Gardens by the Bay or the National Orchid Garden: Which One Suits You?

Booked side by side online, these two look like the same kind of purchase. The Gardens by the Bay entry ticket is from €6.83 with 4,232 reviews at 4.3 stars; the National Orchid Garden entry ticket is from €7.37 with 547 reviews at 4.8 stars.

Same money. Better rating on the smaller one. And almost nothing else in common.

The short version

Gardens by the Bay is an attraction, built on reclaimed land beside Marina Bay and opened in the last fifteen years. It is designed to be photographed. The free outdoor gardens run 5 am to 2 am; the paid parts are enclosures – two conservatories, two elevated structures, one indoor floral display.

The National Orchid Garden is a collection, inside the Singapore Botanic Gardens, which dates from 1859 and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 4 July 2015 – the first and only tropical botanic garden on the list, and the third anywhere after Padua and Kew. The Botanic Gardens are 82 hectares, hold over 10,000 plant species, and are free to enter, every day, 5 am to midnight. The Orchid Garden is the one enclosure inside them that charges.

One is the newest thing in Singapore doing an impression of nature. The other is the oldest institution in Singapore doing nature properly. Both are worth a day. They are not alternatives in the way the price suggests.

Side by side

Two lines in that table decide most visits.

The Orchid Garden closes at 7 pm and stops selling tickets at 6 pm. There is no evening version of it. Whatever else you do that day has to happen after, not before.

Children under 12 go free at the Orchid Garden. That is an unusual thing in Singapore and it turns a family of four into two adult tickets. At Gardens by the Bay the child rate starts at age 3 and runs to 12, and there is no free band for older children.

What the Orchid Garden actually is

Over 1,500 species and 3,000 hybrids, laid out on a hillside inside the Botanic Gardens. It contains the Sembcorp Cool House, with over 1,000 species from five regions of the world – a cooled glasshouse, which in this climate is the difference between reading labels and giving up – and the Tan Hoon Siang Mist House.

At SGD 15 for a standard adult it is one of the cheaper paid attractions in Singapore. The operator publishes a local rate as well, at SGD 5; students and seniors aged 60 and over pay SGD 3 standard, SGD 1 local.

What you do not pay for is the walk to it. The Botanic Gardens themselves are free and open from 5 am, so the honest way to do this is to arrive early, walk the free gardens in the cool, and buy the orchid ticket when the gate opens at 8:30 am.

Choose Gardens by the Bay if…

• You have one day in Singapore and want the thing Singapore is photographed as. It is next to Marina Bay Sands, and the two go together – see the Gardens and the SkyPark in one day.
• You want an evening, not an afternoon. The Supertree show is free, nightly at 7:45 pm and 8:45 pm.
• You want air-conditioning at 2 pm. The two conservatories are kept at 23 to 25 °C.
• You are travelling with children who want something to happen. See Gardens by the Bay with children.

Choose the National Orchid Garden if…

• You care about plants rather than displays. The collection is the point, not the setting.
• You want the morning and the cool hours, with a free 82-hectare garden around the paid bit.
• You are on a budget with children under 12, who pay nothing.
• You have already done Marina Bay and want to see a different Singapore. The Botanic Gardens are inland, residential, shaded and quiet; Marina Bay is none of those things.

Do both, in this order

They are on opposite sides of the city, but the timetables complement each other almost perfectly.

Botanic Gardens from around 8 am, Orchid Garden when it opens at 8:30 am, out by late morning. Lunch. Gardens by the Bay conservatories in the hot part of the afternoon, out into the grove for Garden Rhapsody in the evening.

That is one day, two ticketed attractions, roughly SGD 61 of gate price per non-resident adult, and two genuinely different places. It is the strongest plant day in Singapore, and most people do half of it.

When neither is the right call

• A grey, wet afternoon with limited time. The Orchid Garden is largely outdoors; you will be walking a hillside in the rain. Gardens by the Bay’s conservatories are the indoor option, and they are the better bet in bad weather.
• A stopover under six hours. Neither is close to Changi, and both want more time than the transfer leaves you.
• You dislike hot, humid walking. The Orchid Garden is a hill in the tropics. There is a cooled house inside it, but getting there and back is outdoors.

Practical points

• National Orchid Garden: 8:30 am to 7 pm daily, last ticket sale and entry 6 pm. The Botanic Gardens have five gates – Tanglin, Bukit Timah, Nassim, Tyersall and Gallop – and two MRT stations, Botanic Gardens on the Circle and Downtown lines and Napier on the Thomson-East Coast line. Check which gate your route lands at before setting off; 82 hectares is a long way round.
• There is a second Orchid Garden listing in our inventory, from €6.83 with 184 reviews at 4.8 stars. Two listings, one gate – compare what each includes on its own booking page rather than on the price.
• Gardens by the Bay: each paid attraction closes one day a month for maintenance, on its own schedule.
• Euro prices above are starting prices in our inventory on the date at the top of this article. SGD figures are the operators’ published gate rates. Both move; confirm yours.

Which parts of Gardens by the Bay are worth paying for is set out in which ticket do you need. If the orchids win and you want to build a day around them, see the Orchid Garden with the rest of the city. Everything ticketed sits on our Singapore attractions page.