The relative impact of radiation pressure and photoionization feedback from young stars on surrounding gas is studied with hydrodynamic radiative transfer (RT) simulations. The calculations focus on the single-scattering (direct radiation pressure) and optically thick regime, and adopt a moment-based RT-method implemented in the moving-mesh code AREPO. The source luminosity, gas density profile and initial temperature are varied. At typical temperatures and densities of molecular clouds, radiation pressure drives velocities of order ~20 km/s over 1-5 Myr; enough to unbind the smaller clouds. However, these estimates ignore the effects of photoionization that naturally occur concurrently. When radiation pressure and photoionization act together, the latter is substantially more efficient, inducing velocities comparable to the sound speed of the hot ionized medium (10-15 km/s) on timescales far shorter than required for accumulating similar momentum with radiation pressure. This mismatch allows photoionization to dominate the feedback as the heating and expansion of gas lowers the central densities, further diminishing the impact of radiation pressure. Our results indicate that a proper treatment of the impact of young stars on the interstellar medium needs to primarily account for their ionization power whereas direct radiation pressure appears to be a secondary effect. This conclusion may change if extreme boosts of the radiation pressure by photon trapping are assumed.

18 pages, 19 figures (main results presented in 13 pages, 10 figures; extended appendix for RT tests with extra 9 figures). Accepted for publication in MNRAS after tiny changes