Uber vs Bolt price: which is actually cheaper?
Bolt is often the cheaper of the two, but not always. See why the lower fare switches sides by route, time and promo, and how Fab shows you both before every ride.
Read the comparison →There is no single worldwide ride app. Uber appears in more countries than any other app in the table below, but it is neither the only one nor automatically the cheapest. In Spain and Portugal, Cabify and Bolt fight it for the bottom of the list. In the United States, Lyft, Empower and Waymo change the answer city by city. In Algeria, Yassir leads, ahead of Heetch. Landing somewhere with one app installed means accepting the price it shows without knowing whether a better one sat next to it.
Country coverage: Fab's own availability catalogue, updated with every platform integration. No reliable public reference exists on this subject, as operators open and close markets continuously. Checked on .
Opening the same app everywhere is the expensive habit
Most travellers install one app and consider the matter closed. A car does arrive. Three things escape them.
- Local players are often cheaper. In Lisbon or Madrid, Bolt and Cabify compete for the lowest fare. In Santiago or Bogotá, Uber is not even the reference: Cabify is.
- Taxis go missing. Across much of Europe, licensed taxis are booked through Freenow, and they regularly beat rideshare during surge. In Germany, Austria, Ireland or Greece, ignoring them means comparing half the market.
- Categories differ. The same app does not offer the same products everywhere: motorbikes exist in Bangkok and not in Vienna, and a six-seater van does not carry the same relative price from one country to the next.
What actually changes at a border
Three things move at once when you cross a border, and they do not move together.
Who operates. The most visible one. An app may cover a whole country or only its capital. Bolt covers 17, Freenow 10 and Cabify 5, each with its own geography.
The price ranking. Even when two apps run on both sides of a border, the cheaper one is not the same. Commission rates, driver density and local promotions are enough to flip the order.
The currency. Fares show in the local currency. An amount that looks high in forints or pesos may not be: what stays readable is the comparison between apps, at the same moment, in the same currency.
Which ride apps work in which country
Here are the apps Fab compares, country by country. These are the 11 apps currently connected in Fab, across 49 countries and more than 170 cities. An app missing from a row may still operate there: it is simply not compared by Fab yet.
| Country | Apps compared by Fab |
|---|---|
| Western Europe | |
| France | Uber, Bolt, Heetch, Freenow, G7, LeCab, Comin |
| Belgium | Uber, Heetch |
| Germany | Uber, Bolt, Freenow |
| United Kingdom | Uber, Bolt, Freenow |
| Ireland | Uber, Freenow |
| Austria | Uber, Freenow |
| Netherlands | Uber |
| Switzerland | Uber |
| Southern Europe | |
| Spain | Uber, Bolt, Cabify, Freenow |
| Portugal | Uber, Bolt, Cabify, Freenow |
| Italy | Uber, Bolt, Freenow |
| Greece | Uber, Freenow |
| Croatia | Uber |
| Northern and Eastern Europe | |
| Poland | Uber, Bolt, Freenow |
| Estonia | Uber, Bolt |
| Lithuania | Uber, Bolt |
| Romania | Uber, Bolt |
| Czechia | Uber, Bolt |
| Sweden | Uber, Bolt |
| Latvia, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Denmark | Bolt |
| Norway, Finland, Slovakia | Uber |
| North America | |
| United States | Uber, Lyft, Empower, Waymo |
| Canada | Uber, Lyft |
| Mexico | Uber, Cabify |
| Latin America | |
| Brazil | Uber, Cabify |
| Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru | Cabify |
| North Africa and Africa | |
| Algeria | Bolt, Heetch |
| Egypt | Uber, Bolt |
| Uganda | Uber, Bolt |
| Morocco | Bolt |
| Mali | Heetch |
| Middle East, Asia and Pacific | |
| United Arab Emirates | Uber |
| Türkiye | Uber |
| Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China | Uber |
| India | Uber |
| Australia | Uber |
Coverage is declared app by app. It keeps growing, and an app may serve a city without the whole country appearing here.
Apps that operate there and Fab does not compare yet
Fab's catalogue lists 39 ride and taxi apps worldwide. Eleven are connected, the other 28 are coming: inDrive across Latin America and Central Asia, Grab in South-East Asia, Yango and Careem in the Middle East, DiDi in Mexico and Japan, 99 in Brazil, Curb in the United States, Gett in London. They appear in the catalogue marked « soon »: you know they run where you are going, and you can install them yourself, even though Fab does not pull their prices yet.
That is deliberate. Claiming coverage we do not have would be easy; the first time a traveller opened the app in Jakarta and found no Grab, the promise would collapse.
What to do before you leave
Three steps, and the right moment for them is before departure, not in the taxi queue on arrival.
- Search your destination in the catalogue. Type the city or country in the list of compared apps: you see what runs there, what is already in Fab and what is not yet.
- Install and create the accounts from home. Signing up usually needs a phone number and a valid payment method, which is easier with signal and time than with a suitcase in hand.
- Connect those accounts to Fab. That is what lets Fab pull their prices and line them up for you. With no connected account there is nothing to compare.
On the ground nothing else changes: you enter your trip, Fab shows the current prices of the apps you connected, cheapest first, and you book in the one you keep. The questions travellers ask most are gathered in the FAQ, and how it all works is laid out on the compare ride prices page.
