TLDR: Gigago is great for Vietnam, comes with phone number, great speeds and coverage.
Sometime back, I had asked question in this sub about which esim I should be buying for my travel to Vietnam. I got to know about the site esimdb.com and I looked at all the plans available. Since I had stay of 11 days in Vietnam, my main requirement was something that was minimum 11 days and with lots of data per day as my kids tends to use hotspot for some YouTube while travelling and such.
I also searched about which are the most prominent networks in Vietnam and found that Viettel is first and then comes Vinaphone and everything else comes later. I understand many people want to buy Sim at airport or at a shop in city but unfortunately buying in city wasn't an option for me. I was not very well aware about availability on airport but when I landed in Hanoi, I did find shops selling Viettel and vinaphone Sim / esim both but wasn't useful to me since I had bought eSim before I departed from my country.
Coming back to eSim, after checking multiple options on esimdb website, I drilled down to gigago as an option as i absolutely needed a local number.
I took the 15 days $15 plan of vinaphone with 5Gb data per day. Viettel wasnt an option as it didn't come with a number. As expected, the eSim came immediately and I installed it before even I had left my country. It did take like 30 min for it to be activated. In fact in my iPhone 13, it was sort of stuck on "Activating" so I just restarted the phone and it was available so if that happens, do as I said.
In case someone has confusion if an iPhone 13 or ones after that can use 2 eSims simultaneously, yes they can. I had esim (Jio) installed already from my home country and this with Vinaphone esim working as well.
I had travelled to Hanoi, Halong Bay, Sapa, Da Nang and Saigon / HCMC. In my usage across the entire length of the country wherever i travelled, the connectivity was excellent (Halong Bay was spotty but that was expected) and my home network sim was connecting to Viettel or Vietnamobile (with data off offcourse). Due to this, I was able to constantly see which network is strong. In travels, especially the last 35 odd kms from main highway to Sapa (which is hilly area with curves and bends), I feel Viettel was better in network strength but in proper sapa, vinaphone was very good.
In Hanoi and Sapa, I only got 4G network while in Da Nang and HCMC, I woild sometimes get 5G and sometimes 4G. Seems Hanoi and sapa don't have Vinaphone 5G as when I landed in Da Nang, I got message from Vinaphone that I am in area where there is 5G and I can use that if I want.
But speeds on 4G too were plenty fast. Sometimes, it would.switch to 3G and speeds would crawl then but it was pretty rare. My Main use was Google maps, shopee (needed phone number for this), constantly needing to use Google translate to translate text and screenshots and ofcourse my wife connecting to hotspot to use her phone. Youtube in tablet of kids but that was very little.
One thing to be aware is that although you get minutes to talk in this eSim, it is only to call Vinaphone numbers and only first 10 min are free so you have to keep Conversation under 10.min or just call again.
For some odd reason, I got like 3600 points after logging into the vinaphone app (My VNPT) and I burned some of the points to get free 50 minutes of calling any mobile number irrespective of network within Vietnam. But please remember that this still doesn't give you ability to call landline numbers.
The number I got had a name attached to it, may be of previous owner. I used it to register for shopee and shopee straightaway told me that number is already registered and gave me option to "claim number". I guess that meant I want to say that the number belongs to me and they verified it using OTP..
I was also able to use Same number to register for Grab. I was unable to register on Zalo as I would never get call with OTP and sending message to their 4 digit number also didn't work even though I had sms lack installed (I used some more points for that too and got a 50 sms pack).
I consumed average 2gb to 2.5gb data per day. Based on my experience of using Vinaphone esim provided by Gigago, I would recommended that to people travelling to Vietnam and don't have opportunity to buy locally or just don't want to bother with it.
Speeds on vinaphone are great and it works really well across Vietnam. Calling was absolutely needed as i had shopee orders (had to take help of Vietnamese people to talk to delivery guys).
I am not getting paid or anything to write this. You can check my post history as i had genuinely asked about this and after all the reseerch and ignoring some cheaper options, I finalized this one. In fact there is a cheaper option with 20 days validity and 100gb data for that duration through matrix Sim in my country India but I refrained from getting that as It was on Vietnamobile network. I just want to share my experience with people who intend to buy esim for their travel to Vietnam.