Price, and the real gap
Albania is cheaper, and the gap is substantial rather than marginal. Club entry runs around fifteen euros on the Riviera against fifteen to twenty-five in Malta, an open-bar boat party forty euros against seventy, and restaurants follow the same slope. Across a week in a group, the difference runs into the hundreds. On the other hand flights to Tirana are often pricier and less frequent than to Malta, which claws back part of the gap depending on where you fly from.
Density: all on foot, or not
This is what separates the most groups. In Malta, Paceville fits into three or four streets: every big club is minutes from the next, and if the group stays in the middle nobody is hunting a taxi at four in the morning. In Albania you sleep in Saranda and go out in Ksamil, twenty minutes away, and the taxi is compulsory every night. It costs under ten euros, but it has to be organised, and with twelve people that is never nothing.
Indoors or outdoors
Malta parties in enclosed clubs, air-conditioned, in structures holding thousands, with programming seven nights a week. Albania parties outdoors, feet in the sand or beside a pool, with Corfu on the horizon. This is not a difference of quality, it is a difference of kind. People who have done both almost never prefer the same one.
The season, which is not the same
Malta runs May to late September, with a handful of Paceville clubs open at weekends all year. Albania stops dead in mid-September and does not reopen until June: the Riviera closes, there is nothing left. If your trip falls in May, in October or out of season, the question does not arise, it is Malta.
The crowd
Malta pulls a very international and very young crowd, with club access from seventeen making it the destination for first trips with friends. Albania pulls mainly French and Italians, and the programming reflects it: French Party, Dolce Vita, Le Classico. If you want to run into people from home, that is Albania. If you want the opposite, that is Malta.
What there is to do by day
Malta has Comino and the Blue Lagoon, Gozo, the coves at St Peter's Pool, and seven thousand years of history if that speaks to you. Albania has a less crowded coast and water at least as good, with the coves the El Mar excursion runs along. Malta offers more to do, Albania offers more peace in which to do it.
And if you do not want to choose
The two combine badly across one week: there is no direct flight between Malta and Tirana, and routing through a connection costs a whole day. The pattern that works is two trips in the same season, or Albania in July and Malta in September once the Riviera has shut and Malta is still running.