Where Do Digital Nomads Work in Chiang Mai?

Most people arriving in Chiang Mai work from cafes for the first week, get frustrated, and then find a coworking space. This is the shortcut.

The honest version of the cafe question

Chiang Mai has genuinely excellent cafes, and you can work from them. What you cannot reliably do is take a client call, leave a laptop while you go to the bathroom, or count on the wifi at 4pm when the room fills up. Nimman cafes in particular are busy, and many now have polite signs asking laptop workers to leave at peak times.

Cafes are good for two hours. They are not good for a working day, and they are not good for a working month.

Where nomads actually end up

The established coworking spaces in Chiang Mai are Punspace, Yellow, Alt_ChiangMai, Hub53, Heartwork, CAMP and RealSpace. They are clustered in three areas.

Nimman is the dense, walkable, slightly expensive area with the most cafes and the most nomads. Convenient, and you will meet people, but it is the busiest and the noisiest.

The Old City is quieter and prettier, inside the moat, close to the temples and the weekend markets. Punspace and Alt are here.

Chang Phueak, just north of the moat, is where we are. Cheaper rent, more local, five minutes from the old city, and considerably calmer than Nimman without being far from anything.

What to actually check before you commit

Ignore the photos. Every coworking space in Asia photographs identically. Check these instead.

How many phone booths, and are they ever free? This is the single most common complaint about coworking anywhere. If your work involves calls, ask to see the booths at 2pm rather than at 9am.

Is a monitor included? In Chiang Mai this varies more than the price does. Several spaces charge extra.

Are there quiet floors? Open-plan is fine until the person next to you takes a call. Spaces that separate quiet work from social areas are noticeably better to spend eight hours in.

When does it close? Some spaces are 24/7 for members only. If you are on day passes, ask what time you are actually expected to leave.

Is anyone talking to each other? Walk in at 5pm. If the room is silent and everyone has headphones on, you will not meet anybody, whatever the website says about community.

On the loneliness problem, which nobody puts on a pricing page

The real reason to use a coworking space in Chiang Mai is not the wifi. You can get wifi anywhere. It is that working alone in a foreign country gets quietly difficult around week three, and a room with the same faces in it every day fixes that in a way nothing else does.

That is worth choosing for. Ask what happens in the evenings. Ask whether there are events, and then ask whether anyone actually comes to them.

One of our members, who moved here from China to become a content creator, described what he was looking for better than we can:

"The community here is so supportive. They will keep you accountable, they will teach you what you don't know, and they will always be there for you."

Where we fit

RealSpace is five floors in Chang Phueak. Quiet floors for focused work, social floors for everything else, a cafe at the bottom, 500mbps+ fiber, a monitor on every desk, soundproof booths, meeting rooms, and weekly events that people actually attend.

There is also a content studio with a team who set it up, film you and edit the footage. If you are building an audience rather than just answering emails, that is the part worth knowing about.

Day passes are 300 THB. Hot desks are 4,000 THB a month. Open 9am to midnight, every day, and you do not need a membership to still be here at 11pm.

Come and try a day before you commit to anything.