Overall search interest (Google Trends, worldwide, 12 months)
Relative interest, 0–100. Two comparison groups were queried (5-term limit per query); Airalo was included in both as a cross-check anchor.
Saily, aloSIM and SimLocal were queried in a separate group from Holafly, Nomad eSIM and Maya eSIM — cross-group comparison is approximate. "Maya Mobile" as a raw search term risks collision with the unrelated Philippine banking app maya.ph; the score above uses the disambiguated query "Maya eSIM".
Search share by country
Within-country share of combined search interest across the 5 brands compared on Google Trends' region breakdown.
The Philippines data point for "Maya Mobile" has been excluded (shown as no data) — the raw Google Trends export used the term "Maya Mobile", which collides with maya.ph, an unrelated Philippine digital bank formerly known as PayMaya, and the Philippines was the one country where that collision produced an implausible outlier (25% share). The rest of the map does not share this naming collision and is shown as scraped.
Japan — plan pricing across 7 providers
Scraped directly from each provider's Japan eSIM page.
Holafly — regional pricing (unlimited plans)
Same brand, same plan structure, different prices by country — Colombia and Argentina carry a clear premium over Spain and Mexico.
Nomad eSIM — Serbia vs India
Two of the more contested markets from the trends map, compared on pricing.
iOS App Store — ratings & review counts
Review count is a much more direct proxy for actual installed base than search interest — unlike Trends, it isn't vulnerable to keyword collisions.
Ratings and review counts scraped directly from each app's App Store listing. Apple's "#N in Travel" category rank badge was not reliably extractable (the extraction step fabricated ranks for apps with no visible badge) and is omitted here.
Strategic takeaways
- Capped-GB plans are a commodity. Saily, SimLocal, aloSIM and Nomad price within ~$0.50–1 of each other at every GB tier. Competing here means matching this band or winning on something other than price.
- Unlimited plans cluster on a shared ladder ($11→$74 for 3→30 days) across Airalo, Holafly and aloSIM — likely reflecting a common underlying carrier cost. Maya breaks this ladder by pricing 30-day unlimited at $49.99, undercutting the cluster by ~30%.
- Holafly has a near-total lock on Spanish-speaking markets (64–80% search share in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador) and prices accordingly — charging 20–30% more in Colombia and Argentina than in Spain or Mexico. Don't fight this on price; it's a defended moat.
- Airalo owns developed/English-speaking + Gulf/CIS markets (Israel, US, UK, Canada, Russia, Kazakhstan, Poland) with 2–3x the share of the next competitor.
- Japan is genuinely contestable — Airalo and Holafly split it almost evenly (45%/44%), and pricing is fully converged. This is where product/UX differentiation, not price, would move share.
- Serbia and India are the most fragmented markets in this data — no brand has a dominant share, suggesting room for a new entrant.
- GlobaleSIM is not a real competitor — under 1% search share everywhere measured, only 18 App Store reviews, and a 1.6/5 rating from its own users.
- App Store review counts tell a cleaner story than search interest. Airalo's installed base (97K reviews) is roughly 3x Holafly's (31K) and dwarfs everyone else — a much more direct signal than Trends since it isn't vulnerable to keyword collisions. Nomad eSIM (15K reviews) has a larger real user base than Saily (10K) despite getting less search attention.