Greek SIM card or travel eSIM? Where each one wins

Greece is the country where local SIMs still make sense

In most of Europe the travel eSIM wins by default, largely because buying locally means finding a shop and handing over a passport. Greece removes that friction: prepaid SIMs are sold with no ID and no registration wait, over the counter at Athens International, Heraklion and carrier stores nationwide.

Our country data puts a typical Greek airport SIM at around $15, and the tourist packs are sold in the 10GB to 30GB range. If that holds, you are paying somewhere between $0.50 and $1.50 per gigabyte, which is competitive with everything below and better than most of it.

That changes the shape of this comparison. It is not eSIM-by-default here.

The three networks, and the one that matters

Cosmote, Vodafone Greece and Wind Hellas (Nova) cover the country. Cosmote is the largest, is the only operator with deployed 5G, and has the best island coverage in the Cyclades. Vodafone and Nova are strong on the mainland and the major islands but thinner once you get to the smaller ones.

For a mainland-and-Athens trip, any of the three is fine. For island hopping, Cosmote is the one you want under whichever plan you buy.

What the travel eSIMs cost

Cheapest entry by provider:

Provider	Network	Cheapest plan	Price
Airalo	Not disclosed	1GB / 3 days	$4
Saily	Not disclosed	1GB / 7 days	$4.49
Nomad	Not disclosed	1GB / 7 days	$4
Holafly	Not published	3 days unlimited	$11.90

The Airalo rows are verified, read from Airalo's own site on 13 August 2026, the Saily rows likewise from Saily's on 16 August 2026, the Nomad rows from nomadesim.com on 17 August 2026, and the Holafly rows from esim.holafly.com on 18 August 2026. eSIMCard's rows have been withdrawn: we read its own pages on 18 August 2026, found the figures we held were wrong, and could not store the real ones.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. Nomad publishes no host network either — an earlier version of this table put it on Cosmote, which it does not claim. Airalo sells its Greek local eSIM under the product name Meraki Mobile, which is Airalo's own branding — it does not publish which Greek network the plan connects to. Saily publishes nothing either: its Greek pages name no carrier, only "a reliable connection from the country's best networks". We used to list Cosmote and Vodafone against it, and that was unsupported.

You will occasionally see eSIM Go listed for Greece at $0. That is a placeholder in our data, not a price, and we have left it out here. There is nothing to replace it with: 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.

Cost per gigabyte, which is where the spread opens up

Cheapest per gigabyte first:

Nomad is the value pick from 20GB up, and by a clear margin — its 20GB month at $21 is $14.50 less than Airalo's for the same allowance and $14.99 less than Saily's. It also takes the top of the table: its 50GB month at $31 is $0.62 a gigabyte against Airalo's $42 and $0.84. An earlier version of this page had Nomad's 20GB at $22 and named Airalo's 50GB as the country's cheapest data; the Nomad ladder had never been checked, and both statements were wrong.

Saily used to sit mid-table here on the strength of a $29.99 twenty-gigabyte month. Its verified price is $35.99, which puts it behind Airalo at that size and a long way behind Nomad. The same correction applies at 10GB, where Saily is $22.99 against Nomad's $18 and Airalo's verified $20 — so Saily is no longer a price recommendation at either size.

Unlimited, and the island-hopping case that has gone

This section used to say that Holafly ran across all three Greek networks with automatic switching, and called it the one genuinely Greece-specific argument for buying it. We have withdrawn that. When we read Holafly's Greek prices off esim.holafly.com on 18 August 2026 we found it names no host network for Greece, and none for any of the 28 countries we checked — so there is no published three-network fallback, and the Cosmote/Nova/Vodafone list we carried came from our own data rather than from Holafly. Nobody selling an unlimited plan for Greece will tell you which islands' masts you land on.

Without that, the case rests on price alone, and Holafly does not win it. Its verified ladder is $11.90 for 3 days, $20.50 for 5, $27.50 for 7, $36.50 for 10, $50.50 for 15 and $73.90 for 30. Airalo's verified unlimited is $11.50 for 3 days and $69 for 30, cheaper at both ends. Nomad sells unlimited at $11 for three days, $18 for five, $25 for seven and $33 for ten, undercutting both of them at every length it offers. Holafly also has no hotspot, so two people cannot share one.

The gaps nobody covers

Some places have no signal regardless of what you bought: the smaller Cyclades and Dodecanese islands including Folegandros, Sikinos and Kastelorizo; interior mountain areas of the mainland and Crete; the interior highlands of Corfu; and stretches of open water on Aegean ferry routes between islands. Download your maps and ferry tickets before you sail.

The verdict

Greece is one of the few countries where we would tell you to consider walking up to a counter. Full plan pricing is on our Greece hub.