Coliving vs coworking: what's the difference?
By Niko · Head of Making Cool Stuff
Coworking is a place to work. Coliving is a place to live that includes one. What each costs, who each suits, and how both run in rural Spain.
Coworking is a place to work. Coliving is a place to live that happens to include a place to work. That is the whole distinction, and you can stop reading here if that was all you came for. A day pass with us is €25 and involves no bed at all. A coliving stay starts at €49.50 a night for a room or €71.50 for a cabin, coworking included. The interesting bit starts when you stop treating the two as a choice.
Coworking: a desk you share with strangers
Coworking is the easy one to define. It's a workspace you share with people who aren't your colleagues. A desk, fast internet, decent coffee, a meeting room, and the low hum of other people getting things done. You skip the rent of a private office and the slow isolation of your own kitchen table. Someone else deals with the fibre, the printer and the ergonomic chair, and you turn up and work.
What it does not include is a bed. You shut the laptop and you leave. A coworking space is somewhere you go to and come back from, and that is the line. Ours is built for that kind of day, on two separate 600 Mbps fibre lines, so a dropped video call is never the thing that wrecks your afternoon.
Coliving: a place to live that comes with the desk
| Coworking | Coliving | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A desk for the day | A home, with the desk in it |
| How long | A day, or a run of days | A few nights to a few months |
| Where you sleep | Wherever you already sleep | Here, in a room or a cabin |
| Community | Whoever turned up that day | The people you cook and eat with |
| Here it costs | €25 a day, or €90–€200 for 5–20 visits | From €49.50 a night for a room or €71.50 for a cabin, coworking included |
| Best for | Getting out of the city for a day | Getting out of the city for a while |
Coliving covers the other sixteen hours. You get your own private space, a room or in our case a cabin, and you share the rest: the kitchen, the common areas, the long dinner table and the people around it. It's a flatshare for grown-ups who want company and still want a door of their own to shut.
Coliving took off among remote workers because remote work is lonely. Working from anywhere sounds like freedom until you notice you've spoken to nobody but a barista in three days. Coliving puts the social part back without asking you to organise it. You come downstairs and someone is there to eat with, compare notes with, or talk you out of a bad idea over a glass of local wine.
So what's the actual difference?
One is your home. The other is your office. That's it. Either works on its own: plenty of people cowork all day and go back to their own flat at night, and plenty of others live in a coliving and commute to an ordinary job. The two solve different problems, so ranking one above the other answers a question nobody asked.
- Coworking fixes the work problem: infrastructure, focus, and a reason to leave the house.
- Coliving fixes the rest of the day: a home, people, and someone to eat with.
- Coworking is somewhere you go. Coliving is somewhere you stay.
- Either works alone. Put both on one site and the commute disappears, which is the part remote workers notice first.
Why they work better together
Put the two on the same patch of ground and the comparison stops mattering. What you want is both, two minutes apart, so the commute is a walk past olive trees instead of a train you resent. You get up, you go to a real desk with real internet, you do a real day's work, and when you shut the laptop you are already home, among people you actually want to see.
That separation matters more than it sounds. The quiet trap of remote work is the beige room where you sleep and also answer Slack at 9pm. A desk that is physically not your bedroom hands the boundary back, and people downstairs mean the evening after it isn't empty. Office structure, shared-house warmth, and none of the worst habits of either.
How it works at Hamlet's Friends
We weren't trying to settle a definitions debate. We wanted a place where remote work actually feels good, so we run both halves on one site in Nuño Gómez, in the Sierra de San Vicente, 110 km and about an hour and a quarter from Madrid, with Talavera de la Reina as the nearest big town. The coworking half is the dual-fibre, head-down part. The coliving half is a private cabin or room, shared kitchens and common areas, and people you can talk to without anyone having to run an icebreaker.
The setting does some of the work for us. Mountains instead of motorways, silence instead of open-plan chatter. People come for the fibre and stay for the dinners, which is the reverse of how most coworking stories go. We hold a 5.0 rating across 183 Google reviews, and almost nobody writes one about the broadband.
If you're weighing coliving against coworking and quietly suspect the answer is both, you're our kind of person. Come and find out: a desk by day, a full table by night. The drive from Madrid is the hardest part.
INE: remote working statistics for Spain
Frequently asked questions
- Can you do coworking without coliving?
- Yes. A day pass is €25 and open to anyone, with no stay required. People drive out from Madrid in the morning, work, eat, and drive back.
- Is coworking included in a coliving stay?
- Here it is, for every guest, at no extra cost. Don't assume that elsewhere. Plenty of colivings bill the desk separately, so check before you book anywhere.
- Which is cheaper?
- Per day, coworking. But coliving puts a bed, a desk and the dinner table into one price, so once you're sleeping here anyway the two stop being comparable.
- Which suits a first-timer?
- A day pass, if you want to test the place with nothing at stake. A short coliving stay, if what you're really after is the change of pace and not the desk.
