are live the moment you land. That sounds decisive, and for most trips it is. The exception is coverage, and in Germany the coverage argument is unusually strong.

Where local SIMs are sold

Frankfurt Airport has Vodafone, O2 and Telekom shops in Arrivals B, open 06:00 to 22:00. Munich Airport sells through its airport shops. Telekom, Vodafone and O2 all run high-street stores in every German city, and the supermarkets — REWE and Edeka — carry prepaid starter packs on the shelf.

Bring your passport. Registration is required and a SIM you cannot register is a SIM you cannot use.

Travel eSIM prices for Germany

Cheapest entry point by provider:

Provider	Network in our data	Cheapest plan	Price
Airalo	Not disclosed	1GB / 3 days	$4
Saily	Not published	1GB / 7 days	$4.49
Nomad	Not published	1GB / 7 days	$4.50
eSIM Go	None published — the Telekom entry was our own text	3GB / 30 days	$9.00, not on sale
Holafly	Not published	3 days unlimited	$11.90

The Airalo prices were read from Airalo's own site on 13 August 2026, the Saily prices from Saily's on 16 August, and the Nomad and Holafly prices from theirs on 18 August, so all four are verified. eSIMCard's rows have been withdrawn: we read its own pages on 18 August 2026, found the figures we held were wrong, and could not store the real ones. See our eSIMCard page. eSIM Go cannot be: eSIM Go sells wholesale to resellers and publishes no consumer price — checked on esim-go.com on 18 August 2026, where there is no basket, no checkout and no per-country page — so its rows cannot be bought or ever verified. See our eSIM Go page. Saily's entry plan used to appear here at $3.99, which made it the cheapest way into the country; at the real $4.49 it costs 49 cents more than Airalo's $4.00, and buys four more days for it. None of these six publishes which German network its eSIMs connect to: Airalo, Saily, Nomad and Holafly all name nothing, eSIM Go has no consumer page on which it could, and we hold no read of eSIMCard's German listing. Earlier versions of this table put Telekom against Nomad and then against Holafly; both were errors in our data. Nomad names no host network in any country, and neither does Holafly — reading Holafly's German prices off its own site on 18 August 2026 established that it publishes no host carrier anywhere, so the Deutsche Telekom day pass this table used to describe was doubly wrong: wrong network, and a plan that does not exist. In Airalo's case the name it sells the plan under, Hallo! Mobil, is its own product branding rather than a carrier, and it publishes host networks for no country at all. Where an earlier version of this table named carriers for eSIMCard, we could not source them, so they have gone.

Where it gets interesting is further up the ladder, on cost per GB:

Every row above has now been read at the seller's own checkout, and the Nomad rows are the ones that moved. This page previously listed Nomad's 5GB month at $12 when it is $10, its 10GB at $18 when it is $14 and its 20GB at $28 when it is $21, and carried no Nomad 50GB row at all — that plan is $32. The correction puts Nomad at the top of the table at four sizes rather than trailing it at three. Saily's 5GB month at $10.99, which an earlier version of this page called the cheapest 30-day plan at that size, is second to Nomad's $10.

Fifty gigabytes is still where the cheapest data is, but it is Nomad's $32 at $0.64 a gigabyte rather than Airalo's $36 at $0.72, and both are verified.

Unlimited: three providers, and Airalo wins on price

Holafly, Airalo and Nomad all sell unlimited German data by duration. This section used to say Holafly and Airalo landed within a couple of dollars of each other, on Holafly figures nobody had read. Checked against Holafly's own site on 18 August 2026, the gap is wider and it runs one way. Holafly is $11.90 for three days against Airalo's verified $11, $20.50 for five against $18, $27.50 for seven against $24, $36.50 for ten against $30, $50.50 for fifteen against $42, and $73.90 for thirty against $59. Airalo is cheaper at all six lengths, by $14.90 at a month. Nomad matches Airalo at three, five and ten days and is cheapest of all at seven with $23, but stops there. On top of the price, Holafly has no hotspot.

The coverage argument, which is the real one

Telekom leads Germany on every measure that matters to a traveller: 68.9 Mbps average download, the widest rural coverage, the best highway and railway coverage, and 98% 5G availability. Vodafone and O2 are strong in the major cities and noticeably weaker outside them.

The documented gaps are specific. Rural east Germany — Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Bavarian alpine areas. Rhine gorge train tunnel sections. Minor roads on the Baltic islands of Ruegen and Usedom. Deep Black Forest valleys. And some Autobahn stretches that only Telekom covers.

If your trip goes to any of those, being on Telekom stops being a preference — and no travel eSIM will give it to you. Airalo, Saily, Nomad, Holafly and eSIMCard name nothing. eSIM Go looked like the exception, but that Telekom entry came from this site's own generated text, and eSIM Go sells wholesale to resellers rather than to travellers, so there was never a plan to buy behind it. Earlier versions of this page also listed Saily, Nomad and Holafly among the sellers naming Telekom, and all three were wrong. A local Telekom prepaid SIM is the only route.

Which to buy

The honest summary: for city trips the eSIM wins on price and convenience and it is not close. For rural Germany the local Telekom SIM is worth the passport and the queue. Full country detail is on our Germany hub.