To enable fair comparisons of clouds between climate models and the ESA Cloud_cci climate data record (CDR), we present a tool called the Cloud_cci simulator. The tool takes into account the geometry and cloud detection capabilities of the Cloud_cci CDR to allow fair comparisons. We demonstrate the simulator on two climate models. We find the impact of time sampling has a large effect on simulated cloud water amount and that the simulator reduces the cloud cover by about 10 % globally.