Best eSIM for Vietnam: 20 Providers Tested and Compared

Heading to Vietnam soon? Sort out your eSIM before you leave. A translation app, Grab for your daily rides and Maps to find your way all run on mobile data, so it is the first thing you want working the moment you land. The catch is that the difference between providers, in both price and quality, is enormous. So I tested 20 eSIMs for Vietnam and compared them side by side, while I travelled through Hanoi, Hoi An, Da Nang, Nha Trang and Cam Ranh.

The good news is that mobile data in Vietnam is dirt cheap, and avoiding high roaming charges takes a couple of clicks. The best eSIMs in my test were not the most expensive ones, quite the opposite: even as a heavy user, you do not need to spend more than $15 for a month. And an eSIM with a local Vietnamese phone number is easy to get.

In this guide I share what I measured on the ground, what to look out for when you choose, and which providers I would skip.

Short on time? Go for the local Viettel eSIM at MicroEsim: a generous 5 GB of data every single day, for very little money, and code FYESIM takes another 5% off. Viettel has the best network in Vietnam, ideal in the cities and even more so once you get off the beaten track.

How to choose the best eSIM for Vietnam

Which eSIM suits you best comes down to a handful of questions:

• Are you only visiting Vietnam, or other countries in the region as well?
• How long are you staying?
• Do you need a phone number as well?
• How much do you value convenience, a polished app and good customer service?

For most trips the local Viettel eSIM at MicroEsim is my tip. 5 GB a day is far more data than most people will ever use, but it is so cheap that it beats even the small bundles from Saily, Airalo and Ubigi on price, let alone Holafly. It was also the best performer of the 20 eSIMs I tested. And Viettel has the best coverage in the country, so it works just as well in the cities as it does off the beaten track.

Travelling through several countries in the region? Then Jetpac and Eskimo are worth a look. And if you want a local number, MicroEsim also sells a MobiFone plan that comes with one.

Roamless, Airalo, Ubigi, Saily and Maya Mobile all deliver perfectly good eSIMs for Vietnam. They are simply not my first pick here, because the local Viettel eSIM from MicroEsim gives you many times the data for less money. But if a smooth app and a polished experience are worth that difference to you, they remain strong options. You get the easiest installation and activation with providers like Saily, Airalo and Jetpac. Saily in particular is strong on user experience, better than the cheaper providers with local deals, and that can be a reason to pay the difference after all.

The providers I would avoid are Airhub and Yesim, and to a lesser extent Holafly. You can read why in the comparison of all 20 providers further down.

Not sure how much data you need? Our data calculator works it out for you.

Want to compare prices yourself? Browse all 50+ providers for Vietnam in our comparison tool, with plans from under $0.50.

Test results: 20 eSIMs for Vietnam

In August 2026 I tested twenty providers in Da Nang. The short version: the local eSIMs I bought at MicroEsim came out best, with Abestesim and the Vinaphone plan from MobiMatter close behind.

The familiar travel brands did fine too. Eskimo, Maya, Jetpac, Airalo, Roamless, Ubigi and Saily all worked without trouble, and budget provider Jambosim held its own. They all connect through a roaming profile instead of a local network, and none of them gave me real problems.

Before you get to the table, there are three things worth knowing:

• Download speed matters least. 100 Mbps is plenty on a phone, and enough to work on a laptop. Almost everything in this test clears that.
• Stability is how steady that connection stays once you actually use it, rather than just during a speed test.
• Response time is the delay between tapping something and the network reacting. That is what you feel when a page loads, when a message goes out, and most of all on a video call.

If you lean on your phone all day, I would not go below "Fair to good". If you mostly message and browse, "Fair" will do. Below that I would look elsewhere.

One caveat: this is a snapshot, and providers can change the network behind their eSIM at any time. I tested the providers that scored poorly more than once, and in different places.

Underneath the table I go into Airhub, Yesim and Holafly, the three that came out lower than you would expect.

How I tested: I bought and ran all twenty eSIMs myself, back to back on the same iPhone 16 Pro Max in Da Nang on the same day, so no result comes down to a different handset, a different corner of the country or a quiet hour on the network. Providers that scored poorly were retested on other days and in other cities: Hanoi, Hoi An, Nha Trang and Cam Ranh. Speeds are the measured download and upload rates. The response times in brackets are the delay before the network answers, first with the connection idle and then while it is busy downloading. The ranking is based on how steady and responsive a connection felt in everyday use, not on raw download speed alone. Routing (the network your eSIM uses, and the country your data leaves through) is listed too, but providers can change this at any time.

The eSIMs I would avoid for Vietnam, based on these tests, are Yesim, Airhub and to a lesser extent Holafly.

• Yesim was the worst eSIM for Vietnam of the twenty I tested, and it was an unlimited plan at that. What you get is a European roaming eSIM: your connection comes out with a British IP address, so everything you do travels to Europe and back before it even reaches the internet. You feel that in every single thing you open. It took 477 ms before the network even answered, against 11 ms on the Viettel eSIM from MicroEsim. On a WhatsApp or FaceTime call you talk over each other the whole time, and even plain browsing was irritating: I kept thinking there was something wrong with my phone. And you pay for it: three days of unlimited data costs about as much as a whole month on Viettel.
• Airhub came second to last, and I cannot recommend it for Vietnam either. Its biggest problem was not the speed as such: you pay the full price for an unlimited plan that was throttled from the very first minute, and when I bought it in August 2026 I found nothing about that on the product page or at checkout. I never got past 8.5 Mbps down and 9.9 Mbps up, the lowest of all twenty. That belongs on the product page, in plain sight. I asked Airhub twice for a response and never got one.
• Holafly in Vietnam was not as bad as those two, but nowhere near MicroEsim, Jetpac, Airalo, Ubigi or Eskimo either. What you get is an eSIM from China Mobile that roams in Vietnam, like a handful of budget providers, and of those resellers, Holafly had the lowest upload and the slowest response, while costing the most.

What Yesim, Airhub and Holafly have in common: at checkout and in the terms I was shown, I could not find a concrete fair use policy for any of them. Holafly is the clearest example: the only one I could find sat in the third tab of the FAQ at the bottom of the country page, where speeds may be reduced "in rare cases", for "no more than one (1) day". No threshold, no numbers, nothing at checkout, while other China Mobile resellers do state theirs. Its hotspot was capped at 1 GB a day when I tested in August 2026, and Yesim and Airhub were no more concrete when I bought them. So you do not know what you are buying, you cannot compare it with the providers that do publish their limits, and you are left with exactly the worry that unlimited is supposed to take away.

Local networks in Vietnam

These are the mobile networks in Vietnam:

• Viettel
• MobiFone
• Vietnamobile
• Vinaphone

Travelling mainly to the big cities or the tourist areas? No worries there, all of them work well. But if you are heading through the country or into remote areas, you want to be sure your eSIM runs on Viettel. It is by far the best network in Vietnam for coverage and for 5G.

MobiFone and Vinaphone are good enough for most travellers, but off the beaten track they fall behind. Vietnamobile is one to leave alone once you are outside the cities. For more on this, see for example Opensignal's Vietnam Mobile Network Experience Report, August 2026.

A real Viettel eSIM is sold by MicroEsim, for example.

Buying a local SIM card

Do you want to buy a local eSIM or SIM card once you land in Vietnam? If your phone takes an eSIM, doing it online is easier:

• MicroEsim has Viettel, Vinaphone and MobiFone plans, the last of those with local calling minutes.
• Abestesim sells plans from a budget service provider.
• MobiMatter has Vinaphone plans.
• Sim Local has MobiFone plans.

Do watch that you pick the local plans and not an international roaming eSIM, because most of these shops sell both.

So there is no need to wait until you arrive. Which is rather nice after a long flight.

Are you tied to an old-fashioned physical SIM? Then there is not much else for it. The airports have plenty of them, but there is one thing to watch out for: with a domestic transfer you may never walk past a stand that sells them.

In Hanoi and Cam Ranh I did not see a single seller, because I was transferring and ended up in the domestic terminals. The first SIM card stand I came across was in Da Nang, at the baggage belt, two weeks into the trip. At the international terminals the choice is wide, but a transfer can route you straight past it.

Prices are not the problem. A local SIM card costs you a few dollars, much like a local eSIM.